Washington Monthly

Many of the lefty writers who analyzed Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate at the Venetian suggested that had the event been promoted as if it were a Vegas show, the marquee might have read “Fright Night,” or perhaps “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid,” given how much the candidates hyped the threat of jihadist terrorism.

In 2010, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas published his book American Taliban, which detailed his belief that “fundamentalist Muslims [are] basically hard-right Christians…American [religious conservatives] may be more constrained by American society and laws than their Middle Eastern counterparts, but…their goals are the same.” This past weekend, one current and one former Daily Kos writer…

In the race for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have made media bias an issue, as did Newt Gingrich during the 2012 contest. Irony alert: Martin Longman believes that it was one of the media’s favorite GOPers, John McCain, who planted the seeds for such press-bashing when he chose his  running mate. Longman contended in a Wednesday post that “something…

The left tends to believe that Republicans, for whatever reason, are a lot better than Democrats at messaging and salesmanship. In that vein, Martin Longman argues that GOPers have a flair for fabricating issues -- “non-problems,” Longman calls them -- which distract the public from real problems. “There was the non-problem with Fast & Furious,” wrote Longman in a Friday post. “There was the…

Wednesday is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moreover, it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of what D.R. Tucker calls “one of the great tragedies in American history”: the election of Ronald Reagan as president. (The two events are, of course, related.) Tucker asserted in a Sunday post that “Reagan’s election nearly destroyed this country”…

In the week when a new James Bond film is coming out, it’s fitting that two lefty writers are both shaken and stirred by recent Republican blasts at media bias. In a Sunday article for Salon, Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson charged that “since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy…

Since even some conservatives thought that Hillary Clinton won Thursday’s Benghazi hearing, it stands to reason that lefty bloggers would be happy with the way things turned out. In fact, not all of them waited until the hearing was over. Early in the afternoon, when Clinton still had several hours of testimony before her, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall observed that “…

Is the Republican party actually two parties? In a sense, believes The Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who contended in a Monday post that the forty or so congressmen who constitute the Freedom Caucus “are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that…

Liberals and conservatives often differ over the concept of American exceptionalism, either on how to define it or whether there even is such a thing. Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore recognizes a limited version of American exceptionalism, one which pretty much boils down to a mania for guns. “America is mainly exceptional [italics in original] among advanced democratic nations not in our…

Variations on the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” are common on both the right and the left (a Google search for “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” yielded roughly 180,000 results). Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to see Indiana University law prof Steve Sanders modify Charles Krauthammer’s famous coinage in order to trash religious conservatives. “The Christian right is deep in the grip of gay…

A few months ago, many liberals, including much of the bloggerati, were afraid that Walker had a good chance to win not only the Republican presidential nomination but also the presidency. Now that Walker’s out of the GOP race, several lefty pundits have weighed in on why.

In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released what soon became known as the “autopsy report,” which looked at how the GOP might reverse trends that recently had caused the party to lose the popular vote for the fifth time in six presidential elections. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that conservatives’ hostile response to the report’s big-tent ideas paved the way…

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.

Conservatives tend to be religious, but is conservatism itself akin to a religion? Yes, opined Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins in a Sunday post. “Many consider modern conservatism to be an almost cultic movement,” Atkins wrote. “Its adherents long since stopped caring about the evidence or empirical results. It’s all about who can prove truest to the faith, and maximally annoy and rebel…