Some commentators contend that Mueller’s non-finding of criminal wrongdoing on Trump’s part paradoxically “did Democrats a favor.” In this view, the door is now closed on further investigations of Trump’s misdeeds, and Dems can now focus on the 2020 election, the surest way of removing Trump. This theory is nonsense. Trump’s misuse of office has […]
ON TAP
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The Spurious Claims of Democratic Purplehood
“We’re actually a more purple caucus today than we were a year ago,” Rep. Jim Himes says in a story in today’s Washington Post. Himes’s own purpleness is beyond question: H’s a past chairman of the New Democrat Coalition, and is, to my knowledge, the sole Democratic House member who worked at Goldman Sachs. He […]
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Connecting the Dots in the Catastrophe that is Europe
There is a direct connection between the three core elements of Europe’s deepening calamity. Those would be (a) the failure of the EU leadership to prevent the Greek financial crisis from crippling the EU economy as a whole; (b) the popular backlash in a worsening economy against refugees; and (c) the rise of the far […]
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Mueller Punts to Congress
By leaving open the question of whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, Robert Mueller fairly begs Congress to pursue it. We may or may not learn from the full text of Mueller’s report why he chose neither to charge Trump nor to exonerate him. It would be useful to know, but either way the duty now […]
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Conservatives: Fighting the Blowback from Their Own Idiocies
Back when American conservatism was actually a body of thought, and not just an apologia for Donald Trump’s racism and narcissism, conservatives liked to warn against the unintended consequences of governmental activism. That said, some of the most catastrophic unintended consequences of governmental activism to have befallen us came from the governmental activism of conservatives […]
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Will Democrats Snatch Defeat Out of the Jaws of Victory?
So let’s see. We have two old white guys, one of them still the darling of the party’s young left and the other standing for what remains of the party’s center. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, is in many ways a far more creative radical than Sanders, but if he has a lock on the hearts of […]
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Just What the Democratic Presidential Field Needs: Two (2) Colorado Centrists
It was a bare two weeks ago that former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper announced he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Now comes Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, who told The Washington Post’s James Hohmann in an interview published today that, Hohmann writes, “he’s inclined to run for president and will decide in a matter […]
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Truth Time for Trump’s Turtle
Senate Majority Mitch McConnell has been the most loyal of the Trump loyalists. But in his home state of Kentucky, where he is up for re-election in 2020, McConnell is running behind in the polls. About 33 percent of Kentucky voters approve of the job McConnell is doing, while some 56 percent disapprove. Lately, McConnell […]
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Trump’s Very, Extremely, Seriously Bad Week
This was the week that Trump’s senate supporters began deserting him big time, on the Wall (12 Republican Senate defections), on support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen (7 defections) and most ominously, on Special Counsel Mueller’s report, which both parties want made public. This is how it works. Support is solid, until it starts […]
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Beto: The Tabula-Rasa-for-President Candidate
Among the gazillion Democrats now running for president, former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who announced his candidacy today, is the most unformed. His brief tenure in the House gives few clues as to his politics, though he did support centrist Democrat Seth Moulton’s challenge to Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader in 2016. His relatively […]
