In the annals of political writing, you would be hard-pressed to find a more ridiculous piece of dreck than the latest column by The New Republic Senior Editor Jonathan Chait on "Why a McCain Presidency Wouldn’t Be So Bad." And if the title alone doesn’t convince you of that, consider the reasons Chait gives, because despite recognizing that McCain has flip-flopped on every issue large and small in the interest of political expediency, that he lies and has anger issues, Chait says:

Yet, somehow, I still feel some pangs of affinity for the old codger. Where Bush is peevish, entitled, and insecure, McCain's charming, ironic, and self-deprecating.

Great. Chait would rather have a beer with John McCain, so let's elect him. It gets worse:

A president sets the tone for our public discourse, and McCain is pretty easy to take. His demagoguery comes with an awkward forced smile, which doesn't make it more forgivable but does make it less irritating.

As for his substantive views, they do (now) closely resemble Bush's. Yet the upside to a candidate who changes his philosophical orientation as often as McCain is that he could always switch back.

Yes, Mr. Chait, a McCain presidency might not be so bad because the angry, lying Senator who, except for when it comes to war, switches his position as often as (most) people change their underwear, just might change his views again. Let’s bet the country on that hope.

And this?

The best aspect of a McCain presidency is that, while it would probably follow the policies of George W. Bush, it would put an end to the politics of Karl Rove...A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.

So, a McCain presidency would continue with the disastrous policies of George Bush (unless he changes his mind, of course), but on the bright side, it would end the politics of Karl Rove? Apparently like McCain, Chait hasn't mastered "the google."

• "Karl Rove, the president’s top political hand since his Texas days, recently gave money to McCain and soon after had a private conversation with the senator. A top McCain adviser said both Mehlman and Rove are now informally advising the campaign. Rove refused to detail his conversation with McCain."
• "The elevation of Steve Schmidt -- who worked closely with Karl Rove --

  The move is the latest sign of increasing influence of veterans of Rove's shop in the McCain operation. Nicolle Wallace, who was communications director for Bush in the 2004 campaign (and in his White House) has joined the campaign as a senior adviser, and will travel with McCain every other week. Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Rove's operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of presidential advance in the Bush White House, was hired by Schmidt last week after a series of what McCain's advisers acknowledged were poorly executed campaign events."

• "Generally speaking, Rove's advice is action-oriented and useful," said another senior consultant to the McCain camp. "It's always well received." This McCain adviser noted that Rove talks periodically to Black and a few other top campaign aides on several key matters. "It can be policy ideas, messaging ideas, fundraising prospects, or people who need calls from someone in the campaign." Rove is "part of the information network that the campaign has," this adviser said, adding that Rove talks fairly regularly to such key people as Wayne Berman, a major fundraiser for McCain; Nicolle Wallace, a communications adviser; and Steve Schmidt, a senior aide."

Chait finishes by saying:

What can I say? Bush has lowered my standards.

...which brings to mind that old expression:

It is better to be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

It's official. Jonathan Chait is a fool.

The greatest explanations come from a response to a response.

Noam, Michael and Eve inhabit one of my favorite blogs on the presidential race.

In an article recently posted at The New Republic Bruce Bartlett discusses the rising tide of conservative support for the election of Barack Obama.  This support reflects the deep divisions within various segments of the American conservative movement that have has little play in the MSM or in discussion forums on the political left.  
What is becoming clear beyond my anecdotal discoveries is that there is a growing, almost viral discontent within the republican party and the conservative movement.

More below the fold.

Michelle Cottle, a senior editor of The New Republic, today reports What went wrong, as told by more than a dozen anonymous members of the campaign. This was the post-mortem:

IOWA

"If you ask the Iowa folks, I'm sure they would tell you she wasn't there enough...."

"It was obvious talking to people on the ground there that they simply did not get the Iowa caucus from a field perspective. That's where the thing was lost. They didn't have a good idea of the horse-trading that makes caucuses work for you."

"Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald dismissed the possibility of youth turning out heavily in Iowa for Obama, saying on the record after the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, 'They don't look like caucus-goers.'"

"Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. ....We didn't lay a serious glove on him until the fall. We tried to a little bit, but we weren't successful."

Yesterday I read a column by Jonathan Chait at the New Republic. I sometimes amble over that way, curious to know what the dunderheads are crowing about. Every once in a while there's an acorn.

And sometimes there's a real jewel. Yesterday was one of the beauties. Chait, in defining the difference between liberalism and conservatives, hit this one out of the park. I couldn't agree more with his opinion on liberalism. Except it's not a weakness, it's a strength.

More below the fold.

This is for those Hillary supporters who are who are just appalled at the slander that's been tossed at Bill and Hillary Clinton over race during this campaign.  And for those who support Obama and are going to post a bunch of nasty comment here - all I ask is that you read the entire piece before you do so.

Put aside everything else - does it make any sense that the Clintons would "play the race card" if they wanted to win?  Could there be anything stupider one would do in a Democratic nomination contest?  Think about that for five seconds, and then read the piece

The New Republic has posted its piece on the behind the scenes drama between the New York Times Washington Bureau, Executive Editor Bill Keller, and McCain attorney Bob Bennett that resulted in the story finally making it into print.

The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.

It's not that unusual for stories like this to generate a lot of internal debate in newsrooms. But this story seems to have left some wreckage in its wake.

In the past few days there have been a spate of diaries by people saying farewell to dailykos arguing, correctly, that it has become something of a low-level think tank for Obama, and not much else. At the same time there have appeared a number of good diaries questioning what can best be called Obamamania and some of the things Obama has said in his speeches. Among these are BenGoshi's Obama's Wrong, jimsaco's I'm Outta Here, Too, The Smouldering Crone's Demagogue Obama: The Recipe, and DallasBHughes's DailyKos is Dead.

This is a good sign. More reasoned debate.

Today, the reviled (on dailykos, at least) New Republic has a wonderful series of essays by fourteen notable personalities making their personal case for their candidate of choice, or their indecision: Fourteen Views for Clinton or Obama. I excerpt those that interested me below, with analysis.

The New Republic published an article yesterday, Did the Media Really Screw Edwards?  in which the author, Jason Zengerle, claims Edwards really did get media coverage. But a closer look reveals that Zengerle's thesis is more than just a little flawed.

Kenneth Pollack, yes, that Kenneth Pollack who was proclaiming victory in Iraq last summer, is back, praising the surge in The New Republic as a path to victory.  Pollack was one of Hillary Clinton's chief foreign policy advisers while she was in the Senate and is supporting her candidacy for president.  Here, he expresses hope that the Bush administration will finally make good on its path to "success" and offers up a new plan for victory.  The link is available to subscribers only, so I'll paste the best parts below the jump:

John Edwards released a statement today about Hillary Clinton's newest slogan (video):

"The war in Iraq isn’t even history yet, but the Bush Administration is repeating the march to war with Iran – and they’re getting help from a person who should know a lot better – Senator Clinton.

"On Saturday at the Iowa Jefferson Jackson dinner, Senator Clinton unveiled her new campaign slogan to ‘turn up the heat’ on the Republicans.

"Well, somebody will have to tell me how you ‘turn up the heat’ by voting with Bush, Cheney and the neocons on their path to war with Iran. Because I don't believe that's turning up the heat – I think that's giving them exactly what they want.

"Senator Clinton had her chance to stand up and she chose not to use it. Our nation needs leaders who have the strength and backbone to fight the president on his march to war with Iran – not quicken the pace."

I thought I should put all my Col. Boylan investigative reporting in ONE place, so that it would be easier for dKosians to ignore and belittle.

I have been faithfully chronicling the silencing of "The Baghdad Diarist" since July. I have posted SOME of my work on DailyKos (remembering that the most "interest" I ever received here was last year, when some idiot decided -- along with his friends -- that my research on Howie Rich wasn't NEAR as interesting as attacking me repeatedly for being a "blogdumper" and a "blog whore.")

Funny: you've been getting the good stuff for FREE. What kind of self-respecting whore does that?

UPDATE: The story is gone from Drudge's front page. Completely gone. Not so "developing" anymore, it would seem. [End update]

Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the man the RW Wankosphere can't stop fantasizing about:

SHOCK DOCS: THE NEW REPUBLIC 'SHOCK TROOPS' STORY COLLAPSES  —  The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained internal documents from the investigation of THE NEW REPUBLIC'S "Baghdad Diarist", Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance from the Iraq War front.

Jump the fold for the Earth-shattering details.

Greg Sargent over at Talking Points Memo has an excellent piece today on Maureen Dowd's column in the NYT.  

In her latest column on Hillary, Maureen Dowd quotes New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier as follows:

   'Others do not underestimate her relentlessness. As Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, once told me: "She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone."'

I've been closely following the debate surrounding Jon Chait's book  (excerpted in The New Republic) about the rise of supply side economics and the cranks behind it. The debate fascinates me for a few reasons. For starters, Chait is my favorite columnist out there right now. He also went to the most important college ever. more importantly, the debate has provided an interesting view into the mind of conservatives like McMegan and Grover Norquist. The Norquist bit is particularly interesting, because he's remarkably up-front about the motivations behind much of conservative rhetoric behind tax cuts, and what he says provides a window into the operation of the current Republican movement as a whole.

Recently the New Republic put out an absolutely fascinating piece by John Judis expaining how new research in psychology explains the Republican success exploiting the WAR ON TERROR.
From the article:

This strongly suggested that Bush's popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden's video on October 29, and the Bush campaign's reiteration of the terrorist threat (Cheney on election eve: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again") were integral to Bush's victory over Kerry. "From a terror management perspective," they wrote, "the United States' electorate was exposed to a wide-ranging multidimensional mortality salience induction."

Bush won West Virgina in 2000, and 2004 a state Democrats carried except for two exceptions, for every presidential election from 1960. For some reason there has been little examination of this. Too many people have just bought into the Republican talking point, that West Virginians have "just" become more conservative, ect.

But John B. Judis, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success makes a fine point.

Some pundits have tried to explain away this mystery by arguing that Bush backers (in West Virginia) voted for their values rather than their interests. But this explanation is unsatisfying, since many of those voters didn't opt for "family values" in 1992 and 1996, when the country elected a well-known philanderer as president

[From the Frog Pond]

Noam Scheiber updated his blog in response to my request that he name names of the reporters that celebrated wingnut Mike Huckabee's second place finish in the Iowa Straw Poll.