By Kevin Baker 9/25/12 7:51pm

Shrinking Brain

Photoillo: Ed Johnson

The Unlikely Resurrection of Ralph Reed

What a relief it was to pick up my New York Times this Sunday and see that Damien really is back in town. I thought I’d spotted him at the Republican convention, felt sure I’d caught a whiff of sulfur when he passed, found myself swarmed by his usual entourage of flies. It would have been hard to miss him, since he was wearing a pink tie and a green plaid jacket at the time.

Yet I told myself I must be hallucinating under the relentless Tampa sun. Surely there was no way even today’s Republican party could have welcomed the Antichrist—a k a Ralph Reed—back into the ranks just six years after he imploded so spectacularly amid the Jack Abramoff scandals.

Reed, whose “preternaturally youthful” appearance, as the Times described it, still makes you think he must have “666” etched just above his brow line, got his start in the first heady days of the Reagan administration, when he was one member of what was known as the “triumvirate,” running the College Republican National Committee (CRNC), along with Mr. Abramoff and Grover Norquist. Read More

By Jonathan Liu 8/05/08 7:47pm

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
By Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books, 384 pages, $25

Call it the Thomas Frank Problem: Since What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2005), the journalist and polemicist has become a figure of irresolvable promise and consternation to the American left. Kansas, of course, put in straight and strident words what liberals Read More

By Staff, Staff 10/16/06 12:00am

An Author Responds

To the Editor:

I read with interest and some astonishment the error-filled and badly misleading review of my book Heist by Chris Lehmann [“The Gaud That Failed: A Tour of New Jack City,” Oct. 2]. To set the record straight on several facts, the following points are worth noting. Mr. Lehmann is wrong that Read More

By Chris Lehmann 10/02/06 12:00am

The Gaud That Failed: A Tour of New Jack City

When future historians of the current Gilded Age in our nation’s capital need to designate its zeitgeist-on-horseback, there’s little doubt that Jack Abramoff will be the man—or, as he was given to spell it in his voluminous collection of frat-boy-voiced e-mails: “da Man.”

Now so universally known in news reports as “disgraced superlobbyist” that Read More

By Staff 9/07/06 2:47pm

Civility

While Mark Green and Andrew Cuomo are still working on their definition of negative campaigning, a similarly constructive dialogue is being carried out between the Democratic candidates in Brooklyn’s 11th Congressional district.

Outside the candidate forum in Park Slope last night, a flier was distributed that said, “Why is David Yassky, a Democrat, taking Read More

By Joe Conason 4/10/06 12:00am

The Culture of Corruption Will Outlast Tom DeLay

Tom DeLay resigned his Congressional seat with all the dignity, discretion and probity that have marked his decades in politics. Leaving office just steps ahead of the law, with prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public-integrity section in hot pursuit, he delivered a farewell speech blaming others for his problems and blithering on at length about Read More

By Joe Conason 1/30/06 12:00am

Picturegate Inspires No Media Outrage

The White House possesses several photographs of George W. Bush with Jack Abramoff, the once-powerful Republican fixer who recently pled guilty to bribery and fraud. The snapshots show nothing more than the typical “grip-and-grin” that the President has politely bestowed on thousands of visitors—or so his flacks assure us. Although the pictures are said to Read More