Adam Serwer

Pivoting off a 2000 speech in which Pat Buchanan accused Ivy League schools of discriminating against “white Christians,” Ross Douthat writes that “it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.” Douthat isn’t too specific on what Buchanan got right, and he never actually makes the claim that Ivy League schools aren’t mostly made up of […]

Yesterday, Sarah Palin wrote an inflammatory tweet about the planned Islamic Center at Ground Zero, which she then promptly deleted: She actually doubled-down on the sentiment later, in a fashion that was only slightly less embarrassing. I remember in 2006, when Rep. Silvestre Reyes, then the new Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was […]

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, suggested that 2011 Afghanistan drawdown date might not be as solid as advertised: “As few as a couple thousand troops” could be returning home from America’s longest war at the July 2011 target for a “transition” in Afghanistan, Vice President Joe Biden told “This […]

The attempts to tie the NAACP to the New Black Panther Party fall into two categories: Politically cynical or absurdly reductive. First of all, NAACP President Ben Jealous made it very clear that he did not believe the Tea Party Movement to be racist as a whole, but was rather asking the leadership to repudiate […]

So there’s a game Rush Limbaugh likes to play, where he’ll express a sentiment he actually holds in the form of a joke, and when called out on it he’ll remind everyone that it was intended as “satire.” He calls it “illustrating absurdity by being absurd.” Often the idea is that you’re accusing liberals of […]

So, a number of things have happened in the past few hours that should really discredit the entire conservative conspiracy theory behind the New Black Panther Party case. Earlier today, I reported that J. Christian Adams, in his testimony to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said that there was no indication of pressure from outside […]

It’s really astonishing that David Vitter is still a senator. Tim Geithner vs. Elizabeth Warren? Just read this. Ann Friedman explains that the way to make friends of other races is not to treat them as anthropology projects. Ben Smith destroys the NBPP story.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has already weighed in on the NAACP’s condemnation of racist elements within the Tea Party movement, but I thought John McWhorter‘s take was interesting as well. McWhorter, while agreeing(!) with the NAACP, writes that “a lesson America also needs to learn, especially those who read a T-shirt and think it’s their responsibility to […]

Yesterday I wrote that countering domestic radicalization will often involve people who are conservative or political in ways the government won’t necessarily like, because those people will have a kind of theological and cultural credibility more liberal Muslims won’t. Matt Duss, pivoting off a Washington Institute for Near East Policy report on the administration’s national-security […]

Jay Bybee on the torture memos he helped write: He said he was “proud of our opinions” at the Office of Legal Counsel, too, calling them “well researched” and “very carefully written.” Still, he said the controversy surrounding his tenure there had been difficult. “I have regrets because of the notoriety that this has brought […]