Quote of the Day – Torture Trials Edition

"Well, conservative, conshmervative - even Karl Rove would pay good money to see Pelosi handcuffed to Dick Cheney." - Kate McMillan responding to news that the then-Minority Whip and top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was briefed on the use of "enhanced interogation techniques" in the fall of 2002 and "gave it her stamp of approval." And, no, the fact ...

Bill Kristol’s Replacement

As everyone knows by now, Bill Kristol's last NYT column appeared yesterday. Aside from the italicized footer "This is William Kristol’s last column," it was unremarkable.  Which, most observers on the Left and Right seem to agree, was something it had in common with most of Kristol's NYT columns and largely explains why the one year experiment was not continued. There ...

Would Reagan Recognize Today’s Republican Party?

Former Texas congressman and minor Reagan administration official Mickey Edwards claims his old boss wouldn't recognize the modern GOP were he alive today. He believes modern Republicans are simply reflexively anti-government with no agenda otherwise. What would Reagan think of this? Wasn't it he who warned that government is the problem? [...] Reagan, who spent 16 years in government, actually said this: "In ...

Bush Term Extended

Those eagerly awaiting Barack Obama's taking over the reins will have to wait just a bit longer, as the Navy has just added an extra second on to 2008. The world's official timekeepers have added a "leap second" to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth's slowing spin on its axis, which takes ...

The Laconic Karl Rove

This NYT Magazine interview with Karl Rove is rather amusing, especially for the terseness of his responses. Do you like Joe Biden? I think he has an odd combination of longevity and long-windedness that passes for wisdom in Washington. Do you regret anything that happened in the White House during your tenure? Sure. You’ve been booed off stages recently. No, I haven’t. I’ve been booed on ...

John McCain’s Message

Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain's campaign: "It's what he's saying, not how he says it." Jeremy Rosner observed, A lot of people have noted he's just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and $300 million prizes for new electric ...

McCain Shakes Up Campaign Staff. Again.

John McCain has reshuffled his top campaign staff for the second time is a less than a year, elevating Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt to the top post. Responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, Mr. McCain put a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign in charge of day-to-day operations and stepped away from a plan to have the ...

I Miss Karl Rove

Remember the good old days when everyday events were coordinated by Karl Rove? Today could have counted as one but, alas, Karl Rove is nowhere to be found. Child rapists can't be executed, Supreme Court rules The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only ...

Karl Rove ‘Example How Not to Do It’

GOP strategist Ed Rollins opines, "I think the legacy is that Karl Rove will be a name that'll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it." To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on what the meaning of "it" is. If we're talking of Rove as a campaign runner, it's nonsensical. ...

Caption Contest Winners

The Swell Foop Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse(SWITZERLAND) ✰ THE WINNERS ✰ First: William d'Inger - Aero-Prius? Second: Bithead - "I will not encourage others to fly." - Bart Simpson on the blackboard, later that day Third: Gollum - Tower to Ghost Rider, um, your . . . umm, your tailhook is still out. HONORABLE MENTION charles austin - ...

Going to War with the Ideology You Have

Kevin Drum, responding to Jonah Goldberg's argument that George Packer's "The Fall of Conservatism" erroneously conflates conservatism with the Republican Party, retorts: No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has ...

Rove: Republicans Must Stand for Something

Karl Rove has an op-ed in today's WSJ entitled, "The GOP Must Stand for Something." I followed the link to it from memeorandum mostly so as to make a "now he wants to stand for something" comment. After reading the piece, though, the thing that stands out is that it doesn't tell us what the GOP should stand for. Or, ...

Obama Losing Two-Front Race War

Andrew Sullivan fears that, whatever the outcome of tonight's primaries, the press will frame it as about race. [W]hat Obama has been subjected to is a classic pincer movement: the Clintons have attacked from the right, subtly and not-so-subtly framing Obama's candidacy as a racial one, and evoking Bill's own Bubba identity and Hillary's totally fabricated working class white credentials. And ...

Getting it Right on Iraq

Taking a page from Christopher Hitchens' book, Jim Henley admits that he was right on the Iraq War. Predicting ahead of time that a given war is a bad idea isn't particularly hard, frankly. It's a bimodal choice (War/No War) and wars are almost always "bad" in some sense that would be defensible down the road even if ...

Schwarzenegger, Giuliani and McCain Republicans

RealClearPolitics' John McIntyre reminds us that the 2004 convention gave President Bush a large bounce in the polls, while the Democratic convention did next to nothing for John Kerry. He's got an interesting theory on why that was: Who did Karl Rove and the GOP strategists chose to put front and center on prime-time television for the American people? ...