No Beer, No Civilization (Updated)

George Will has been at the top of the pundit game for so long that you'd think he'd have joined a sizable number of his peers in seemingly dusting off one of their stock columns every week. Not so. Will's latest installment is on the virtues of beer. "The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization ...

Blogs Then and Now

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. [Update: The result, "Political Blogging 2.0," is now up.] I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with the political blogosphere, a ...

High Gas Prices Our Own Fault

George Will joins the Blame America crowd on the issue of high oil prices. Responding to Chuck Schumer's suggestion that we block arms sales to Saudi Arabia until it "increases its oil production by one million barrels per day," which would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately," Will notes that notes that, "One ...

Cult of the Presidency

George Will decries the romanticization of the presidency. Barack Obama recently said, "I believe in our ability to perfect this nation." Clearly there is something the candidate of "change" will not change—the pattern of extravagant presidential rhetoric. Obama is trying to replace a president who vowed to "rid the world of evil"—and of tyranny, too. [...] If you can name it, presidents ...

Hillary Clinton’s Equal Opportunity Disappointment

George Will's latest column is entitled "The Prize Clinton Isn't Owed." Women, we are told by some people who say they know them, are not amused. Women, or at least those whose consciousnesses have been properly raised, supposedly think that the impatience being expressed about the protracted futility of Hillary Clinton's campaign is disrespectful. They say that if the roles were ...

Hillary’s Math Problems

George Will notes, as I have many times, that Hillary Clinton, rather than being almost a sure loser, would have had this thing wrapped up a long time ago had the Democrats operated on rules similar to those the Republicans use. [S]he was too late in understanding how much the Democratic Party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, ...

Florida and Michigan Do-Overs

The Democratic National Committee is trying to work out a means for Florida and Michigan to stage delegate selection contests within the rules but there has thus far been no plan that's acceptable to the states and both campaigns. Meanwhile, some supporters of Hillary Clinton are arguing that the DNC should simply seat the delegates from the previous round of ...

2008 Prediction Games

Michael Medved has a much-linked column assessing the Republican candidates' chances of beating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in November based on some "trial heat" surveys. He figures Mitt Romney is the worst of the plausible nominees and John McCain the best. Kevin Drum has found survey data which backs up his hunch that Hillary Clinton would be just as ...

Bipartisanship: Comity vs. Consensus

Kevin Drum reacts with relief to news that "there was precisely zero detectable enthusiasm for a Bloomberg bid" in a meeting yesterday to find a way out of the current partisan climate. I think the error most people make on this subject is being confused about what voters are really tired of. They aren't tired of partisanship, they're tired of ...

Republicans Love Barack Obama - For Now

George Will closes a subpar (by his standards, at least) column on the silly populism of Mike Huckabee and John Edwards with this praise for Barack Obama: Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- ...