Category: long story short

After tripping over themselves a few times right out of the gate, the Clark campaign is starting to look downright professional. Here are a few of the top stories from the last couple of weeks: Kerry, Gephardt, and Lieberman attack Dean’s electability. Dean strikes back. Clark testifies against the war criminal he bagged and gets…

I really should resist responding to Bill Safire’s op-eds in the Times, which lately have amounted to a form of trolling writ large. Also, I promised not to be all pro-Dean here at Edgewise. I have plenty of other outlets for that (Oakland for Dean, Tech4Dean, etc.). But Safire’s latest piece, Don’t Stop Dean is…

1. Saddam is captured. 2. There’s much rejoicing. Yay! Yay! 3. Then less then 10 days later we go to Orange Alert — “high risk of terrorist attacks.” Yikes. They’re planning something even bigger than 9/11, we’re told. And Osama OKd this attack personally. All while Saddam sits in a small room somewhere, after spending…

Interesting multi-page interview with Dean up on ABCnews.com, including a suggestion by the interviewer that Bradley might be a VP consideration. No real response from Dean of course, but that’s the first I’ve heard of a Dean/Bradley pairing, even as a hint of a whisper of 2/3 a piece of gossip. I hadn’t even considered…

Adam Nagourney at The Times seems to be having some fun at Kerry’s press secretary’s expense: Mr. Kerry’s press secretary, Stephanie Cutter, sent an e-mail message to news organizations listing remarks Dr. Dean had made over the past six months that she said demonstrated that his opposition to the war was "politically driven." But Ms.…

There’s a fascinating insta-article from Time covering Saddam’s first day as a prisoner. (Mad props to the always excellent Talking Points Memo for the link that sent me there in the first place.) The whole article is worth a quick look if only to be amazed, as I was, to see that Time already has…

My instincts about Dean’s chances are just about the opposite of Andrew Northrup’s, but he makes a pretty good point in More Unseemly Politicization of the Political Processes when he suggests that Dean sure had better be able to handle attacks like these from Democrats if he’s going to fight off a scorched-earth media campaign…

Billmon has produced another masterful analysis of the capture of Saddam. This comment in the attached thread caught my eye: am I the only one who smells a rat? Here was an operation involving 600 soldiers going after a tip on saddam hussein, and NOT A SHOT WAS FIRED???THat tells me they knew that not…

There’s a lot of talk lately about the Democrats’ Southern problem — how Bush swept the South last time around, how the Democrats can’t win without the South, and how the South is sure to find any of the Democratic candidates repellent. Why all this concern for the Democrats from big-hearted conservatives like Trent Lott…

Here’s a sideways counter-point to Xian’s earlier post: The newsmedia has a vested interest in keeping these things entertaining. That’s not conspiracy-talk. It’s just capitalism. Year in, year out, the one constant is, there’s always a tussle — a moment of drama. No drama from the Republicans this year, so you can bank on some…

Like Brooks used to be, Kristol is one of those Republican (yes, neoconservative) pundits who isn’t afraid to go against the talking points. He seems to get a bye somehow, maybe as a kind of jester or cassandra. His column in the WashPost today, How Dean Could Win, cuts through the fog of the otherwise…

The latest rumor is that Gore is about to endorse Dean. If true, that looks to me like a massive signal to fall into line to the rest of the faithful. The dirty little secret of this campaign is that if any of the nine candidates were to gain the nomination the Democratic voter base…

Turns out, the “F.” in John F. Kerry doesn’t stand for “friggin.” If you know what I mean. And in case you don’t, let me spell it out for ya: John Kerry is a big-time potty-mouth — big-time. This story must make the Kerry folks so happy — after all these months of hearing about…

I honestly have no idea of the veracity of this dissenting report about what happened in Samarra. In fact, while it circulates the idea that Iraqi police may have tipped off the insurgents/bandits who attacked the currency convoy, I seem to recall that Times reporter Dexter Filkins mentioned on the Lehrer hour last night that…

When I saw the Thanksgiving news about the President going to Iraq to cheer the troops, I thought this was admirable, something definitely worth doing. I didn’t grudge Bush the good PR. I felt something similar when the statue of Saddam was pulled down (in Firdos Square, was it?), and only later, as stories of…

First, some disclosure: I support Howard Dean for President, have donated to his campaign, and am supporting him as an unpaid grassroots volunteer. I am obviously biased. However, I have resisted and still resist the whole stampede to Dean’s aura of inevitably. Yes, he does seem to have finessed the whole field. He has won…

When we won the cold war we entered a period of change and risk in some ways as perilous as the nuclear threat of the previous forty years. Bush the first understood this, and even his kinder, gentler New World Order concept of multilateral cooperation scared the bejeesus out of the militia types who ultimately…

Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional in that state for marriage to be restricted to opposite-sex couples, the Republicans have the culture-war wedge issue they were planning to run on in 2004 served up to them right over the middle of the plate. It perfectly divides the electorate for them, marginalizing…

I just reposted an article by David Reinhard published in the Oregonian called Why Dean can win next November over at my new Oakland for Dean site. It tackles the “unelectable” meme head-on.

I’ve set up a site called Oakland for Dean and I’ll be posting campaign news and opinions there. When I think something over there would be interesting to Edgewise readers I’ll be sure to post a link here. I’m also going to add the headline feed from O4D to the sidebar of this blog, and…

I admit it, Roy Moore scares me. I live in my west-coast bubble and he lives in his Alabama bubble and we both believe we have self-consistent world views and that there is something seriously wrong with the people who tend to overrule us. “What is he trying to do?” I asked B over breakfast,…