Chris Wallace, self-styled tough interviewer, waxes wimpy with El Rushbo

13 comments November 1st, 2009

 Proving that he’s nothing like his old man, Chris Wallace treated Fox News viewers to a game of PATTY-CAKE with Rush Limbaugh this morning.

Here’s how a Pentagon appointment by Obama triggered a bloodbath among Republicans

8 comments November 1st, 2009

 Frank Rich NAILS IT.

 A few excerpts:

 Barack Obama’s most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national GOP civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond…

 The more rightists who win GOP primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.