Josh Marshall

It was “friggin’ obvious” that Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to face criminal charges related to her private email server, and the media dropped the ball by not making that clear, argued Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall in a Tuesday post. “Given what we knew, criminal charges weren't even in the realm of reasonable consideration,” he stated. “You could find this out with just a…

Though the Brexit debate didn’t break down along ideological lines, some liberal writers focused their morning-after scorn on pro-Leave conservatives. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall wrote that American conservatives rooted for Brexit because of “the same turn back…the clock to glory nonsense that animates Trumpism…American conservative glee [over Brexit] is just a retreat…

In the course of presenting what is apparently one story in a series of several on a "Divided America," David Bauder at the Associated Press portrayed two Americans with largely different news consumption habits. Though the theme of Bauder's Thursday morning report was about how Americans are "retreat(ing) into tribes of like-minded people who get news filtered through particular world views,"…

The boy who cried “Wolf!” eventually had a serious credibility problem. Now, according to Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, so do anti-Donald Trump conservatives as a result of the right’s frequent over-the-top allegations regarding President Obama. Marshall thinks it’s fair for conservatives (or anyone) to call Trump a “demagogue and potential strongman,” but argued in a…

“True fact,” “filled to capacity,” “ATM machine.” To this list of redundancies, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall might add “conservative general-election challenger to Donald Trump.” Regarding what righty activists might do if Trump gets the Republican nomination, Marshall contended in a Friday post that “if you run a 'movement conservative' against Trump, it gets pretty hard to…

The last two midterm elections have yielded big Republican congressional gains, yet most conservatives who cheered those developments now jeer at Donald Trump. That’s inconsistent thinking on their part, suggests Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall. “Trump is very little different from the average candidate Republicans elected in 2010 and 2014, in terms of radical views and extreme…

Many of the lefty writers who analyzed Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate at the Venetian suggested that had the event been promoted as if it were a Vegas show, the marquee might have read “Fright Night,” or perhaps “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid,” given how much the candidates hyped the threat of jihadist terrorism.

A lot of people (not all of them liberals) consider Donald Trump a demagogue, but Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall thinks Trump is as much of a collaborator as he is a leader. In Marshall’s telling, Trump’s invective derives in large part from an audience that’s been primed by Fox News’s nonstop emission of “hate, lies, nonsense and febrile fear.”

Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

Since even some conservatives thought that Hillary Clinton won Thursday’s Benghazi hearing, it stands to reason that lefty bloggers would be happy with the way things turned out. In fact, not all of them waited until the hearing was over. Early in the afternoon, when Clinton still had several hours of testimony before her, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall observed that “…

“Keep your eyes on the prize” is a phrase widely associated with the civil-rights movement, but Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall implies that it’d be a good one for liberals to keep in mind regarding gun control. In this case, the prize would be, in Marshall’s words, “a society where there were radically fewer guns, where buying a gun meant getting a license…where you had to…

Almost a quarter-century ago, Seal sang, “We're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.” These days, suggests Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, it’s awfully hard to survive in the Republican presidential race if you’re only a little crazy, now that Donald Trump “has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable…

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature may soon weaken protections for tenured professors in the state’s university system. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall believes that Gov. Scott Walker’s enthusiastic support for tenure reform is “driven in part by right-wing ideology and in part by the palpable animus Walker himself holds to people who managed to get an education.”…

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall sees a pattern of self-deception among Clinton-loathing conservatives. Marshall acknowledges that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely “play close to the line” and “refus[e] to play by rules tighter than those applied to anyone else,” but argues that right-wingers fool themselves when they insist that behind those tendencies lies criminality…