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Ross: Jonathan Chait and Stephen Spruiell have already chewed over this a bit, but neither have expressed what I think is an appropriate amount of mystification at the idea that immigration reform, of all issues, represents the toughest possible test for Republicans, and a target of opportunity for the Democrats. This is the kind of [...]
Filed under: immigration, politics
The discussion in the comments section of my recent post on the midterms continues, but I wanted to post a couple of my responses from the thread to explain why anti-Bush, traditional conservatives shouldn’t be very pleased with the prospect of a Republican House majority. Here is one response: Speaking for myself, there are some [...]
Filed under: politics
I think Daniel makes an important point that any group conceiving of themselves as a “New Israel” would be more likely to have ambivalent feelings at best, hostile ones at worst, toward any group calling themselves “Old Israel.” Christianity itself provides an excellent example. So saying that Americans have an affinity for Israel because we [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, history, politics
The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews [...]
Filed under: politics
Ross: TARP may have saved the United States from 15 percent unemployment, but it also implicated our government in the kind of crony capitalism you’d expect from a banana republic. If it was necessary, it was also un-American. If it worked, it did so while doing grievous damage to the credibility of Wall Street and [...]
Filed under: economics, foreign policy, politics
Yet neither the Democratic ascendancy nor the Republican humiliation meant the country had made a fundamental shift to the left. People had fired Tom DeLay’s congressional majority and quit on President Bush, but they had not become latter-day McGovernites. In fact, the opposite. A July 2009 Gallup report noted that by a 2–1 margin, people [...]
Filed under: politics
The 2009-2010 cycle has produced the kind of facts on the ground that Republicans could only dream about. Thanks go to Obama and congressional Democrats. The political environment created by their unpopular policies has produced what Republicans couldn’t on their own—a united party. ~Fred Barnes Unfortunately for the GOP, some of them are still dreaming. [...]
Filed under: politics
James Fallows noticed this remarkable Citizens Against Government Waste ad. As should be clear to anyone who knows anything about Chinese economic policy, putting American fiscal conservative rhetoric into the mouth of a professor from the PRC is simply bizarre. As Fallows writes: And if you know anything about the Chinese economy, the actual analytical [...]
AIPAC would likewise wield much less influence inside the 21st-century beltway if the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts hadn’t thought of themselves as reenacting the exodus of the Hebrews from bondage in ancient Egypt. ~D.L. at Democracy in America As the distilled essence of Mead’s argument about the reasons for pro-Israel attitudes in America, this captures [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
The Strategic Defense and Security Review released this week by Prime Minister David Cameron is bad news for anyone who believes that a strong Britain is a vital bulwark of liberty. ~Max Boot I can’t be the only one who laughed at this sentence. Hawks often make the claim that any and all military spending [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics