Vox

Like or dislike Barack Obama, his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention caused a lot of people to think of him as a potential president. Now we have a Donald Trump speech that’s supposedly disqualifying as far as Trump’s bid for the presidency is concerned. According to the headline in Vox, Trump’s Saturday remarks introducing his VP pick, Mike Pence, “showed why” Trump “shouldn’t be…

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life. Anybody who ever saw the movie The Manchurian Candidate would have quickly thought it rather odd that every soldier captured in Korea with Raymond Shaw gave identical answers when asked to describe him. However, when associates of Hillary used identical answers to describe her, Ezra Klein of Vox…

On June 16, four days after the Orlando nightclub massacre, Dylan Matthews tweeted his endorsement of “letting the [president of the United States] unilaterally ban people (hopefully everyone!) from buying guns.” That’s provocative, but less so than a Matthews article from this time last year that was reposted Friday. In that piece, Matthews contended, “American independence in 1776 was a…

Bill Clinton’s personal conduct has exasperated liberals for roughly as long as his political success has exhilarated them. While some of them dismissed his get-together with attorney general Loretta Lynch as trivial, others saw it as yet another of his potentially damaging, impulse-driven unforced errors. Esquire’s Charles Pierce called the meeting “stupid and reckless” and fumed, “For the…

The shocked reaction of Oxford University students to the Brexit vote yesterday was notable for the fact that they were so firmly esconced in their liberal bubble that even Vox took note of their extreme divorce from reality. As we shall see, it never even occurred to them that (gasp) the vote would be to leave Brexit. In fact the Oxford students clueless reactions to the vote were so laughable…

You are not worthy!!! That pretty much sums up the brutal assessment of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro by Dylan Matthews of Vox. He was listing the pros and cons of various possible running mates for Hillary Clinton. Most of them seemed weighted on the pro side but when it came to Castro, the cons screamed off the page in a most cruel way that overwhelmed whatever pros he…

During the upcoming presidential campaign, predicts David Roberts, the media will not acknowledge an inconvenient truth: that the difference in quality between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is comparable to the difference in potability between “Coca-Cola [and] sewer water.” “The campaign media's self-image is built on not being partisan,” wrote Roberts in a Thursday article. “How does that…

Last week, a long Vox essay by Emmett Rensin asserted that “contempt” for supposedly “stupid” blue-collar whites -- in response to the exodus of those voters from the Democratic party -- has become pervasive among liberals. The piece has gotten some pushback from lefty writers, including Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, who thinks that Rensin greatly overestimates the spread and influence of what Rensin…

According to Dylan Matthews, Donald Trump attracts a highly diverse group of foes. Some of them (mostly Democrats and independents) find racism appalling, but others (notably some prominent Republicans) are fine with it as long as it’s packaged in a certain way. In a Wednesday article, Matthews remarked that even though GOPers such as Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have sharply criticized Trump, they’…

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…

During the 1980s, a favorite talking point of liberals was that President Reagan tended to confuse movies with reality. In a Friday article, Zack Beauchamp accused a current Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, of doing something similar, and alleged that the GOPers who took part in Thursday’s prime-time debate stand for a “view of the world [that] is as much a work of fiction as” Michael…

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.

Last Friday your humble correspondent noted the absence of Sarah Kliff on the topic of ObamaCare and now he is unhumble enough to believe that this put pressure on her to return to that painful topic today at Vox after nearly a month of avoiding it. As you can read, poor Sarah seems to have gone from acting like a cheerleader aboard a sinking Titanic to taking on the role of radio reporter…

According to David Roberts, activist conservatives are “bending the political system to their will” not by scoring policy victories but by taking their cues from “fever dreams” (i.e., conspiracy theories). In a Thursday article, Roberts suggested two reasons why conservatives generally are more inclined than liberals to buy into CTs. One is that for conservatives, not trusting “the political…