David Atkins

Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons I sometimes get tired of writing about Donald Trump and the GOP presidential race, but he has said so many outrageous things in the last 48 hours that the subject cannot be avoided in a serious political forum. Many people wish political commentators would simply ignore Trump as unworthy of news coverage, […]

Bill Schneider at Reuters wrote a piece this week that garnered some attention claiming that the GOP primary disaster is the fault of the media. His argument goes that modern television journalism has created a reality show environment where the most outrageous hucksters perform the best and where quality candidates and policy positions are lost […]

As most Washington Monthly readers know by now, Democrat John Bel Edwards defeated disgraced Louisiana Senator David Vitter in his bid for governor to replace failed presidential candidate Bobby Jindal. Vitter was famously the center of several scandals, especially including a prostitution debacle in which he reportedly engaged in not-so-vanilla interests. Vitter had been trailing […]

The week’s conservative shenanigans and descent into totalitarian thinking have put me in quietly determined mood. In that vein, enjoy Rob Dougan’s Clubbed to Death, Kuryamino Version, featured in The Matrix among other places. Enjoy and talk amongst yourselves on this beautiful Saturday evening.

Alex McGillis at the New York Times has one of the most intriguing and important pieces of political analysis I’ve seen in quite some time today. Most of us are familiar with analyses reliant on racial and cultural resentments to explain why poor white communities seem to vote against their own interests: voters with racist […]

I can’t help but take another opportunity to mock the Republican establishment and the mainstream press for believing that Donald Trump and Ben Carson were mere entertaining flashes in the pan until the “real” candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio could take over. It’s important to bring this up again because pundits should be held […]

ENERGY.GOV/Flickr Yesterday the House passed HR 4038, the Orwellianly misnamed “SAFE Act” to limit the number of Syrian refugees able to enter the United States. The unanimous Republican caucus was joined by 47 Democrats, mostly in swing districts. Most of the reporting around the Democratic defections centered around disagreements between many Democrats and the White […]

This now-viral photo of Presidents Obama and Putin at the G20 is confidence-inspiring because of its implications for the crisis in the Middle East, among other reasons. Most people underestimate the degree to which American foreign policy in the Arab world is predicated on Cold War geopolitics designed to thwart Russia. In both Iraq and […]

Remember when all the pundits again declared Rubio and/or Cruz won the last GOP debate? I hate to sound like a broken record, but about that: According to the five-day rolling Reuters/Ipsos presidential poll, Trump has leapt some 17 percentage points among likely Republican voters since Nov. 6, when he was essentially tied with Ben […]

By now the facts of the terrorist attack on Paris are becoming clear, and they are not pretty. The massacre appears to have been plotted and organized by ISIS members. At least one was apparently a French national radicalized domestically, but early reports suggest that at least a few came into France as refugees from […]