Talking Points Memo

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…

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…

Former PBS fixture Moyers recently touched on Ted Cruz’s Canadian birth, but not with an eye toward whether or not Cruz is eligible for the presidency. Rather, it was to contrast Canada-born hockey enforcer John Scott with Cruz, who’s “another kind of enforcer.” Each has a large and enthusiastic following: fans voted the journeyman Scott into this year’s NHL All-Star game, and Cruz, of course,…

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…

Lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte grants that so-called political theater usually dovetails with the beliefs of the politicians and activists who perform it. Among the exceptions: some Republicans’ insincere, “comically overwrought meltdowns” over the Iran nuclear deal. Those histrionics, Marcotte declared in a Wednesday Talking Points Memo column, are meant “to stir up irrational fears to be harped…

A great many Fox News hosts and contributors publicly criticized Donald Trump’s latest Twitter swipes at Megyn Kelly. This raises a major pot-kettle issue, claims lefty writer Marcotte, in that these high-profile personalities who objected to Trump’s sexism work for a channel that disseminates one sexist message after another. “The position at Fox News and elsewhere in the conservative media on…

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…