Chris Lehmann
Articles by Chris Lehmann
Podhoretz and His Poxy Pals! Decoding the Neocon Cabal
Jan. 11th, 2008, 1:04 pm

more egregiously mistaken about
a wider range of policy issues
than any pundit in our time.
THEY KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT: THE RISE OF THE NEOCONS
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday, 319 pages, $26
The wizards of modern brand management have nothing on the obstreperous group of warrior intellectuals known as the neoconservatives. After all, the neocon movement is closing in on its fifth decade (its precise date of origin, like many of its core doctrines and streams of influence, remains maddeningly elusive)—but it still retains a prefix that signifies novelty. And like a good viral marketing campaign, the brand seems to have a knack for being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere: Here inveighing against the excesses of 60’s-era black nationalism and student radicalism, there cozying up to the culture-war broadsides of the Christian right—and of course, most notoriously, stage-managing the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, in smug defiance of reliable intelligence reports, international law and coherent policy making. read more »
Another Bush Legacy: The Powder Keg in Pakistan
Jan. 1st, 2008, 4:17 pm
As the bromides and bunkum of primary season lurch into caucus-eve overdrive in Iowa, the rest of the world has upstaged the election-addled news cycle. A new Osama bin Laden video, a Colombian hostage crisis and—most of all—the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto have made weary onlookers newly aware that there will be a long, grave to-do list awaiting whichever candidate prevails in the cartoonish 2008 presidential race.
Bhutto’s death marks the most sobering setback for the U.S. read more »
Swamp Things: Pelosi’s Bench Rolls Over on Iraq
Dec. 18th, 2007, 3:31 pm
Gullible voters keen to treat the onset of the 2008 primary season as a hale sign of life in the American democratic system had best avert their gaze from Capitol Hill this week. For as Congress winds down the year’s business with earmark-laden appropriations bills and unsightly cave-ins to Bush prerogative after Bush prerogative, the governing metaphor is not the campaign scene’s notorious horse race—something that, for all its by-the-numbers familiarity, at least connotes forward motion. read more »
Can a Fractured G.O.P. Split the Difference With Huckabee?
Dec. 5th, 2007, 12:50 am
It used to be such a simple thing for Republican candidates to position themselves as modern conservative leaders of the faith.
You’d make coy campaign overtures to religious denominations that couldn’t officially endorse you. Point at the lurid God-baiting work of a liberal pop culture, a liberal media and a liberal university scene. Hotly denounce the activist courts, and their bids to treat abortion and euthanasia as counterculture party favors, while de-Christianizing the schools and the public square. Introduce symbolic variations as needed: NEA-funded blasphemies in the museums, gay marriage as mortal threat to civilization, secular tolerance as coddling of “Islamofascists,” the special Congressional session on the Terri Schiavo case, the “war on Christmas,” etc. read more »
Bush Speechwriter Flogs Horse, Re-fights the Culture Wars
Dec. 4th, 2007, 10:49 am
For George W. Bush, “the speech was the thing,” writes Michael Gerson. “He used major speeches to push his own policy processes for new ideas; to clarify his thinking as he edited; to announce his commitments in serious detail; and to drive the news of the day.”
Like much of the fawning insider anecdotage collected in Mr. Gerson’s new book—indeed, like the book’s sonorous title—this sounds at first like an agreeable virtue, until you start to consider just what the writer is actually saying. What, for example, does it mean to “push … policy processes” in the hope of fleshing out new ideas? Shouldn’t the ideas be in place before policy processes are pushed, so that the pushers have a basic sense of what they’re up to? Shouldn’t the time for clear thinking come before a chief executive edits, not as he careens through the text with his blue pencil? read more »
Why Is 2008’s Winning Party Playing It So Safe?
Nov. 20th, 2007, 4:07 pm
The Democratic primary field seems to operate under a hidden dictum of reverse momentum: Anytime the battle for early advantage in the race tightens, the actual content of the struggle goes slack. read more »
Shifty Hillary Versus Authentic Obama
Nov. 6th, 2007, 4:24 pm
Mr. Obama is obviously up to mounting a much more content-driven appeal to voters—and has indeed been admirably direct in developing one in the “retail politics” forums of Iowa and New Hampshire. read more »
Power Speaking to Power: How Christians Are Reshaping America
Nov. 6th, 2007, 2:23 pm
Faith in the Halls of Power, Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay’s new study, demonstrates that evangelical believers have gradually stockpiled influence in four major arenas of American life: national politics, higher education, the entertainment industry and the business world. read more »
Plame Book Reveals Imperial Washington
Oct. 23rd, 2007, 3:30 pm
Valerie Plame Wilson's Fair Game speaks volumes about how business is done among the lords of Washington consensus. The native dialect of journalists at the court society of the Bush administration is the argot of the deal. read more »
Someone Tell the Pundits: Polls Are Piffle
Oct. 9th, 2007, 2:48 pm
It was like watching a mechanical rabbit spring onto the rail of a greyhound track: Over the weekend, the Des Moines Register reported the results of an October poll showing Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton pulling away from her two main competitors for the Hawkeye State’s January caucus vote. read more »
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Rudy
Sep. 25th, 2007, 3:46 pm
It’s certainly no news to New Yorkers that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a taste for the theatrical. read more »
The G.O.P.’s Ed Gillespie: How to Sell a Surge
Sep. 11th, 2007, 3:43 pm
The most vital propaganda arm of the surge is largely the handiwork of former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie. read more »
Bedtime for Gonzo
Aug. 28th, 2007, 7:27 am
'Where's Ed Levi now that we need him?' read more »
Rove and the Seductions of Civilian Life
Aug. 14th, 2007, 3:23 pm
It’s true that August is a bad time for a product launch, as Andy Card famously said of the American invasion of Iraq. read more »
YouBoobs: Hillary and Obama’s Silly Squabble
Jul. 31st, 2007, 4:35 pm
All the conspicuous alarm over the first-ever YouTube presidential debate becoming terminally inane now seems quite overblown. read more »
Cheney Undisclosed: Flattering Biography Never Lifts the Veil
Jul. 31st, 2007, 2:39 pm
For all the author’s heroic mike-pointing, he delivers at best a two-dimensional portrait of a genuinely complicated statesman. read more »
Rudy Takes the Lead From … Nobody
Jul. 17th, 2007, 7:13 pm
Mr. Giuliani has won both the polls and the money sweepstakes by default. read more »
Libby at Liberty!
Jul. 4th, 2007, 7:02 am
Commutations come with quite explicit guidelines of their own – promulgated by the department of Justice back in the days before it became a Rove-branded house of patronage and prosecutions to solidify G.O.P. tactics of voter suppression. read more »
Parsing Obama’s ‘Punjab’ Flub
Jun. 19th, 2007, 3:34 pm
The Democratic primary field can’t seem to go about the basic business of negative campaigning without generating unruly heaps of sanctimony on all sides. read more »
This One Isn’t for the Gipper
Jun. 5th, 2007, 4:18 pm
Here’s one simple measure of how out of sorts the Republican Party is these days: Nearly all of its aspirants to the 2008 Presidential nomination are keen to brand themselves in the image of Ronald Reagan—the only G.O.P. President of the postwar age to remain popular for two full terms in office. But candidates find themselves tip-toeing around his immigration policy. read more »
Onward, Christian Soldier
May. 29th, 2007, 9:19 pm
Carl Bernstein traces the evolving religious commitment of a politician partial to triangulation. read more »
The Fault, Dear Al, Is Not in the Media ...
May. 29th, 2007, 1:25 pm
If anyone has the right to fulminate on the irrationality of American political debate, it’s Al Gore. read more »
Alberto Gonzales’ Zombie Hut
May. 22nd, 2007, 4:49 pm
In virtually any other Presidency, Alberto Gonzales—a clumsy prevaricator, a talentless hack and a dangerously indifferent advocate of the rule of law—would be a dead man walking. In the Bush White House, though, he is the walking dead—a curiously lifeless drone who seems to draw strength from the leadership vacuum surrounding him. read more »
The Pentagon’s Shortsighted Milblogger Crack-down
May. 8th, 2007, 4:12 pm
A new set of OpSec (operational security) directives that the Army promulgated last month seem likely to severely limit active-duty blogging. read more »
Playing the Palace
Apr. 24th, 2007, 6:19 pm
Hey! Rich Little Routine Was Really Savage, Brechtian. read more »
The Global War on Words
Apr. 15th, 2007, 8:00 pm
The Pleasurers of the President
Apr. 1st, 2007, 8:00 pm
Wit and Sharp Argument Skewer a Damaging Euphemism
Jan. 28th, 2007, 8:00 pm

Disciplined Politician Dispenses Tough Love
Nov. 12th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Disciplined Politician Dispenses Tough Love
Nov. 12th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Angry Data Nerds Rain on Democratic Parade
Oct. 22nd, 2006, 8:00 pm
Angry Data Nerds Rain on Democratic Parade
Oct. 22nd, 2006, 8:00 pm
Moral Clarity Dissolves In Foley Affair
Oct. 8th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Moral Clarity Dissolves In Foley Affair
Oct. 8th, 2006, 8:00 pm
The Gaud That Failed: A Tour of New Jack City
Oct. 1st, 2006, 8:00 pm
The Gaud That Failed: A Tour of New Jack City
Oct. 1st, 2006, 8:00 pm
Let the Buyer Beware: Rich Rates Bush’s Blarney
Sep. 24th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Let the Buyer Beware: Rich Rates Bush's Blarney
Sep. 24th, 2006, 8:00 pm
The Smarmies of the Night
May. 7th, 2006, 8:00 pm
The Smarmies of the Night
May. 7th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Crisis at the Ballot Box— Good Fuel for Political Satire
Apr. 23rd, 2006, 8:00 pm
Crisis at the Ballot Box- Good Fuel for Political Satire
Apr. 23rd, 2006, 8:00 pm
Tick-Tock of Ford’s Debut, The Blot of Nixon’s Pardon
Apr. 16th, 2006, 8:00 pm

Tick-Tock of Ford's Debut, The Blot of Nixon's Pardon
Apr. 16th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Russ Never Sleeps
Mar. 26th, 2006, 8:00 pm
A Briefly Brilliant Editor, And His Long, Slow Twilight
Mar. 12th, 2006, 8:00 pm
A Briefly Brilliant Editor, And His Long, Slow Twilight
Mar. 12th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Bush Flickers Out, Republicans Face Mass Hibernation
Feb. 12th, 2006, 8:00 pm
Bush Flickers Out, Republicans Face Mass Hibernation
Feb. 12th, 2006, 8:00 pm
It’s for Your Own Good! Tapping, Torturing and Secrets
Dec. 25th, 2005, 8:00 pm
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