Perhaps jealous its sales may trounce those of the wildly popular Perhaps jealous its sales may trounce those of the wildly popular Left Behind novels — the evangelical publishing phenomenon scribbled by fundamentalists Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins — many religious conservatives have been up in arms over J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally […]
Chris Mooney
Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent and, most recently, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatened Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).
Posted inArticle
Liberals Love Smallpox
There’s no doubt that, with the battle over airline security, partisanship is back in a big way. But who would have ever thought a right-wing commentator would stoop to accusing liberals of killing people who haven’t died yet through a smallpox outbreak that hasn’t yet happened? That’s the gist of the latest Marvin Olasky column, […]
Posted inArticle
A Time of Reversion
Along with inexplicable tragedy, it seems, comes a reawakening of long discredited ideas, theories and impulses. Amidst grief, we encounter reversion. The examples continue to accumulate: Ann Coulter calls for a holy crusade against the holy crusaders who attacked us. (Vintage 12th century.) A writer in the Washington Times calls for the use of nuclear […]
Posted inFeatures
Senatorial Crockery
Anthrax and the war in Afghanistan notwithstanding, Senate Republicans have elected to play domestic hardball. Recently, they delayed a foreign-aid bill to protest what The Wall Street Journal editorial page called “unprecedented stonewalling” on the president’s judicial appointments by the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Yet what may be truly without […]
Posted inFeatures
Libertarian Rhapsody
It’s so hard to teach New Yorkers,” says columnist John Tierney of The New York Times, lowering his binoculars and shaking his head. “I try twice a week, and it never works.” It’s morning in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, and Tierney and I are standing near 89th Street, spying on dog walkers on the promenade […]
Posted inFeatures
Treasure Island
What would happen in a political system where there are no votes, but only money to influence decision making? In such a dystopia, one might expect the well-heeled to have power and the poor to be disenfranchised. But now suppose further that even those with money find themselves bitterly divided on the central political issue […]
Posted inArticle
The Secret War on Tom Daschle
The producers who brought you The producers who brought you Doggygate and the brouhaha over Al Gore’s alleged claim that he invented the Internet are at work on a brand new project: the destruction of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Comments from a recent discussion thread on the right wing website FreeRepublic.com demonstrate the […]
Posted inArticle
Mandate Madness:
If mimicry is the best form of flattery, conservatives are making a lot of people blush. Lately, they’ve been stealing rhetoric at will — even if they railed against that very rhetoric just months ago. During last December’s electoral fiasco in Florida, for example, Republican pundits happily drew upon lefty postmodernist theories of human subjectivity […]
