Paul Waldman

How will you deal with the “vast right-wing conspiracy” always trying to “undermine” you if you are elected? This is just one of ten “good questions” liberal blogger Paul Waldman wants to ask Hillary Clinton, if she ever has a press conference before November 8. His latest “10 Good Questions for Hillary Clinton,” posted in the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog this weekend, strikes the same…

Conservatives can’t stand Hillary Clinton, but do they have reasons for their antipathy? No, suggests pundit Paul Waldman, who indicates that detailed accusations about such matters as emails or Benghazi are mere pretext for the right’s “visceral loathing” of Hillary, which would be expressed more genuinely via sexist insults, or maybe primal screams. In a Tuesday Post web piece, Waldman wrote…

On Saturday morning, Tom Johnson at NewsBusters called attention to how Paul Waldman at The Week recently crowed about the Obama administration's supposedly scandal-free record consisting of "only piddling little scandalettes."  Waldman's fever-swamp take is made even more hilarious by the fact that he considers George W. Bush's "selling of the Iraq War" a genuine scandal. But somehow, President…

Angry, embarrassed Republicans went looking for a scapegoat and settled on a man who’s more than a decade past the normal retirement age. That’s essentially the explanation The Week’s Paul Waldman gives for House GOPers’ move to impeach 76-year-old Internal Revenue Service commissioner John Koskinen. That effort, asserted Waldman in a Tuesday column, stems from Republicans’ “frustration over the…

Give columnist Paul Waldman credit for coming up with a real grabber of a lead: “Get ready, America: we're about to take a long and unpleasant journey back down Bill Clinton's pants.” Less amusing is the rest of Waldman’s Monday American Prospect piece, which trashed Republicans for raising the 42nd president’s sexual behavior as an issue in the current campaign. Waldman jeered at GOPers for “…

If Paul Waldman had wanted to put the main argument of his Monday American Prospect column in Obamaesque terms, he might have written that conservative opponents of political correctness have gotten bitter and are clinging to their supposed right (and maybe even their duty) to act like jerks. “For today's Republican, if people think you're a jerk then you must be doing something right, and the…

Regarding the mainstream media’s superficial coverage of religion, is the sticking point excessive evenhandedness or simple ignorance? Two lefty bloggers differed Friday on that issue. First, Paul Waldman wrote on The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog that reporters don’t like asking the presidential candidates “about the specifics of their faith and how it might influence their day-to-day…

Pundits occasionally opine that someone or other is the face of a given political party. Paul Waldman of The Week implies that Donald Trump would be a fitting choice as the Republican party’s face, presumably drawn by a cartoonist, since Trump is “a walking caricature…created from everything Republicans believe” about matters such as money and patriotism. “Trump is the essence of contemporary…

Hillary Clinton’s call in a Thursday speech for federally mandated automatic voter registration and a minimum of twenty days for early voting won widespread applause in the lefty blogosphere. So did Clinton’s blasts in the same speech at alleged Republican efforts to throw a wrench into the ballot works for certain Democratic-leaning groups. Two ringing endorsements of Hillary’s proposals and…

The American Prospect’s Waldman sympathizes with conservatives who are “unfairly accused of racism,” but says that overall he doesn’t feel too sorry for them given that right-wingers routinely condone actual bigotry from their leaders. Addressing his conservative readers, Waldman admits that sometimes “liberals are too quick to see racist intent in a comment that may be innocuous or at worst…

The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman argues that “anti-intellectualism has often been an effective way for Republicans to stir up class resentment while distracting from economic issues. It says to voters…[d]on't aim your disgruntlement at Wall Street, or corporations that don't pay taxes, or the people who want to keep wages low and make unions a memory. Point it in a different direction, at…

The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman claims that right-wingers’ “belief in tax cuts doesn't rest on the practical effects. That's an argument that's meant to appeal to everyone, since it concerns something (growth) that just about everyone thinks is good. But the real source of the conservative support for tax cuts is moral, not practical. They believe that taxes are inherently immoral.”

“What the average person is seeing right now,” declares the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman, “is an entire party mobilizing to defend the use of torture, whether they will call it by that name or not. And that looks to be having an effect on public opinion.”

Waldman says the Fox audience believes the world “is going [to] hell,” and that the channel’s frequent airing of sexually oriented stories and images helps to reinforce that belief. "Fox is a channel for the conservative id, where you can have your darkest thoughts and worst fears nurtured and validated. And of course, there's nothing the id likes better than looking at half-naked girls."