Jacob Weisberg Quotes
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Professional politicians often claim they are not professional politicians. Trump genuinely isn't one.
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What ultimately makes 'The Wire' uplifting amid the heartbreak it conveys is its embodiment of a spirit that Barack Obama calls 'the audacity of hope.' It is filled with characters who should quit but don't, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons who lose their hearts to them.
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Libertarianism, the political philosophy of rugged individualism, ought to hold a natural appeal to tolerant, anti-statist, free-trade conservatives who deplore the turn taken by the party of Abraham Lincoln toward racial prejudice, authoritarianism, and mercantilism.
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Donald Trump is an archetypal grifter. Using the presidency to promote your golf courses, hotels, and real estate business is grifting. So is getting people to pay a premium for buildings with your name in big, gold letters. Licensing your name is what every grifter dreams about.
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Like academic Marxists, who are their sisters under the skin, libertarians are far more interested in an ideal world than in the one where ordinary humans live.
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Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.
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The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong.
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If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'
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Many reporters have gone to Tea Party rallies looking for expressions of bigotry. What they have tended to find instead is a constitutional fundamentalism that argues that Washington has no right to tell individuals or states what to do.
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If Obama succeeds in turning health insurance and funding for college into universal entitlements, he will have expanded Washington's obligations on the scale of an LBJ or an FDR.
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Writing that's native to the web is different in ways that are crucial but subtle enough that you can miss them if you conceive of your audience as reading a printed product.
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Within half an hour of posting a piece on 'Slate,' I get a direct, often hostile and personal, response from readers.
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Most people prefer living in a healthier town.
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In practice, conservatives are no less inclined than liberals to adopt superior stances or to tell people how to live their lives.
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Like other forms of gambling, wagering on the Internet isn't illegal because it's bad. It's bad because we've chosen to make it illegal.
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Members of Congress are less beasts of accumulating burden than computational machines designed to win re-election. Their sense of their own political interests is acute.
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As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of '08 was a sin of omission - less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism.
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Republicans with any moral sense are desperate for a supportable alternative to Donald Trump.
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Politicians try to make friends, build constituencies, and avoid gaffes. Trump does the opposite, seeking out land mines in order to detonate them.
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Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs - except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them.
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Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments.
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Trade, tourism, cultural exchange, and participation in international institutions all serve to erode the legitimacy of repressive regimes.
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Conservative journalists don't just have the inside track on Republican strategy - they help devise it.
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Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector.