Washington Monthly

When you think of tough crowds, Philadelphia sports fans or the audience for Amateur Night at the Apollo may come to mind. The Washington Monthly's D.R. Tucker thought of the “right-wing Republicans” he expects will heckle Pope Francis when the pontiff speaks before a joint session of Congress late next month. “Joe Wilson’s…infamous 2009 'You lie!' outburst will be considered a term of…

“The blue-collar white males who make up the GOP base” are between a rock and a hard place, suggests The Washington Monthly's David Atkins. The Republican party doesn’t represent their economic interests, but “their inherent racism, sexism and distrust of government” won’t allow them to vote Democratic. As a result, argued Atkins in a Sunday post, they’re waging an ideological “insurgent war,”…

Much of the left would be thrilled if Bernie Sanders became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, but that, suggests The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman, is what Al Gore might call a risky scheme. A Sanders win in the general election would make him the POTUS of progressive dreams, but a Sanders loss “would be a total epic disaster” and a boon for right-wingers who are “capable of great evil…

Conservatives have an ideological fever, and the only prescription is to wait until their crazy ideas vanish. That’s the word from Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman, who opined in a Wednesday post that many on the right have suffered from a sort of “heat-fever” when confronted with President Obama and his policies. Longman explained that “a fever is something that comes over you suddenly…

It’s likely that most NewsBusters readers are familiar with the grimly humorous saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Last Friday, UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman opined in so many words that the Republican party’s beatings in presidential elections will continue until its mental health improves. In a Friday Washington Monthly post, Kleiman mocked conservatives…

Presidential nominees sometimes choose one of the candidates they defeated during primary/caucus season as their running mate for the general election. In that tradition, the Washington Monthly's D.R. Tucker recommends that Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, name Bernie Sanders to the ticket, adding that Hillary “would have to signal that [Sanders] would be something of a co-…

Several years ago, an episode of The Simpsons featured a Fox News helicopter emblazoned with a fictional slogan for the channel: “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists.” Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore seems to think that those words fit the modern Republican party. Kilgore acknowledged in a Wednesday post that “if you go back far enough the Democratic and Republican parties were very different…

Michael O’Donnell is eager to push back against the belief that Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt as a great 20th-century president. In his review of H.W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life in the Washington Monthly’s June/July/August issue, O’Donnell wrote that “Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s).…

America no longer has a two-party system, argued Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman in a Friday post. That’s because the Republican party is essentially “defunct,” having been sucked into a “vortex of stupid” (i.e., taken over by right-wingers). “The architects of this vortex,” wrote Longman, “are as varied as Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Regent University jurisprudence,…

Monday was a big day for journalists to suggest similarities between mass murderers and Republicans. Newsweek writer Nina Burleigh claimed that certain of Timothy McVeigh’s “militia ideals have gone mainstream” in the GOP, but Esquire's Pierce really put the ideological pedal to the metal when he likened Dick Cheney to one of the all-time worst genocidal maniacs, opining that Cheney’s relatively…

When did Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president of the United States end? Officially, on January 20, 1989, but Washington Monthly blogger D. R. Tucker posits that in a sense Reagan stayed in office well after that. In a Saturday post, Tucker asserted that in 1988, some right-wing “ideologues” sought to “artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping…

A new Pew Research study found that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian fell from 78.4 to 70.6. In a Tuesday post, Martin Longman speculated about causes for the dropoff, commenting that “the Republican Party’s embrace of a very conservative interpretation of Christianity” may be “undermining people’s faith.” Longman added that it’s not solely the…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait claims that for today’s GOP, “everything Reagan thought or did was presumptively correct, even the things that contradict the other things he did.” Specifically, “the Reagan cult is largely (though not entirely) a propaganda vehicle for the anti-tax movement,” even though “in reality, Reagan veered wildly out of step with anti-tax orthodoxy.” The Washington…

Veteran journalist Steven Waldman, a former Washington correspondent for Newsweek and a senior adviser to the Federal Communications Commission for two years during Obama’s first term, argues that an Obama nomination would be “good for [Hillary], and very good for progressives. Would he want it? It’s possible he’d view it as too confining, but it may be the only job a former president can get…