Mother Jones

If there were a restaurant called Clinton Scandals, Kevin Drum has an idea of what the house specialty would be. “Whitewater was a nothingburger. Travelgate was a nothingburger. Troopergate was a nothingburger. Filegate was a nothingburger,” asserted Drum in a Wednesday post. “The Vince Foster murder conspiracy theories were a nothingburger. Monica Lewinsky was Bill's problem, not Hillary's.…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has contempt for both Donald Trump (“his appeal operates…at a sub-intellectual level”) and those who’ve voted for him (“the Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots”). Still, suggested Chait in a Thursday post, Trump and his supporters have unwittingly clarified something important: the Tea Party movement is not and never was truly conservative,…

Universities have generated countless breakthroughs in science, technology, and medicine. Then there’s the product of higher education that Kevin Drum discussed in a Saturday post: “The first concrete movement toward gender-neutral bathrooms started at universities. Now it's becoming mainstream. Good work, idealistic college kids!" Drum remarked that some current campus obsessions -- “safe…

Kevin Drum thinks he understands Hillary Clinton’s reluctance to release the transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches, and it has more to do with attacks she might face during the fall campaign than it does with Bernie Sanders. Drum believes it’s “vanishingly unlikely” that the speeches include “something genuinely damning,” but noted in a Saturday post that “when you give speeches to any…

When a politician says that the mainstream media favor the other side, he or she almost always is a conservative Republican. Therefore, it was noteworthy when, this past week, Sanders accused the MSM of propping up the GOP; his argument, however, was unconvincing even to a reporter for a lefty magazine. On Thursday, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones noted Sanders’s remark that “if we had a media in…

Call it the golden mean or the vital center, Mother Jones blogger Drum is for it with regard to economic systems. Drum contended in a Tuesday post that “the mixed economy is the only way to run a modern country” since the other choices, a “pure free market” and “socialism,” have unacceptable consequences.

This past week, two writers for Mother Jones contended that non-conservative Donald Trump’s presidential bid is actually a byproduct of longstanding Republican efforts to stimulate and profit from what one of them called a “climate of hate.” David Corn, best known for his role in the release of the Mitt Romney 47-percent video, argued that the GOP "raised the expectations of its Obama-detesting…

"Journalistic integrity" and "Mother Jones" are two phrases that should not be in the same sentence. But alas, the ABC comedy Fresh Off the Boat has lent some gravitas to the infamous lefty rag. 

Bing West was a Marine infantry officer in the Vietnam war and a frequent embedded reporter in Iraq, yet Drum likens him to a tantrum-throwing kid and lectures him, “It's time to grow up, Bing.” (West is 75 years old.) After West commented, “The lesson of Iraq is that after American troops achieved stability, Mr. Obama quit, leading to a larger war and more American deaths,” Drum vented, “Jesus…

President Obama deserves high marks for his ISIS policy only if you’re grading on a curve and the other students are Republicans who “can't be bothered to take any of this seriously,” suggested Kevin Drum in a Thursday post. Drum charged that GOPers “blather about Obama being weak, but when you ask them for their plans you just get nonsense…Obama's ISIS strategy has [not] been golden. But…

Even though Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum describes Charles Krauthammer as a “hardcore conservative,” he suggested in a Friday post that Krauthammer is too enlightened to be on the same page as most right-wingers regarding Obama White House scandals. When Krauthammer argued recently against the effort to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen, he commented that on matters including the IRS/Tea…

For nearly three decades, Ben Carson was the head of pediatric neurosurgery at one of the world’s best hospitals. To MSNBC panelist Barnicle, however, Carson is a “political nut-boy” who reminds him of a patient at a certain type of hospital. In a Monday Daily Beast column, Barnicle opined that Carson is “out there on the fringe talking nonsense in a soft, nonthreatening manner that is quite…

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…

On Friday, Washington Monthly's Ed Kilgore and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones contended that the conservative war on political correctness is a tempest in a teapot, and that being politically correct is pretty much synonymous with not being a bigoted jerk.