non-smug dem politics sites

list them here.

ezra klein
538
dailyhowler

... starting to be at a loss after this. washingmonthly, digby, talkingpointsmemo, atrios - they all make my skin fucking crawl these days, just so full of self-congratulatory, put-downy bullshit. i don't recall them always being this way, but maybe they were?

yglesias? thinkprogress? krugmans blog is OK. ackerman?

a couple of the TNR blogs are good--chait is OK on anything besides israel and marty peretz. cohen for healthcare.

does glenn greenwald count as smug? hes kind of shrill and very self-righteous but he keeps me honest re: my obama standom.

kevin drum is good but might be 'smug.'

brad delong isnt 'liberal' per se but democratic-ish.

drum is ok but has become utterly unremarkable to me - he covers everything like two days after it's happened and says pretty much the same things as everyone else, just "nicer". he's like the bob herbert of the dem blog world.

greenwald is in a class of his own - he's beyond smug, every post is in some kind of righteous fury mode. i imagine him ordering a suboptimal cappucino: "That these so-called baristas can hand me this dishwater with smiles on their faces is simply astonishing. They have had every chance to make my coffee correctly, and at every turn have chosen not to. UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out that better coffee can be had two blocks away, at Venetia. These readers miss the point, which is not that good coffee may be had at some other establishment, but that this coffee, in this establishment is presented as good yet is clearly, to anyone who bothers paying even cursory attention, not."

i will check out the others you mention

loool

yeah the greenwald moment a week ago when he decided that all these rahm profiles were obamas secret way of apologizing to the DC establishment for not being centrist was... interesting

greg sargent

yglesias is appealingly wonky in the ezra klein-y way but can be kind of irritating.

ackerman is great about nat'l security/defense, but sometimes he writes about 90s hardcore and i want to delete his blog from the internet.

political(ish) blogz currently in my bookmark bar:
tpm
gawker
yglesias
ezra klein
538
ta-nehisi-coates
wonkete

memeorandum is pretty unsmug cause u know its a computer

yeah i wasnt sure if i should mention tnc's blawg which i dig but is only like 40% politics (30% race, 10% personal, 10% world of warcraft, 10% dallas cowboys)

klein is a little bit too stuck inside conventional wisdom for me a lot of the time tbh, even though i like him because he tries to play it straight insted of fawn and preen. as an example, a recent column of his looked at how to control health care costs. he makes a big distinction between this and spending, though the two are quite inter-related, of course (if i spend money on the big vat of mayonnaise at wal-mart, it will cost less than if i spend money on two jars that are each half the size).

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/modest_far-reaching_cost_contr.html

Cutting health-care costs is hard. And it needs to be distinguished from simply capping spending. When liberals say that single-payer will save a bazillion dollars, or conservatives point to Paul Ryan's plan and say that will save a bazillion dollars, they're talking about capping spending. Liberals do it on the provider side, saying that government will only pay so much for medical services people need, and the system will just have to adjust. Conservatives do it on the consumer side, saying that government will only give individuals so much for the coverage they need, and if that proves insufficient, then tough.

ezra certainly sounds like he's bought into the idea that single-payer or nationalized healthcare is mainly characterized by "rationing". which is a shame, because it makes me sort of not trust him about the other stuff.

really? i dont get that from the excerpt you quoted?

pretty sure klein has many times stated his preference for single payer - in the case of that post i think he was just referring to some of the sky high saving estimates one sees bandied abt from time to time to make a particular point

ackerman is great about nat'l security/defense, but sometimes he writes about 90s hardcore and i want to delete his blog from the internet.

― max, Wednesday, 10 March 2010 13:39 (11 minutes ago)

the fuck, man?? this is awesome. i'm not a hardcore dude at all, i'm just impressed. like, whenever the 3rd in command for policy under mccrystal lets go a press release with the words "strength of our institutions" in it, yup, here's a youtube of someone shouting INSTITUTIONAL STRENGTH!!!

klein and yglesias' taste in music is way way way worse

loool @ greenwald's cappuccino btw

ackerman needs to get off fire dog lake asap, place is an offense to humanity and good taste

and yes if theres a piece of advice i would give dork political bloggers its 'dont post abt music'

haha i think its embarrassment abt being a recovering NJ hardcore kid myself

its not that hes clueless, its just... dont talk about that shit man im trying to forget that i spent hours writing minor threat lyrics on my converse all-stars

aww

digby, talkingpointsmemo, atrios - they all make my skin fucking crawl these days, just so full of self-congratulatory, put-downy bullshit. i don't recall them always being this way, but maybe they were?

.........

greenwald is in a class of his own - he's beyond smug, every post is in some kind of righteous fury mode.

I'm not sure what you guys want – grace and class? Anytime you inveigh against hypocrisy, you risk looking smug. Deal with it.

When I find Greenwald's tone too shrill, I simply don't read him that day. On just about ever issue since 2005 he's been right, and blessedly devoid of hero and power worship.

greenwald is kinda funny in that hes generally right abt issues, but clueless regarding ~reality~ - hes 100% self-righteously pissed-off and his pieces are way too long - hes at his best when writing abt the law, but he prefers to bitch abt cable news dudes - almost never read him anymore

is greenwald gay? sullivan said he lives in brazil cos his partner is HIV positive, is that even true?

i feel like i'm asking if the popular girl got a nosejob or not...

"Reality" = not picking on cable news dudes.

Yes, Greenwald is gay and lives in Brazil.

u r fired as my post summarizer

lol i had no idea greenwald lived in brazil, does he ever talk abt that

u can almost hear the samba when u read his posts

hey greewald why dont u complain abt 'brazil' then, fuckin trader

Unless something's changed since 2006:

A recent and now-widespread claim is that I don't live in the United States, but in Brazil. I'm an expatriate. My book should be called "How Would an Expatriate Act"?

Other than a 9 month period after college when I lived in Europe, I've lived in the United States my entire life. My partner is Brazilian and is a citizen of Brazil.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/response-to-right-wing-personal.html

I'm reminded of some of the posts on the Tim Russert RIP thread. It's worth mentioning how many of these Washington correspondents have Bloody Marys at Cokie and Liz Cheney's on Sundays. If Digby and Greenwald have a theme around which their righteousness coheres, it's the grisly relationship between social intimacy and public policy, and how disastrous it's been for the US in the last nine years.

and it's worth something that Greenwald's columns are circulated around the White House by staffers.

just cause something is bad doesnt mean one should have an aneurysm in print over it, i personally relate to a more measured tone is all and would hate to see how glen greewald reacts when someone eats all his favorite cereal

What's measured – taking you to the back and sucking your dick?

http://www.rdogs.de/Blue2.jpg

the back of brazil

I'd just like to thank everybody who's ever spoken to me in a measured tone

no no of course greenwald's (almost) always right, and inbetween the righteous blowharding it's possible to learn lots of interesting stuff, but his problem is the same as with chomsky, that other guy who's always right - he appears to believe the world is divided into three groups: evil machinators who are intent on destroying the universe; imbeciles whose intellectual sloth makes them complicit; and them

just on a stylistic level--its difficult to read 10 800-wd screeds a week, even if i agree with all of them

he appears to believe the world is divided into three groups: evil machinators who are intent on destroying the universe; imbeciles whose intellectual sloth makes them complicit; and them

Well, again, what's "reality" – what the Rahm claque says it is? A scold isn't supposed to be nice. Since we have no reason to trust politicians, even the ones we voted for, why give them the benefit of the doubt (and, to be fair, in the first few months of Obama's term Greenwald said "wait and see" many times).

really dont think i should be forced to choose between greenwald and rahm re reality, theyre both so appealing

greenwald is harsh but fair to obama and the administration.

but hes also always 100% convinced of his correctness, which, regardless of whether or not its true, is grating--when he waded into the health-care debate defending jane hamsher he was like super irritating and not convincing

i like my bloggers to have a little bit of self-doubt which is why ackerman and klein and tnc are appealing. yglesias can have a little bit of the "im always right" feeling.

Just imagine them in a bar arguing about the tab.

kind of a funny side effect of greenwaldian tendencies on the left is that republicans are more powerful than democrats - it took like 6 years for the right to start hating bush and he was the biggest fuck up ever - now just to be clear im not at all telling greenwald et al to get in line and fight the war - i believe people should follow their hearts - but it is an interesting structural phenomenon in our political setup that the left is much more willing to eat its own

yeah don't think Greenwald fits into the non smug category

I'm sometimes glad for the banalities that TPM and Drudge turn into stories. Today's example: John Roberts' comments, which will dominate the cable talk shows this morning and get health care out of the pundits' heads for twenty-four hours.

btw if "smug" in this context means: "I know I'm right because here are the facts," how is that annoying?

wait, TNC blogs about WoW???????

lol

oh fuck you fdb

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/04/12/the-truth-is-good-enough-again/

has the needle swung back on non-smug dem politics sites?

it started years ago obvs (this was an early example) but the backlash against all the sites named by max in the first post in this thread (ezra, yglesias, nate silver, krugman) now feels in full force. are they victims of their own success, or is this some broader political drift? was the creation of vox as frankenstein clickbait wonkblog monster the turning point, churning out wikipedia-citing low-quality ezra & matt clones with daily Hilarious blunders? did these guys only seem like a breath of fresh air during the immediate aftermath of peak-smug era under GWB?

do ppl favour the left aggro-smug style of writers like sean mcelwee, adam johnson now? i personally hate their headlines & tweets, but they're still worth reading. freddie deboer isn't really a journo and doesn't seem to cover politics per se so much as twitter leftists and social justice on elite campuses, but i feel like we're all unified in hatred of him

or maybe this was all just the dem primary driving everyone crazy

i think of yglesias, ezra, silver, etc techno-liberal bloggers, as distinct from freddie deboer who i think of as more in jacobin, corey robin new [new?] left style - kinda where they are now is where a lot of these technolibs were before they all broke through -- mostly posting on private blogs, getting published here + there. i find them all pretty intolerable (nate silver is an exception - his crew i find are v good esp when they stick to what they're good at) but i prefer the technolibs to the neo-marxists. sometimes i read a jacobin article and i'm just like i cannot believe you are saying this, is this even for real or just an elaborate trolling?

counterpunch types the least tolerable of them all. intercept smug as fuck but does publish good stuff and has a broader / deeper interest than a lot of these US/West focused writers.

JACOBIN IS THE WORST

lol that tracer hand greenwald parody at the top is still straight fire 100%

interesting how "dem" in thread title now means "not republican" in the discussion

what would a Dem politics site burrow into, since they don't believe in anything?

dem is the title obv always was a loose term for the left from the get-go cf the greenwald discussion up-page and the fact that even moderate-lib writers like nate silver are not dnc apparatchiks but congratulations on getting the same post you've made over a thousand times over the last decade onto yet another thread big thumbs up dipshit

lol

move to a MOVE fire

come call me names IRL, boychick, you'll depart to campaign door-to-door for Jill Stein.

ezra klein's old wonkblog is still going at washingtonpost, and puts out interesting stuff! no star power, not too many of these mayfly 'explainers'

hey, they have a weekly Larry Summers op-ed, that's some starpower

i managed to not know that

i think the thing that has hurt the sites listed upthread a lot is being wrong on trump. being that wrong on something that important is going to hurt credibility hard.

i was wrong on trump, too so i guess i don't really mind that

idk like, last repub primary ever freakshow candidate had a couple weeks at the top of the polls before it reluctantly coalesced on romney. you would have seemed like such a fool predicting HERMAIN CAIN WILL WIN THIS. and it just seemed like trump was that again until he held his lead for so long it was obvious something was up

i was wrong on trump, too so i guess i don't really mind that

― de l'asshole (flopson)

everybody who wasn't a paranoid loon was wrong on trump, but for instance fivethirtyeight's schtick was based on their prognostications being based on EMPIRICAL DATA, so i think it hurts them more than it would your random "making shit up off the top of their head" prediction.

pretty much any leftist who writes harangues about liberals which appears to be an inexhaustible source of smugness online

crooked timber comments are so bad

corey robin is a buffoon: http://crookedtimber.org/2016/07/21/check-your-amnesia-dude-on-the-vox-generation-of-punditry/

He forgets to justify his comparison between presidential candidates bluffing the use of nuclear weapons, and the US Armed Forces historical posture towards nuclear weapons usage, with a presidential candidate threatening to renege on a treaty. If that comparison can be used without explanation you could use it for anything, anytime anyone points out that something in the modern world is frightening them.

Also since our current era hasn't led up to WW3 yet then it's silly to compare it to the era that led up to WW1
just ahistorical really, you poor kids

or like one comment points out, corey fundamentally misunderstands trump's critique. trump doesn't think the US is the wrong messenger for human rights bc of guantanamo bay and the NSA. he thinks the US is the wrong messenger bc we tolerate too much civil dissent and protesting. this is a severe failing as he ends up giving apologetics for a perspective that undermines robin's supposed essential principles.

been seriously creeped out/annoyed by the spectacle of certain "left" writers trying to look daring and insightful by trying to find ways to agree w/ donald trump, or praise him for saying things that, if taken out of context and stretched about, sound vaguely like things they might agree with

Yes, v much that. Also often same people trying to minimize concern about him by superficial comparison to other politicians and simply overlooking some of the worst things Trump has said.

Complacency -- so bold and iconoclastic.

most of the comments on that post are even stupider than the original post. i don't know why so many "radicals" are inclined to sneer at ppl who are quite rightly afraid of the possibility of someone as evil and empty-headed as donald trump becoming president, to the point where they're ready to find positive things lurking in trump's speeches (if you ignore all the racism and misogyny and lying), but i find it genuinely appalling and despicable, to the point where i doubt i'll ever take any of these writers seriously again

crooked timber comments are so bad

― Mordy, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 10:05 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

like what is robin even trying to accomplish by arguing that reagan in 1980 was just as bad as trump today? i hold no brief for reagan but reagan's cold war belligerence was not remotely in the same category as trump's most deranged proposals.

The only thing I agree with Donald Trump on is that is daughter is hot.

https://www.facebook.com/doug.henwood/posts/10153760830506475?pnref=story

one thing that gives me comfort is that if trump wins all these smug shitheads will suffer like the rest of us

The only thing I agree with Donald Trump on is that is daughter is hot.

― frogbs

like, sarah silverman hot or some lesser variety?

Henwood = awesome

Dan Savage, now there's a Clinton-cheerleading smug shithead

drudge sirens

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/08/18/thats-my-time/

Henwood = awesome

― The Hon. J. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Dr Morbius), Sunday, July 24, 2016 4:10 AM (3 weeks ago)

doug henwood is an idiot who actually tried to make "whitewater" a thing again in his stupid anti-hillary article from harper's a while back

wow

He's definitely not an idiot.

link? not that i don't trust ya

"wow"

I just always wanted to have guts and tell the truth, and I did my best at both. I can live with that.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary-2/

gimme the page, dude, i read that 20 months ago, and life is short (esp mine)

y'know, don't. I absolutely don't give a shit, all real estate is a cesspool, fuck private property.

if you can bear to get through henwood's summary of what happened, he basically says that hillary clinton didn't do anything wrong, and then blames her for being "secretive" about it

And then there were the scandals, many of them Hillary’s. The most famous was Whitewater, a word it pains me to type. Democrats love to say that there was nothing to that scandal. While it was certainly not the diabolical conspiracy Republicans made it out to be during the fevered days of the Clinton impeachment, it was not nothing. ...

But the Clintons, of course, were also investors in McDougal’s schemes. The fact that they appear to have lost money on Whitewater, and were never convicted of any criminal behavior in connection with the scandal, hardly excuses this farcical round-robin of ethical conflicts. Yet Whitewater itself is of far less interest than how Hillary handled it: with lies, half-truths, and secrecy.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary-2/7/

What an outrage, that cur Henwood.

You can hear the Clintons' presentational gears grinding like Meryl Streep's in midperformance, always.

Bill's a better actor than RoboStreep, give him that

I don't think "ethical conflicts" = "didn't do anything wrong"

I have next to no memory of the entire Whitewater affair! i have exit velocity, launch angle and other recent baseball metrics to store in this noggin, not to mention Robin Wood's critique of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as a queer text.

Bubba's hyperventilating at BLM was more like Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night

i read LGM every day but i could do without ever reading them on anything except current electoral politics and labor history ever again

case in point: erik loomis's occasional posts about a famous writer he's never read, but has opinions about:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/11/erik-visits-american-grave-part-360