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Tag: republicans

Columns

The Iran Letter: Explaining the Joke
March 12, 2015
By now everyone’s familiar with the infamous and outrageously embarrassing open letter signed by forty-seven Republican senators that condescendingly warns Iran that any nuclear agreement it reaches with the West will die once Obama is out of office. It not only seeks to ...

Bad Faith and Bull from ACA Critics
February 27, 2015
Bad Faith, from the French mauvaise foi, is a concept in existentialist thought used to describe people who are deceiving themselves by dutifully accepting larger social illusions of identity. One of the examples that Jean-Paul Sartre uses is a waiter who too self-consciously ...

Fear, the Ultimate Trump Card
January 14, 2015
America has a long legacy of dressing up its xenophobia in the cheap costume jewelry of law and order. Read what Harper’s Weekly wrote about the Irish immigrants in 1860: Unfortunately, this should sound very familiar. Even today, anti-immigration rhetoric in America reads ...

Rhetoric Meets Reality for Married Gay Veterans
September 22, 2014
A couple purely rhetorical statements have recently achieved the status of “bipartisan consensus.” “ISIS is barbaric” is one. “Returning veterans deserve our best treatment” is another. Unfortunately, these truisms are too vague to suggest any particular course of ...

Benghazi Fever and the Battle of the Branches
June 10, 2014
For the past year or so, left-wing Twitter’s favorite running gag has been to invoke right-wing Twitter’s bizarre fixation on Benghazi—or, rather, on #BENGHAZI—the seemingly unkillable non-scandal which evolved out of the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya. ...

Billionaire Donors and True Believers
April 23, 2014
Democrat billionaires are always looking for an excuse to justify their outsized political spending. Aren’t liberals supposed to be against the wealthy few pouring great gobs of money into the political system? How can they justify railing against this state of affairs while ...

Handwringing and Hypocrisy Over Campaign Cash
April 09, 2014
What a life it must be, to be a modern campaign finance lawyer. Over the past few years, every day must have felt like Christmas, Hanukkah, and Halloween combined. Imagine: just as you’d finished extensively billing the politicos you helped navigate the Citizens United fight ...

Talking Nice and Playing Dirty with the Bush Family
April 08, 2014
Great news for those who seek clarity heading into the 2016 presidential election: Republican donors have decided that Jeb Bush should be the next president. Pair that with the even more established fact that Democratic donors, and Democrats in general, have decided that Hillary ...

Debates Outside the Dichotomy
March 25, 2014
We need to chart another axis. Americans are facing a conflict between authoritarians and counter-authoritarians, on both sides of the left-versus-right political spectrum. That conflict is usually obscured by the tiresome nature of politics that are trapped in a false ...

Wrong if Republican, Right if Democrat
January 28, 2014
Sean Wilentz contains multitudes. Back in 2006, in a cover story that has since vanished from the Rolling Stone website, the Princeton University historian took up the cudgel against George W. Bush. “The Worst President in History,” the headline of Wilentz’s ...

Adult Babies React as Expected When Favorite Toy Taken Away
November 22, 2013
So the Senate minority is no longer able to filibuster the nominations of all executive and judicial branch appointees for shits and giggles anymore. No longer, to use the most recent example, can it block votes on three judges appointed to a circuit court because, as the excuse ...