Free Republic

Brett Kavanaugh stands accused of sexually assaulting a high school classmate. And Feinstein seems to have concluded that the public didn’t need to know this. First of all, what in blazes was Dianne Feinstein thinking? It was late July when she got that letter from a female constituent alleging that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. And only this week did she bother to share it with her Democratic Judiciary Committee colleagues? And not only that. According to Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer’s explosive New Yorker piece posted Friday morning, those colleagues got wind of...

Something changed last weekend, did it not? The firing of Andrew McCabe. The statement by Trump lawyer John Dowd to The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff that Robert Mueller should end his probe soon. Donald Trump’s tweetstorm just after that, his first tweets mentioning Mueller by name along with promises by aides that more attacks are on the way. The amped-up speculation that Trump will fire Jeff Sessions and replace him with someone who hasn’t recused himself so that someone can fire Mueller. Somewhere in there also came an official reassurance by Trump lawyer Ty Cobb that the president has no...

Michael Tomasky is not content to argue, in the wake of Mary Landrieu's defeat, that Democrats should write off the South as politically unfriendly territory.  In his Daily Beast item of today, Tomasky goes to great lengths to trash the region in the ugliest of terms. "Reactionary, prejudice-infested, fetid, reject[ing] nearly everything that’s good about this country, just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment," is how Tomasky slurs most of the South, saying "almost the entire region" is as he describes it.  Remind us now, Michael: just who's "choleric?" Tomasky then has the temerity to shed a...

Hard-left Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky has a nasty habit of smearing conservatives every chance he gets, and it seems he has found his newest target, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-Va.).  Writing in a May 1 piece for the online publication Tomasky used the FBI investigation over gifts McDonnell received for his daughter’s wedding to slam the Virginia governor's Christian faith.  Tomasky started off his rant by throwing harsh language at the governor, calling his actions, “sleazy and cowardly.”  At issue is the controversial relationship McDonnell has with businessman Jonnie Williams and whether or not the governor accepted money for political...

Okay, Joe Biden did his part. Now, or soon, it’s Barack Obama’s turn again. If he flubs this like last time, this race is probably over. If he manages a draw, he’ll stay what he is now, the narrow favorite whose rickety lead is based chiefly on an edge in Ohio that doesn’t feel all that solid, and both sides will be sweating bullets right through election night. He has to win. And frankly, there’s reason to wonder whether he can. He’ll need to be on his toes on taxes and Medicare and health care, sure. But before all that,...

ROUNDTABLE Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic; Michael Tomasky, the executive editor of The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, are three leading voices for liberalism today. Now, following the re-election of George W. Bush, and with the continuing dominance of Republicans in Congress, the politics they stand for is arguably more embattled than at any time since 1933 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Barry Gewen, an editor at the Book Review, asked the three editors to discuss and debate the present state of liberalism in America, and its future. Why has...

In yesterday's Washington Post, media critic Howard Kurtz headlined "a new Harvard study [which] says the conservative editorial pages are more intensely partisan, and far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than the liberal pages are to take on a Democratic administration." The "Harvard study" was done by Michael Tomasky, about whom more later. Tomasky compared editorials in two liberal newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, with editorials in two conservative newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. Tomasky subjectively categorized editorials in the four newspapers on 10 issues arising during the Clinton and...

A leading conservative trope these days seems to be a genuine (although I wonder how genuine) puzzlement over liberal anger. For reasons we'll get to shortly, the Fourth of July strikes me as a very appropriate occasion on which to explain that anger's sources. Permit me, then, as a certain famous American document once put it, to submit these facts to a candid world. Here, distilled into four paragraphs, is the liberal interpretation of the last 10 years. After a long and in some ways well-earned stroll in the wilderness, Democrats finally elect one of their own to the presidency....