Brian Beutler

Crooked Media, founded earlier this year by former Obama-admin staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, recently expanded its efforts to help “get [liberals] through this roiling clusterfuck of a presidency.” One of Crooked Media’s new hires is editor-in-chief Brian Beutler, formerly of Salon and The New Republic. In a Tuesday piece, Beutler contrasted the liberals' handling of the…

Deliberately polluting the air with high-volume diesel exhaust isn’t just a pastime for nihilists -- it’s an expression of “the key animating ethos in the decision-making process” of the Republican Party, claims Brian Beutler. The activity is known as “rolling coal,” and, as Beutler sees it, three years ago it resembled “many Obama-era protest trends” in that it was “a kind of obnoxious primal…

In “Me and Bobby McGee,” Kris Kristofferson wrote that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” On Wednesday, Brian Beutler suggested that “freedom” is just another word Republicans use to deprive Americans of health coverage. The GOP, contended Beutler, has “a weird way to define liberty” that involves 14 million people losing coverage “almost immediately.” He added, “Their…

In their respective articles alleging that the mainstream media facilitated the election of Donald Trump, Brian Beutler of The New Republic and Eric Alterman of The Nation overlapped somewhat. For example, each claimed that the Hillary e-mail story was wildly overcovered, with Beutler citing it as the shining example of how the media “failed abysmally” regarding the “framing and contextualizing…

There’s been a lot of talk in the past few days about “presidential temperament,” and where that quality is concerned, Brian Beutler firmly believes that President Obama has the right stuff. In a Friday piece, Beutler lauded Obama’s "unflappable" performance at CNN’s military-themed presidential town hall Wednesday at Fort Lee in Virginia. By contrast, Beutler opined, Donald Trump "lost his…

A current hot topic in campaign coverage is Hillary Clinton’s underperformance among millennials, an unusually large number of whom favor the second-tier candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Brian Beutler thinks those 18-to-29-year-olds who aren’t #WithHer don’t grasp what happened the last time a significant portion of the left was lukewarm about the Democratic nominee: 2000, when lefty…

Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment isn’t just campaign fodder, believes Brian Beutler, who in a Monday piece argued that by telling “impolite truths,” Clinton pulled an already-loose thread and may have furthered the unraveling of the GOP. Assuming Donald Trump doesn’t become president, some Republicans will “wish to dislodge Trump and Trumpism from the party,” observed Beutler,…

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…

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…

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…

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…