Your one stop pundit shop.
Gail Collins never fails to amuse (me):
Pretend you’re the Republican leadership in a smallish state with an open United States Senate seat. The opposition is running a popular, longtime officeholder whose sense of inevitability was shaken by recent revelations that he had referred to himself as a Vietnam War veteran when he isn’t one.
Your own options are:
A) A well regarded former congressman who is a decorated Vietnam War veteran.
B) A political novice who made her fortune building up an entertainment business that specialized in blood, seminaked women and scripted subplots featuring rape, adultery and familial violence. In which the candidate, her husband and children played themselves. Also, the family yacht is named Sexy Bitch.
Well, obviously, you go for the yacht owner.
E.J. Dionne on the oil spill in the Gulf and what it teaches us about the arguments on capitalism vs. socialism:
"Deregulation" is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics claim it is.
But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions.
Nicholas Kristof nails the Catholic Church:
We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.
But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life. Doctors describe her as saintly.
The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy.
Read it!
David Broder says ... something.
Tom Matlack gets "beneath the myth to find the reality of manliness in America."
Tony Perkins keeps up The Washington Times' drumbeat against Elena Kagan. His argument seems to be based on the belief that she doesn't hate gays, which is pretty odd coming from a close associate of George "Rentboy" Rekers.
Meghan Daum on Campbell Brown's departure from CNN:
Are we really supposed to believe those who claim to be quitting to spend more time with their families? CNN's Campbell Brown sure doesn't — and she hasn't asked her viewers to either. On May 18, when Brown announced she was stepping down from the news program she has hosted at 8 p.m. on weeknights since February 2008, she was singularly frank.
"I could have said that I am stepping down to spend more time with my children (which I truly want to do)," Brown said. "Or that I am leaving to pursue other opportunities (which I also truly want to do). But I have never had much tolerance for others' spin, so I can't imagine trying to stomach my own. The simple fact is that not enough people watch my program."
... By refusing to be cagey about her reasons for leaving, by being brutally honest about her less-than-stellar ratings, by admitting, in essence, to failure, she pulled off something quite magnificent: She appealed to those of us who have failed at one time or another. That is to say, she appealed to all of us, something she apparently couldn't do in the context of hosting a cable news show.