Matthew Duss

As part of an apparent effort to reinvigorate political journalism’s most tired cliches, James Kirchick declares that “the Left lacks a sense of humor.” He offers as proof my Think Progress post from Tuesday, in which I noted what a sad commentary on conservatism it was that Christopher Buckley felt that John McCain needed to […]

I’m with Cernig on the Clinton campaign’s “plagiarism” charge against Obama: I think they take at least as big a hit on this as he does. TPM has more, and points us to this from Jake Tapper: In a conference call just now the Clinton campaign would not guarantee that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has […]

Still running also-ran Mike Huckabee has been using Boston’s song “More Than A Feeling” at campaign rallies, and performing it with his band. News of this has reached the ears of Boston’s founder, guitar geek demigod Tom Scholz, who is not amused: Huckabee, a bass guitarist himself, has the endorsement of one of the band’s […]

Continuing to man the “Surge Success!” booth at the Bush Country Fair, neocon carnie Reuel Marc Gerecht looks at the bright side of life: Regarding the Iraq war and jihadism, two facts stand out. First, if we make a comparison with the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-89, which was the baptismal font for al-Qaeda, what’s most […]

Over at The Corner, one of Jonah Goldberg‘s emailers responds to Goldberg’s latest iteration of his argument that torture is no big deal by suggesting that Jonah “go read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It will tell you all you need to know about torture.” Jonah fires back: I’ve read the Gulag Archipelago. It […]

Steve Benen examines John McCain‘s sell-out on torture: To briefly recap, a spending bill to finance the nation’s intelligence efforts went to conference, where Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) added an important provision [requiring] the intelligence community to abide by the same interrogation standards articulated in the Army Field Manual, which, of course, prohibit torture. For McCain, […]

Yesterday, the Yesterday, the Hillary Clinton campaign charged Barack Obama with “shameless … potential plagiarism” for offering economic proposals that the Clinton camp claims resemble Sen. Clinton’s. While one has to admire the studied imprecision of the phrase “potential plagiarism”, unlike the much-discussed provenance of the new Obama campaign slogan “We are the ones we […]

That Marty Peretz, he’s all class: Reports about the “horrors of Israeli occupation,” Peretz adds, don’t particularly impress him. “I’m not under the impression that Israeli occupation is kind and sweet. No occupation is kind or sweet. But bad things happen everywhere, all the time,” he says dryly. Yeah, big deal, they’re only Arabs, right […]

Reuel Marc Gerecht celebrates President Bush‘s creative destruction: Although the White House often seems bedeviled by the task of defining “victory” in Iraq, it really isn’t that hard. Flawed and ugly as it is, Iraqi democracy stumbles forward. The Shiite and Sunni Arabs are slowly establishing representative political arrangements within their own communities that allow […]