Category: Awards

"Clinton fought back, but she needs a radio-controlled shock collar so that aides can zap her when she starts to get screechy," – Joel Achenbach, WaPo.

"I don’t see how [McCain] wins the Republican nomination. I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us," – Kathryn Jean Lopez.

It’s pretty staggering to see a Khmer Rouge torture technique now being touted as a core Republican principle. But there’s one silver lining to the elections so far. The candidates who have performed best – Obama, Clinton, Huckabee and McCain – are the four candidates with the clearest opposition to torture. This gives me hope for a return to decency after the Bush-Cheney years. It also shows how opposition to torture is not a vote-loser. America is so much better than the toxins of Cheney-Addington-Rumsfeld.

"Bottom line: Republicans have to be careful that they don’t turn a windfall issue (the Democrats are mostly open-borders and captive to the identity-politics wing of the party) into a mass deportation albatross," – Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.

"Who wouldn’t like to see an end to the vicious, violent partisanship of our times? (I’ll tell you who: the ignorance-worshipping sociopaths of the Far-to-the-Nth-Degree Right who created that violent partisanship–utterly deliberately, I believe, for the express purpose of taking over the government and imposing their wingnut sociopathology on the rest of the country. Which come to think of it, they’ve done.)," – keninny.

"Conversely, I remain immune to Obama’s appeal. Who’s writing his speeches? Rob Reiner? How such utter empty gas-baggery could sound to so many people like the second coming of Pericles utterly baffles me. And yet evidently it does thrill millions of people, not only the Beatlemaniacs in the liberal blogosphere, but (much more importantly) the still-powerful custodians in the big media, who have decided that any criticism of Obama no matter how well founded is out of bounds. (See negative reaction to Hillary Clinton’s rebuttal, as above.)  …

There’s an irony here: I think it was Mort Sahl who said of Barry Goldwater that he had always suspected that the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian. It’s even weirder that the first African-American president should have no African-American relatives! Maybe that’s why he plays so well in white America: Obama too learned about slavery and segregation from books," the ever-classy David Frum. (My apologies to JPod to whom I ascribed this originally by mistake.)

"Many bloggers (including me) have a knee-jerk reaction to the mainstream media. We "just know" they have a liberal bias and that they can’t be trusted to report accurately on Republicans and conservatives. If my experience is any indication, then most of what we know is "just wrong."

My job wasn’t to spin the press but to present the facts for the Huckabee campaign’s side of the story. I expected that I’d have the toughest time with the professional journalists but most of the reporters that I dealt with (especially Michael Luo of the New York Times and Jonathan Martin of Politico) were quite fair and always professional. Even when their coverage was cringe-inducing I rarely could fault them for being inaccurate or putting their own biases ahead of the facts.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said of the conservative media," – Joe Carter, Evangelical Outpost.

"The Hawkeye State has not been helpful. If the nominees really turn out to be Huckabee and Obama, the paternalists will have won long before November. And the jihadis will not have done too badly either," – Tigerhawk.

"Yes, it’s early, yes, a lot could happen. But a man who could not have used certain restrooms forty years ago is in the center ring, not as a freak in the manner of Alberto Fujimori or Sonia Gandhi, nor even as a faction fighter in the style of Jesse Jackson, but as a real player. One of our great national sins is being obliterated, as the years pass, by the virtues of our national system. I don’t agree with Obama and I don’t particularly like him, but I am proud of this moment," – Rick Brookhiser, NRO.

"I no longer see the Left as a set of political opponents. I understand them now to be what they are: An uncompromising, barely human mass of malignancy, that exists only to be crushed electorally and culturally once and for all. Or, as a wiser man than I put it, The Evil Party," – Red State’s Thomas, who is retiring from blogging.

Hilzoy’s farewell note here.