Chris Mooney

In her book, The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel observes that political lines often blur dramatically on science, technology, and bioethical issues. Many on the right, for example, will oppose various forms of reproductive technology out of religiously grounded moral principles; many on the left, meanwhile, will wind up in the same place because […]

Okay. Let’s suppose you’re a liberal. Furthermore, let’s suppose you want to draw an intellectually defensible distinction between partisanship as practiced by Democrats and partisanship as practiced by Republicans — and argue that the GOP version is more extreme. Sure, you could just get angry at Republicans and bleat on in a partisan way yourself. […]

The New Dishonesty. Watching Mark Racicot and Terry McAuliffe — the Republican and Democratic National Committee heads — square off for the first time on Meet the Press last Sunday morning was a disheartening spectacle. There’s an aspect of artifice to the latest spurt of hard-core partisanship, as incarnated in these two men, that’s more […]

The prize, at least for this week, goes to George Will. In last Sunday’s column in The Washington Post, Will repeatedly employed a moniker that Republican strategists have explicitly called on their supporters to use in a propaganda war against Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle: “Daschle Democrats.” Will’s column itself was titled “The Daschle Democrats.” […]

The motley marriage of convenience between serious intellectual critics of Islam (whatever you may think of them) and the Christian right (who’re just bashing a rival religion) continues. In the latest development, the Middle East Forum’s Daniel Pipes has appeared on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to discuss the “need to have a general understanding […]

Boston Herald columnist Don Feder spends a good chunk of his time penning anti-liberal screeds; recently he dubbed liberalism “America’s homegrown suicide cult and the real threat to our nation’s survival.” For a man who views those on the left as mere escapists, then, it’s simply stunning to read Feder’s recent adoration — political much […]

This election has turned into a battle of the sexes. Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of American men prefer Bush, and the majority of women prefer Gore. This situation has left the left behinds on both sides wishing they could somehow excommunicate the greater part of their gender. In the absence of […]

Listening to Tim Tompkins describe his job, it can be hard to tell if you’re in a graduate sociology seminar or at a community activist meeting. Tompkins is the creator and director of New York City’s five-year-old Partnerships for Parks, a joint public-private initiative run out of the Parks and Recreation Department, but partly underwritten […]