Washington Monthly

Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, contends in the just-published This Changes Everything that radical economic changes are necessary to combat global warming. The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker calls the new book “one of the greatest nonfiction works of all-time.”

Lumping one’s political adversaries with the vicious jihadists of ISIS seems to be the new new thing. Last Thursday, Dinesh D’Souza alleged that “the common thread between ISIS and [the looters] in Ferguson is you have these people who basically believe that to correct a perceived injustice, it's perfectly OK to inflict all kinds of new injustices...And all of this is then licensed by the left…

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman sees the Republican party on the horns of a dilemma regarding its 2016 presidential nomination. In a Sunday post, Longman asserted that any candidate who strongly appeals to the GOP base couldn’t win the general election, but acknowledged that it’s understandable that the rank and file would point to several recent losses by center-right nominees and ask…

This week, three of the most prominent liberal bloggers agreed that when it comes to criticizing presidents of either party about their vacations, people really need to, as one of the bloggers put it, “STFU.” Do they have a point, or should the appropriateness of presidential vacations be evaluated on a POTUS-by-POTUS basis? Check out their thoughts and comment if you’d like.

Quite a few right-wingers call themselves constitutional conservatives, but self-described constitutional liberals are pretty rare. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman essentially positioned himself as one in a Friday post, arguing that there’s no need for modern Americans to interpret the Constitution the way the Founders did, but contending that the Founders would be OK with that…

Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman laid it on the line (actually, the headline) on Sunday: “Movement Conservatism is Dead as a National Ideology.” Longman argued that “[w]ith each passing year, movement conservatism becomes less viable” as a vehicle for winning the White House and opined that Republicans “will lose, possibly in historic, devastating fashion” the next presidential…

Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore has found some people he thinks conservatives hate even more than they hate President Obama: the thousands of Central American children trying to enter the U.S. at its border with Mexico. After all, righties are merely obsessed with making Obama at least as unpopular in his second term as George W. Bush was in his, but they want to “immediately ship [the]…

There’s a saying that “life isn’t one damn thing after another – it’s the same damn thing over and over again.” That’s essentially what Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” argued regarding the IRS scandal in a Thursday blog post on the “TRMS” website. Benen claimed that throughout “the imaginary IRS ‘scandal,’ there’s [been] an interesting pattern of events that…

In a Sunday post, Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman charged that a combination of unyielding ideological extremism and efforts to prevent many who might oppose said extremism from voting mean that the Republican party’s creed has “really beg[un] to resemble fascism.” Longman noted that the DNC recently announced a campaign designed to find and register likely Democratic voters and…

Piggybacking on Paul Waldman's "Who Do You Hate?" American Prospect post in which Waldman singled out Sarah Palin and Scott Walker for special scorn, another liberal blogger, the Washington Monthly's Ed Kilgore, reflected on the politicians ("usually, though not always, on the right side of the fence") who inspire in him "regular fear and loathing." One of Kilgore's choices is an entire group…

In a textbook case of damning with faint praise, the Washington Monthly's Ed Kilgore asserted on Thursday that of all the "dramatically underqualified people" who may run for president in 2016, Ben Carson is the frontrunner.   Kilgore opines that since Carson is black, his popularity with white conservatives "absolve[s] them of any racist motives when they complain about those people on…

The right has directed most of its anger over the handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack at President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice, but when lefty blogger Martin Longman reflects on reactions to Benghazi, he thinks of a different villain: Mitt Romney. In a Saturday post for the Washington Monthly web site, Longman recalls that a few days after the attack, he was "seething about…

A lot of politically engaged persons, right and left, believe that those on the other side are well-meaning but mistaken. Then there's the Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who in two Wednesday posts (here and here) tried to support the idea that "[m]aking people hate each other is at the core of right-wing politics." Longman opined that "resentment is the key ingredient in [conservatives…