Natasha Berger

When Rosie O’Donnell showed up on The O’Reilly Factor last week, the stage was set for a bludgeoning. You don’t just toss Bill O’Reilly a Hollywood liberal — a lesbian no less — and expect her to emerge unscathed. But instead, it seemed the two met in a political middle of sorts. “Before September 11, […]

It all comes to an end this weekend: the furtive lobbying, the flinging of accusations, the petty rivalry. By now we know that Hollywood studios are not above a little politicking for the coveted Best Picture award. But whether or not the hype about a studio-driven smear campaign has any merit, there’s something disconcerting in […]

Say what you will about Alec Baldwin — “obnoxious” frequently comes to mind — when it comes to politics he certainly doesn’t hold anything back. “I know that’s a harsh thing to say, perhaps, but I believe that what happened in 2000 did as much damage to the pillars of democracy as terrorists did to […]

It’s official — Doris Kearns Goodwin is tainted goods. Her plight was perhaps best summarized recently by Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, who also chairs the board of the Pulitzer Prize. Regarding the board’s Tuesday decision to part ways with Goodwin, Carroll said he was prepared to do “whatever was necessary to maintain the […]

A Note to our Readers: With this article, Natasha Berger will be ceasing her weekly catalogue of lunacies known as Hall of Shame. But she’ll be back next week with a new and longer column — look out for it! Unless I’ve fallen victim to a Swiftian ruse, it seems The Wall Street Journal‘s Richard […]

Ever since Jerry Falwell declared on the 700 Club that pagans, feminists and gays brought terror to our shores, we have been deluged by press parallels between the American right-wing and the Taliban. Cheap shot? Maybe, but how else to account for this little valentine to Afghanistan’s former regime on this week’s edition of hard-right […]

If you’ve been following the media war over stem cell research, you’re probably already familiar with the freakshow rhetoric that dominates the conservative angle. (For a rundown of the developments so far, check out Thomas H. Murray’s “Hard Cell” and our own Robert Kuttner’s “Religious Right Hijacks Stem Cell Debate” in TAP.) This is due, […]

It’s no secret that Andrew Sullivan prefers manly men; His giddy pro-testosterone piece in TheNew York Times Magazine confirmed that some time ago. Fair enough — to each his own. But no pundit, no matter how seriously he takes the threat to “traditional masculinity,” should let his gonads influence his political views. Especially when the […]

Syndicated columnist Debbie Schlussel has a problem with the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City — they’re not the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid. That was the year, you may recall, when the scrappy U.S. men’s hockey team shocked the world by defeating the vastly superior Soviet team and went on to beat Finland for […]

Arguments about whether liberals enable terrorism are nothing new in conservative American media (the press surrounding would-be Taliban John Walker and his supposedly lax Marin County upbringing being only the most obvious example). Now, the idea has caught on with conservatives in Britain — with similarly muddled results. Theodore Dalrymple writes in U.K. weekly The […]