christopher_hallam

Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones writes about how Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, doesn’t have the foggiest idea why his name keeps coming out of John McCain’s mouth. In response to McCain’s latest invocation of his name, Rep. Lewis said in a statement requested by Mother Jones, “I cannot stop […]

Ta-Nehisi beat me to the punch again, but I still have some things to say about this understanding of slavery and abolition from Megan McArdle, which is plainly ahistorical. Indeed, though I myself am pro-choice and mostly irreligious, it seems more likely to me that the main effect of faith is to spur people to […]

When Georgia sent forces into South Ossetia and Russia invaded in response, John McCain cast the conflict in stark terms calling on the nation to “reverse the perilous course it has chosen.” Ben Smith, who described the conflict as a “3 A.M.” moment, quoted McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann and former employee of the Georgian government […]

I guess I’m just having trouble understanding why both John McCain and Barack Obama are still calling for NATO membership for Georgia, which would then bind us to an agreement in which we would have to defend them if they were attacked. I could understand the appeal prior to Russia’s invasion last week, where NATO […]

Jesse Taylor reveals the truth: Has anyone called Larry Johnson yet? — A. Serwer

Since the term “straw-man argument” is played out like a gheri curl, I propose a new term a friend of mine is fond of using for the leveling of an argument towards an allegedly widely held notion that is both not widely held and easily dispatched: shadowboxing. Today’s shadowboxing champion is Nick Charles at The […]

It’s hard to take a column seriously that generalizes so broadly about the personal instincts of Chinese and Americans, but here’s David Brooks arguing that where “Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.” When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates, commenting on Josh Green’s autopsy of the Clinton campaign, has a thoughtful post regarding the “false nobility of victimhood,” the rationalization of the Clintons that they were undone by forces outside their own control, rather than their own incompetence. Obviously, I’m not a Clintonite, but a certain tribe of white men have always […]

John McCain has returned the campaign contributions solicited by Jordanian national Mustafa Abu Naba’a on behalf of McCain associate and owner of an oil trading company Harry Sargeant III. Marc Ambinder asks: If there were a group of questionable donations all with the name Abdullah that were funneled through a guy in Jordan who is […]

Via David Broder‘s latest column: “I’m very sorry about it,” McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. “I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings” together, as he had suggested, during the summer months. This is the kind of […]