Finally reading the infamous Yoo memos after all these years was a sort of vertiginous experience, like catching sight of a unicorn, or meeting Santa Claus, or having brunch with Stalin.  I realized that there was a part of me that was actually hoping to discover some ingenious argument in defense of warrantless surveillance, some […]

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Via Instapundit comes this gem: What is it with this President? Obama has an obsessive need to find enemies against whom to campaign. Surely a tendency unique in American politics.

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In a piece on the dire position of today’s Republican Party, TPM Cafe reproduces a series of historical graphs showing the large, and in most cases growing, gaps in partisan identification across various demographic groups, with Republicans faring especially poorly among young people. And indeed, if you look at the trend over the last decade […]

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Reading Patrick Ruffini’s jeremiad against “the Joe-the-Plumberization of the GOP,” it suddenly struck me that Joe may well be the first full-fledged metapundit. Here’s what I mean.  It’s hardly new to see political advocates whose non-ideological identities are as important to their public role as the substance of what they’re saying—but there’s traditionally been some […]

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