Posts by Jason Linkins

Jason Linkins is an associate editor at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, DC.

Maddow: Why Won't Obama Pursue War Crimes Investigations?
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on November 25, 2008 at 12:34 PM.

On last night's Rachel Maddow show, Maddow engaged Slate's Dahlia Lithwick in a discussion on how Barack Obama might tend to some of the more morally troubling aspects of the outgoing Bush administration -- issues like torture and detention and rendition. Initially, Lithwick says, she was optimistic that an Obama administration would follow through on promises to close Gitmo and bring a halt to the practice of torture. But there's been some hedging.

"I've been waiting for war crimes tribunals to get sexy," Lithwick quipped,. "For folks like me, who have been covering Padilla and covering Moussaoui, covering Gitmo, covering waterboarding for years, we were waiting for this moment for [Obama] to say, as he said, days after the election...we're closing Guantanamo...and within hours, they kind of pulled back on it a little bit." Lithwick noted that the camp is taking a "turn the page" line on potential prosecutions, that it wasn't a matter the Obama team "wanted to expend capital on." "My feeling is," Lithwick said, "if you don't want to expend capital on war crimes, what do you want to spend it on?"

I've long been a fan of Lithwick's, and my heart on the matter is very much in alignment with hers -- torturers should be punished. Abrogations of legal rights must not be tolerated. Nevertheless, I get the distinct impression that the Obama camp has always been of the mind that they could either jump out on January 20, 2009 and start repairing the damage of the Bush administration or set out on a broad campaign of investigations and hearings to elucidate and punish wrongdoing, but that they could not do both, and so were going to follow the former path.

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Gore on Obama: 'Redeems the Revolutionary Promise of Our Declaration of Independence'
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on November 22, 2008 at 10:10 AM.

Coming on this Sunday's edition of CNN's Fareed Zakaria: GPS, Former Vice President Al Gore shares his feelings on the election of Barack Obama with Zakaria, enthusing, "I can barely contain my excitement about his election, I just think it's a fabulous new development."

Gore also strikes an ecumenical note, stressing how important it was for the "international audience" to note how Americans of all stripes -- including Obama's political opponents -- were happy to celebrate the historic nature of the election:

I want them to know that right after the election, Republicans who had campaigned strongly against Barack Obama were interviewed everywhere right after the election saying, 'I'm so proud of my country.' You know, regardless of the differences over issues and politics, this was a watershed election that really...just everyone a feeling of great pride in our nation's ability to transcend our past and redeem the revolutionary promise of our Declaration of Independence that every human being is created equal. It's electrifying to redeem that declaration.

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The GOP Civil War Begins
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on November 5, 2008 at 4:12 PM.

The morning after the election has brought an opening salvo in what could become a contentious battle of recriminations for the GOP, as various factions lay blame and beg for immunity in what has been, since 2004, a slow disintegration of their power in Washington. Just after noon, House Republicans feathers began to ruffle, as it was reported that Majority Leader John Boehner released a letter to his colleagues, officially asking to retain his job:

I'm deeply disappointed by the outcome of Tuesday's election. But I'm equally committed to building a lasting majority on the reform principles that define us and inspire our citizens. For this reason, I'm writing today to announce my candidacy for Republican Leader in the 111th Congress, and to request the honor of your vote.

As your Leader, I've worked tirelessly for our team, and tried to lead by example. I'll always be straight with you, and I'll always be open to your ideas. You deserve nothing less. I can't ask for the best from you unless I'm willing to give it myself.

Winning the majority and rebuilding our party will require the best from all of us. But this is not unfamiliar territory. We've faced and overcome these challenges before, and working together as a bold, unified, and energetic team, we'll do it again.

I'm ready to get started today. I'm confident you are too. I look forward to speaking with you in person and outlining our plans for the future. It's time for the losing to stop. And my commitment to you is that it will.

I humbly ask for your support and the privilege of serving as House Republican Leader in the next Congress.

It's probably no coincidence that around the same time, word got out that Virginia Representative Eric Cantor was gunning to replace Roy Blunt as House Whip. Honestly, it's hard to see how any of the GOP leadership in the House survives -- these were the people who went schizo on the bailout bill, pinning their lack of support to the 5,437th instance of Nancy Pelosi criticizing George Bush, after all. And, who can forget their brilliant plan to center their re-election hopes around a slogan stolen from an anti-depressant?

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Don't Read Too Much into Exit Polls
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on November 4, 2008 at 2:14 PM.

In a matter of hours, you are going to start hearing talk of exit polls.

But, before you get ahead of yourself, there's a question that needs to be asked: Should you trust the exit polling data? The short answer is: No. The longer answer is: Noooooooooooo. Right now, if there's one memory that remains -- stinging -- to a nation of Democratic voters it's the memory of a slate of crazy Kerry-leaning exit polls that made it look like Bush was going down to defeat at about 4:30pm on Election Day. It didn't turn out that way.

Marc Ambinder sums up the exit poll phenomena, thusly: First - "anyone who claims to have exit poll data before then is either lying or has really, really good sources." Second - "The problem with the exit polls has never really been a problem with the exit polls. They've been a problem with people incorrectly interpreting the exit polls; people who don't know what the exit polls actually are." I think that this is more or less true. Exit polls could be astoundingly accurate or terrifyingly wrong, but either way, there's one thing that everyone who pimps them has in common: none of them really have any idea what they are talking about.

Nate Silver, the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com, has a very good primer on exit polling up on his site that's worth a long look, but to summarize: exit polls have a much larger margin of error than regular polls, they tend to skew to the Democratic candidate, they proved to be really bad predictors this year, they actually miss a ton of voters, and, ultimately, they can never be reliably sourced. (Believe it or not, I ran across a website yesterday that purported to have exit poll data!)

So, if you must indulge in exit polling data, feel free. Accept it as another part of the election scenery, and do not put a lot of stock -- or pin too many of your hopes -- to these results. I cannot caveat this emptor enough, people.

Republicans Draw the Line: If You're Against Palin, You're Dead to the Party
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on October 28, 2008 at 4:24 AM.

With the GOP looking more and more set to fracture as the possibility of electoral defeat looms, the cannibals' knives are out. Consider this quote, via Yglesias:

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as "cocktail party conservatives" who "give aid and comfort to the enemy".

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"

Hold it now. They're serious about going all in with the Palin loyalty test? Uhm...apparently so! Nuzzo adds:

He said: "Win or lose, there is a ready made conservative candidate waiting in the wings. Sarah Palin is not the new Iain Duncan Smith, she is the new Ronald Reagan."

Yowee. So, for the sake of Sarah Palin -- who many conservatives correctly assessed as the candidate-born-yesterday -- a whole slew of Republicans-in-good-standing are going to be thrown under the bus? That's a serious civil war, or rather, a war betwixt the Serious and the Un-Serious. Keep in mind that Palin's critics are not marginal figures in the conservative movement. We're talking the aforementioned Brooks and Noonan and Frum, and we're adding Christopher Buckley, George Will, Kathleen Parker, Colin Powell, Charles Krauthammer, Matthew Dowd, and for the sake of argument, we'll throw in Chuck Hagel, Andrew Sullivan, and Christopher Hitchens, even though I hesitate to pin any of them to any sort of doctrinaire conservative group.

This is, indeed, a "bloodbath," and for what? A distinctly semi-pro Alaskan governor who's more or less made the charisma-free Tim Pawlenty look like What Could Have Been?

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Jon Stewart Clarifies Palin Remarks, Expands To 'F%ck All Y'All'
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on October 21, 2008 at 12:29 PM.

Earlier this week, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, performing at Northeastern University in Boston, criticized Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for making divisive remarks, saying, "She said that small towns, that's the part of the country she really likes going to because that's the pro-America part of the country. You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly: fuck you." Since then, a few more hobos hopped aboard the hate-America bandwagon -- Nancy Pfotenhauer insisted that Northern Virginia was not part of a "real Virginia" (despite being the economic driver of the entire state), and Michelle Bachmann (who is basically a nonsense-spewing twit whose electoral success is among the world's most enduring mysteries) went on Hardball to call for a Congress-wide witch hunt for people who didn't measure up to her standard of patriotism.

Early in the show, Stewart lambasted the general divisive sentiment that pits small towns against big cities, alluding to the fact that 9/11's "ground zero" happened to be godless and elite New York City and "Communist Country/Fake Virginia" Arlington County. But at the end of the show, Stewart went back to reference his remarks at Northeastern, to make his point more broadly.

"We're all a little chafed here about this whole 'some parts of the country are real and American' and other parts are not. This weekend I was performing at Northeastern and I just read the statement that Sarah Palin had made about the 'pro-American' parts of the country and I...in response to that, I think I might have said, you know, 'Fuck you!' That's just my way of saying that I think that's a profanity to say, and I was answering with a profanity. But it's not really fair, and it makes it seem like I'm just addressing Governor Palin about this, and I'm not, it's just this whole entire theme that there's more American areas, or some people love the country, some people don't. So what I meant to say is, 'Fuck all y'all.'"

(More video after the flip)

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Bill O'Reilly's Winning Strategy For McCain: Make Loud Noises!
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on October 9, 2008 at 7:29 AM.

As a measure of just how ridiculous the discourse has gotten, let's consider this portion of the O'Reilly Factor. In it, Karl Rove is trying to suggest that it's important for John McCain to present his record alongside Barack Obama's, so that the voters can make their own decisions on the two candidates. Now, let's allow that when Rove suggests a "side-by-side comparison," that comes freighted with all the typical, misleading, "Rovian" stuff. Leaving that aside, Rove actually comes off as the sane, sober partner to this discussion, because O'Reilly's suggestion? To "elevate" McCain? To "transcend politics?" It's to engage in crazyfaced, nonsensical rantings, much in the same way that O'Reilly did with Barney Frank last week.

[WATCH.]

"It was a face! It was a villain! It was Frank vs. O'Reilly!" O'Reilly says, angling for the Peabody Award For Historic Achievement in Journalistic Lycanthropy.

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Maureen Dowd Reacts to Being Tossed From McCain Plane
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on October 1, 2008 at 2:01 PM.

Earlier this week, we learned that the McCain campaign had barred New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd from traveling on their plane, stranding her at an airport hotel in Pittsburgh as McCain's pool of reporters wended their way on without her ready skill at alliteration and musical theater references. Since then, Dowd has had the opportunity to respond:

"I had had a great relationship with John McCain for 16 years, through columns he liked and didn't like. So at first I thought it was a mistake and doublechecked with the press office. They said I was banned from both planes for 'the foreseeable future.' Then [McCain spokeswoman] Nicolle Wallace was gloating about it to reporters on the Palin plane," Dowd wrote in an email.

"It was disappointing because I didn't think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney."

Actually, I'd say McCain is being far more "dismissive" than Cheney. After all, nothing gave Adam Clymer as much cachet as being known as the press corps' "Major League Asshole of 2000." That's BIG TIME.

MoveOn Goes After Brokaw for Citing False Polling
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on September 30, 2008 at 1:01 PM.

On last Sunday's Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw closed down the show's Battle of the Campaign Flacks by deflecting the crux of David Axelrod's Iraq-judgement argument with poll numbers that he had at the ready:

MR. AXELROD: What has happened is, as Senator Obama predicted from the beginning, that we got distracted in Iraq and now Osama bin Laden, who was the person who attacked the United States, killed 3,000 American citizens, is now resurgent. He is stronger. And that's the result of the misbegotten decision of John McCain. And he stubbornly wants to continue, even as the Iraqis won't take responsibility, sitting on $79 billion of their own surplus while we spend $10 billion a month. It doesn't make sense. We can't take more of the same, Steve.

MR. BROKAW: In fairness to everybody here, I'm just going to end on one note, and that is that we continue to poll on who's best equipped to be commander in chief, and John McCain continues to lead in that category despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

[WATCH.]

These numbers sure seemed to blunt Axelrod's argument, but they also seemed to run counter to the polling taken immediately following the "foreign policy debate," in which result after result - in a manner confounding to the press, who initially had settled into the stance that the debate was a "tie" or a slight edge to Senator John McCain (not without exceptions) - indicated that the viewing public favored Senator Barack Obama's performance in the debate. As it turns out, those numbers weren't made up out of whole cloth, but they were certainly out of date.

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NH Newspaper 'Suspends' Writing Editorials to Focus on Economy
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on September 30, 2008 at 2:01 AM.

Okay. Once you get your head around a week in our political lives, during which:

• The first presidential debate was nearly scuttled
• By the candidate who was prepared to decree himself the winner before the debate had even happened
• Indeed, before anyone was certain that the candidate was even going to participate in the debate
• Due to the fact that candidate had announced a "suspension" of his campaign
• (A decision that he never followed through on)
• To help along the legislative process in the ongoing financial bailout wranglings
• (A process to which he ended up contributing nothing)
• (And which he didn't return to work on after the debate had ended)
• Finally to "resuming" a campaign that was never suspended.

The only sensible thing to do is the emulate the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel, who write:

We have decided to suspend our editorial activities today so we can adequately ponder the implications of the economic bailout program.

These are the smartest people in the political press, by far.

The Dirty Secret of the Bailout That No One Is Talking About
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on September 22, 2008 at 1:01 PM.

A critical - and radical - component of the bailout package proposed by the Bush administration has thus far failed to garner the serious attention of anyone in the press. Section 8 (which ironically reminds one of the popular name of the portion of the 1937 Housing Act that paved the way for subsidized affordable housing ) of this legislation is just a single sentence of thirty-two words, but it represents a significant consolidation of power and an abdication of oversight authority that's so flat-out astounding that it ought to set one's hair on fire. It reads, in its entirety:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

In short, the so-called "mother of all bailouts," which will transfer $700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the distressed assets of several failed financial institutions, will be conducted in a manner unchallengeable by courts and ungovernable by the People's duly sworn representatives. All decision-making power will be consolidated into the Executive Branch - who, we remind you, will have the incentive to act upon this privilege as quickly as possible, before they leave office. The measure will run up the budget deficit by a significant amount, with no guarantee of recouping the outlay, and no fundamental means of holding those who fail to do so accountable.

Is this starting to sound familiar? Robert Kuttner cuts through much of the gloss in an article in today's American Prospect:

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McCain's Latest Attack Ad: Starring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears?!
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on July 30, 2008 at 11:57 AM.

There's a fine line between smart and clever, and a similar border between clever and stupid, and John McCain's campaign ads keep on standing on all the wrong sides. In their desperate attempts to undo the success of the overseas trip that would probably have never happened if the McCain campaign hadn't dared the Obama team to take it in the first place, McCain's ad people have decided to attempt to try to play Obama's popularity as a bad thing - comparing the candidate to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. (Which is of real benefit to Spears and Hilton!)

But even beyond the numb-nutted concept behind this ad, look at all the things that are tactically wrong with it. First, it just reinforces Obama's brand as one with worldwide appeal. Second, it's, like, McCain's FOURTH ad that announces that Obama supports a sensible stance against offshore drilling - which isn't popular in states McCain needs to win, like Florida, and which McCain himself even admits would only have a "psychological" impact on the economy. Third, you don't even know it's a McCain ad until he shows up, approving it at the end!

(Catch the video on the flip!)

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New York Times Spares McCain Embarrassment By Rejecting Op-Ed
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on July 21, 2008 at 4:03 PM.

As anyone who hasn't been living under a boulder knows by now, John McCain has always enjoyed an extra-special relationship with the press, who care for the Presidential nominee as one might nurture an orphaned lamb, doing him no end of solids. For example, even though Barack Obama has consistently led in the polls since clinching the Democratic nomination, we are told that this is Good For McCain, because according to something written on the Ancient and Illuminated Manuscript of Press Corps Conventional Wisdom, Obama should be leading by more, and his waste should smell like Springtime in Vermont. Also, when McCain visits Europe, it burnishes his Presidential pedigree, but if Obama does so, it makes him look un-American.

Now, however, the McCain camp is angry at their special friend, specifically the New York Times, because the paper of record spiked an op-ed column that McCain had prepared in response to a similar offering from Obama. McCain's surrogates are flush with outrage over this. But I've now read the piece, and it's pretty clear to me that the Times' decision, if anything, is in keeping with the press' traditional friendly relationship. The Times put bros before prose, and in so doing, spared McCain no end of embarrassment, because the op-ed is rivetingly dumb and laden with inaccuracies. None of which would have come to my attention if the candidate had done the smart thing and kept his mouth shut! But since he wants the attention, let's give it to him.

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Fox's Sean Hannity Confronted Over Relationship with Neo-Nazi Hal Turner
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on March 24, 2008 at 6:03 AM.

The folks over at NewsHounds have been watching their Fox News Channel quarry dither over Senator Barack Obama's associations with pastor Jeremiah Wright, and noted Fox's own Sean Hannity getting himself tripped up in the guilt-by-association tango. Seems that one of Hannity's close chums is a neo-Nazi named Hal Turner who used to be a radio host, is apparently the top man in Bergen, NJ white-supremacist circles, and probably spends a lot of his time in his basement with Star Wars action figures acting out Holocaust-denier versions of The Return of the Jedi. In short, just the sort of person with whom you'd imagine Sean Hannity spends a lot of formational time with.

Anyway, a few days ago, Hannity brought Malik Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party on the show. Shabazz and his organization had previously chosen to endorse Barack Obama, who subsequently rejected the endorsement. It was up to Hannity to make some hay out of this, but the tables got turned very quickly. From NewsHounds:

Hannity added, "What I don't think you're understanding here, Malik, is that when you hear the minister of him for 20 years, when you hear the associations with Louis Farrakhan, one of the biggest racists and anti-Semites in the country, what you're not understanding is, America hears extremism at its worst."

Shabazz responded, "Let me ask you this. Are you to be judged by your promotion and association with Hal Turner?"

Hannity waved his arm around. "I don't know anybody named - this is nonsense. I don't..." Then Hannity changed his tune. "Sir, sir... That was a man that was banned from my radio show ten years ago, that ran a Senate campaign in New Jersey."

Then, as Shabazz refused to stop talking or back down, Hannity, in a tacit admission, said, "I'm not running for president."

"A neo Nazi, you backed his career," Shabazz said.

Hannity answered, "That is an absolute, positive, lie and you've been reading the wrong websites..., my friend. Good try."

Well, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary (Max Blumenthal's piece in Nation is good for a start), but it hardly matters, because don't you know, days later, Turner himself was doing his pal a total solid by coming out and stating, "Oh, yeah! We're best of buds!"

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MSNBC Hosts Founder of Anti-Hillary Group Called "C.U.N.T."
Posted by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post on February 19, 2008 at 10:15 AM.

As is his wont, the little watched and seldom heeded Tucker Carlson continued to pursue his "hurt America" agenda last night on MSNBC, when he once again invited the so-called wisdom of "legendary Republican strategist" Roger Stone. The topic: how would Republicans take the attack to the Democratic nominee?

There wasn't anything particularly groundbreaking to Stone's analysis: whoever the nominee would be would end up being painted as a liberal, George McGovern would be invoked, and of course, the wild insinuation that voting Democrat is a de facto death sentence for the nation at the hands of jihadists would be made. Along the way, Stone got to call Hillary Clinton a "hack" who "believes in virtually nothing," and, with regards to Obama, Stone got to raise the specter of "assassination." Real authoritative, responsible stuff!

Nevertheless, the stunning disingenuousness of the conversation was enough to inspire a fountain of gorge. How will Republicans attack the candidates? Well, in the specific instance of Roger Stone, the answer is: start a juvenile, anti-Hillary 527 organization themed around a vulgar term for female genitalia (cf. Jane Fonda). That any credible news organization can continue to give wide audience to Stone's wisdom without disclosing his involvement in the campaign season's most brazen obscenity is beyond reason.

Ironically, the one employee at MSNBC who's evinced a willingness to challenge Stone on this regard is David Shuster. The cable news network was without his services last night.