Joel Mathis

At The Week , Damon Linker discusses how the Trump campaign can use the sex assault charges against Joe Biden. The Biden campaign's effort to portray itself as a moral reset from the debasement of the Trump years will run into this counter-message like a power sander. The Trump campaign will strip it away with a barrage of paid ads, prime-time cable news diatribes, and a hailstorm of tweets — all of it repeating the message (illustrated with clips from and about the Kavanaugh hearings) that Biden and his fellow Democrats are every bit the BS artists that Trump is, only they won't admit it. They'll lie about it, right to your face.  To Democrats this prediction may sound implausible.  There's no way that Trump, a man whose mendaciousness is well established and total, can possibly succeed in portraying Biden as more dishonest than he is. But he won't have to show that Biden is worse, just that he's no better. Emphasis added. One of our last dinners hos

At least, that's what I take away from Paul Sherman's Wall Street Journal piece today . There's a case winding through the courts in which foreign nationals—both residents of New York—are suing to be allowed to make contributions to political campaigns, saying they have the right to do so under the First Amendment. On Dec. 12, the Supreme Court passed up its first opportunity to announce whether it would take the case. Some observers take this as a hint that the court is going to let the D.C. panel's ruling stand. That would be a mistake, and a sharp reversal from the hard line the court has taken recently on speech-squelching campaign-finance laws.  The panel's ruling stemmed from a conviction that "foreigners" are different and that foreign speech poses a unique threat to the American political system. As to the first point, foreigners surely are different—they can be prohibited from voting, holding elective office, or serving in certain roles of gover

I dunno. Is there another message I'm supposed to take from this?  (Hat tip: Hickey )