Has FBI director James Comey run afoul of federal law? Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, makes a plausible case: The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election. Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the […]
D.R. Tucker
D. R. Tucker is a Massachusetts-based journalist who has served as the weekend contributor for the Washington Monthly since May 2014. He has also written for the Huffington Post, the Washington Spectator, the Metrowest Daily News, investigative journalist Brad Friedman's Brad Blog and environmental journalist Peter Sinclair's Climate Crocks.
Posted inPolitical Animal
The Day the Earth Stood Ill
Ask yourself: how many Trump voters will be watching the National Geographic Channel tonight? As much as we’d like to believe that political polarization isn’t as bad as it really is, let’s face it, tonight’s premiere of the second season of Years of Living Dangerously and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced documentary Before the Flood is a […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Circle of Lies: The Campaign That Created Trump
November 8 is a day that will live in irony. Regardless of who wins nine days from now, the outcome will be influenced not only by the atrocious actions of FBI Director James Comey, but also by a presidential election that occurred twenty-eight years to the day earlier. The bitter legacy of that particular election […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
It Keeps You Runnin’
Here’s another nightmare scenario to ponder, even if it might seem a bit remote: what if Donald Trump loses the 2016 Presidential election by a margin so close that he could actually come back four years from now? There’s a reason why the New York Daily News ran that editorial last week expressing hope that […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Takin’ It to the Streets?
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has been downplaying the prospect of Donald Trump supporters having a profoundly irrational reaction to the Republican Presidential candidate’s likely defeat on November 8. I don’t necessarily gainsay O’Donnell’s overall point–that most Trump supporters will return to their lives, disappointed in the election outcome but determined to take their kids to sports […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Findings of Fact
Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses the 2016 Presidential election, the following will be true: * Those who support Trump have proven to be the most gullible citizens of the United States, the sort of folks who can fall for the simplest of scams. To invoke a famous Washington Post controversy, they may […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
When We Go High, They Go Lower
There are millions of Americans who will never hear Michelle Obama’s words. As eloquent, as passionate and as accurate as the First Lady was Thursday in New Hampshire, we must face the reality that a large portion of this country–a portion mentally contaminated by the lies of Limbaugh, the filth of Fox and the trash […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Deplorable Behavior
It’s not going to happen Wednesday, either. Joe Romm of Climate Progress noted last week that if Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz failed to introduce a specific question about climate change at the Clinton-Trump II debate, the question would never be brought up in Clinton-Trump III: We’ve had two debates where the moderators ignored the […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
The Right is a Hoax
[If Republican presidential candidate Donald] Trump doesn’t win, some are even openly talking about violent rebellion and assassination, as fantastical and unhinged as that may seem. “If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Course Correction for the Climate Movement
Were Donald Trump to win the Presidency on November 8, it would represent a deathblow to the climate movement: it would be impossible to make any further progress on reducing carbon pollution if the chief executive officer of the United States happened to be a man who sabotaged the Paris climate agreement and appointed vehement […]
