Calelari
1655
Your use of this word in this particular post says a whole lot about you, as well.
Also, what scottagibson said.
KevinC
1656
I don’t watch Meet the Press, so my exposure to him is limited to his Washington Post editorials.
The same?
I mean, what kind of a defense is it to say of a demonstrably craven person that they occasionally deliver clever political analysis? WTF is that?
I kinda-sorta agree with Hewitt… while I mostly think his WaPo articles are about 50% worthless, he’s often got some useful insight from a perspective that I don’t particularly like.
Theissen is a waste of ink though. As someone said above, it’s not that he is providing a conservative opinion, he’s almost always providing the GOP/White House opinion. Which means propaganda. in the article linked above, Theissen takes the nearly unanimous position that Trump shouldn’t have been meeting with the Taliban the week prior to 9/11. Not exactly brilliant insight.
Matt_W
1659
I also live in a bubble where I don’t read articles by creations or anti-vaxxers or Holocaust deniers. I’m proud to.
Totally agree. I stopped reading once I encountered that word and commenced to some epic eye rolling.
David Brooks with some serious, sober analysis from the right
KevinC
1663
He’s guilty of using the power of his office to strongarm foreign governments to help him win re-election, but we should not impeach. Got it.
We should definitely allow a completely lawless, corrupt, renegade president to go unchecked. It would be dangerous to do otherwise.
I think there’s a couple of problems with Brooks’ article. First, Trump is trying to distort the democratic process as a whole, never mind the primary process. The primaries will work themselves out just fine thank you. Second, the it will accomplish nothing and this isn’t what the country wants to talk about are both probably true, but you still have to address the elephant in the room. For me, at least, you can’t ignore Trump’s actions just because it would be hard to address or because people don’t want to talk about it. That’s why we hire elected officials to take care of that business. Finally, we’re eight minutes into looking at the latest allegations, way too early to speculate on reactions, what’s good and not good for the country, etc. This could just be the tip of whatever the full iceberg might be, so writing about how just the tip is this or that feels premature at best. At worst it feels like a more “acceptable” presentation of the talking points meant to blunt things before any work can actually occur.
I was listening to npr this morning (on point) and heard the following:
- we aren’t sure if this rises to the level of a crime so impeachment is dangerous. (Conflating high crimes and a political process with a judicial process)
- Jack Beatty talked about the opportunity cost of impeachment and how only a Republican president could do anything for gun control and now we’ve given that up .
I don’t understand why we’d trade an extremely thin chance of fun control away just to try and prevent corruption of the 2020 presidential race. (Fucking sarcasm)
NPR is really letting me down these days.
HumanTon
1667
They’re known as Nice Polite Republicans for a reason.
Concern troll gonna concern troll
Menzo
1669
This is going to be repeated over and over. Republicans are going to suggest that we were just about to have a breakthrough on gun control but then the Democrats had to be meanies. It was never going to happen.
Yeah, anyone who thinks that is psychotic. The din is already settling down since the last mass shooting.
This when I rage quit the npr stream. I should probably stream the bbc world service directly…
Matt_W
1672
All you have to say is “Brooks’ article” and you already know it’s nothing but problems.
I take everything I read with a grain of salt, but when I start having to excavate new salt mines with every new article, as I do with nearly every right-wing pundit, #NeverTrumper or not, it’s not worth it. I don’t need to read Storm Front to know their perspective is worthless garbage. I don’t need to read any more Brooks to know that he’s just vomiting another 800 words of extemporaneous both-siderism supported by “factoids” he pulled directly from his own sinecured asshole. I don’t need to read Theissen or Rubin or Douthat or Hewitt or McCardle or George Will or any of those fucks who were so surprised, when Trump was elected, to discover that the Republican party does in fact contain Republicans. In fact they’re arguably less useful than the Fox News fuckwits, who at least function better as a barometer of what your average Republican voter is(n’t) thinking.
When #NeverTrumpers are right about anything, they’re just saying the same things the left has been saying for decades.
I do read the Atlantic and actually paid to join The Masthead for the first year it was offered. I find its longer form articles, monthly format, and scrupulous attention to its readership lend its perspectives weight. Frum is the one right-wing pundit I read on a regular basis. I’m not sure why because he’s an inveterate neocon and like all the #NT crowd is almost never right about anything that the left hasn’t been right about for decades, but he’s at least not insufferable.
FYI: you can defeat the Atlantic’s paywall by reading in an incognito tab.
Rock8man
1673
I always enjoyed reading Sullivan and Brooks and Frum and George Will. I disagreed with them a lot, but I enjoyed reading their reasoning, and sometimes I agreed with them on things too. But with one exception, their arguments weren’t based on fake science or conspiracy theories or lies. Just faulty reasoning (in my opinion). The one exception being trickle down economics. They all seem convinced that this will magically work next time you do it.
KevinC
1674
It’s like guns. The solution to gun violence is always to have more guns. If trickle down economics isn’t working, it’s just because you need to trickle down on the lower classes more.
