New Republic

Complaints from liberal pundits about media bias against Hillary Clinton have snowballed during the past few days. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had the most high-profile effort, which contrasted “the impression that [Donald Trump is] being graded on a curve” with “the presumption that anything [Hillary] does must be corrupt,” and some of the others have taken aim at Krugman’s newspaper…

Late Monday night, the group Eagle Forum released a statement that its founder, the Christian and conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, had passed away at the age 92 and immediately, The New York Times published a story to serve as cue cards for the major broadcast networks to blast Schlafly for stymying the Equal Rights Amendment and advocating for traditional family values for decades. At the…

A major event that would damage Barack Obama’s presidency as much as Hurricane Katrina did George W. Bush’s is a white whale for conservatives, suggests Brian Beutler: They’re constantly, eagerly scanning the horizon for it, but they’ll never see it. Beutler finds it hard to imagine that any Democratic president would have his or her own Katrina, since Dems have made responding to natural…

The “right-wing noise machine” helped make a mess for Republicans by giving “invaluable aid” to Donald Trump, declared Jeet Heer in a Friday piece. Nonetheless, Heer thinks that one positive consequence of Trump’s nomination is that “some in conservative media are…taking stock of how their own bad habits have enabled an unfit demagogue to become their party’s standard-bearer.” Heer proposed a “…

This past Monday in TNR, Eric Kleefeld had a message for self-satisfied liberals: Don’t apologize for your smugness. Own it. Why not? You’ve “been right all along” about Donald Trump’s candidacy. Kleefeld wrote that “Republican voters this year behaved exactly as the smuggest liberal would’ve predicted, supporting a race-baiting pseudo-strongman who is basically an outgrowth of the conservative…

Plenty of Republicans have been lamenting their party’s nomination of “the one guy who cannot beat the historically unpopular Hillary Clinton,” but Gary Legum thinks they’re assuming facts not in evidence. In a Friday article, Legum indicated that Hillary would have been a prohibitive favorite against anyone the GOP might have chosen. He opined that the Republicans’ so-called deep bench was a…

The day before Donald Trump reflected on “Second Amendment people” and their response to Hillary Clinton’s taste in judges, he made news with a speech about economics. To The New Republic’s Brian Beutler, the takeaway there was that Trump had “adopted [both] Paul Ryan’s tax policy and the GOP’s gaffe-centered 2012 campaign strategy of misquoting or misrepresenting the Democratic candidate’s words…

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump has remodeled or vandalized the Republican party. In any event, left-wing pundits spent the week gaping at, and writing about, what they viewed as the grotesque spectacle of the RNC. For example, Daily Kos’s Hunter opined that the convention was "was barely one step up from an internet-peddled snuff film,” and Salon’s Heather Digby Parton declared…

Donald Trump may have hijacked the Republican party, suggests Beutler, but he hasn’t changed its bigoted course -- he’s just put the pedal to the metal. Trump’s campaign has made clear, “even among many conservatives who once denied it,” that “millions of white people believe it’s important to rally behind politicians who support policies that directly or indirectly penalize minorities—and that…

Whatever else Donald Trump is, he’s a skillful multitasker, suggested Jeet Heer in a Tuesday article. Trump is in the news mostly as a presidential candidate, of course, but Heer claims that his “real objective, win or lose, is relaunching his lucrative brand.” As for how Trump became the Republican party’s presumptive nominee even though politics wasn’t his top priority, Heer opined that there’s…

With all this year's preliminary political events concluded and the Republican National Convention set for July 18-21 in Cleveland, Georgetown University professor and former MSNBC analyst and guest host Michael Eric Dyson declared last Wednesday that Americans have a “moral obligation” to protest presumptive GOP candidate Donald Trump as a “racist demagogue for president.” The tumult began when…

Brian Beutler expects that Donald Trump’s campaign will attempt to “hoodwink first-time voters or people who weren’t paying close attention…into believing known lies” about Hillary Clinton that first surfaced more than two decades ago. As for whether journalists will “debunk” Trump’s “whoppers,” Beutler’s not so sure. “Unless a critical mass of media figures agrees to treat the things Trump…

If Facebook discriminated against conservative-friendly news items, mused Brian Beutler in a Friday article, it almost certainly had good reason to do so, given the abundance of nonsense that right-wingers unleash on the Web. “The differences between mainstream and liberal political content on the one hand, and conservative content on the other, [are] critical,” wrote Beutler. “Facebook…

Too much information. Way tooooo much information. Now that the New Republic is in the interregnum between its sale and its final takeover by the new owner, ultra liberal banking heir Winthrop McCormack, and incoming publisher, blueblood bolshevik Hamilton Fish V (not to be confused with the third or fourth), I guess the staff feels free for awhile to tread where none dare go before. And where…