The NYT’s politics blog with photographic evidence of “joke” deleted from the remarks the President delivered today upon the reopening of the press briefing room: Ha, ha. Of course it’s a joke. Why eject when you can just ignore?
Please click through to learn more about this “Confucian sex symbol”: From the moment he landed in Nanjing, a fawning press covered his every move, marveling repeatedly at how spry he remains at age 84. When [he] lands elsewhere, he has to worry he’ll be summoned to testify about knowledge of war crimes…During the event [...]
I think Ruth Marcus was a little tough on Barack Obama here. It was absolutely courageous for Obama to challenge–no, he mildly disagreed with–the teachers on merit pay. The anti-professional, anti-progress militancy of the teachers unions continue to astound me. If they want to be “treated as the professionals they are” in the standard Democratic [...]
Lengthy behind-the-scenes analysis here. Sorry for the lack of David Vitter. For what it’s worth, more than one McCain aide I talked to yesterday mentioned him, usually in the context of, “The only person happy with us today is David Vitter.” The charge that McCain had become a “panderer” irked Weaver and other aides to [...]
Over at the LA Times, Paul Richter (full disclosure: he’s my spouse, or as we think of him around here, Mr. Swamp) and Peter Nicholas notice that the Republican Senators are not the only GOP politicians who are getting more and more uncomfortable being aligned with President Bush on the surge: As President Bush struggles [...]
Marc Ambinder continues his almost wall-to-wall McCain coverage: MANCHESTER, NH — On the eve of yesterday’s campaign shake-up, McCain aides and volunteers retired to the Strange Brew taverns to try and forget, just for a moment, the day when their world collapsed. One McCain aide said he was “physically there” but “mentally gone.” Another did [...]
Given his passionate biases, it’s not often I find myself persuaded by a Dick Morris column. But in The Hill today he writes a fairly cogent and sober piece arguing that President Bush’s only hope of saving the GOP from devastating losses in 2008 is to begin withdrawing troops now. Despite Morris’ intemperate loathing of [...]
My corporate overlords graciously lent me out this week. Here are the results: Jamie Malanowski’s debut novel about a palace coup in the White House has some sizable flaws, but for all the preposterousness of the plot—which pivots around a bachelor tech genius lothario Vice President, Gordon Pope, who can only exist in the wish-fulfillment [...]
