Novak: Last of the Shoe-Leather Columnists

Pulitzer winner covered politics for the 'Post'

(NEWSER) - Longtime Washington Post political columnist David Broder is dead at age 81 from complications of diabetes. The Post offers a lengthy obit for him here and his final column here . Broder covered every presidential election since 1956 and won a Pulitzer in 1973 for his Watergate coverage. The newspaper's Ben Bradlee called him "the best political correspondent in America" because he knew the system "from the back room up" and not just at the highest levels in DC. More»

Conservatives are not above fear-mongering, he says

(NEWSER) - Karl Rove and Fox News are outraged— outraged! —that the Democrats are running ads suggesting that GOP-backed groups take "secret foreign money." "Have these people no shame?" Rove asks. Right, jokes Jon Stewart on the Daily Show , because conservatives would never spread rumors about shadowy foreign funds ... oh wait, yes they would. Remember the ground zero mosque debacle? Watch and laugh. (And click here for more from the Daily Show.) More»

Red State's Erick Erickson is too extreme, they say

(NEWSER) - CNN's decision to hire right-wing blogger Erick Erickson as a political analyst—the man who called David Souter a "goat-fucking child molester" and Michelle Obama a "Marxist harpy wife"—is still causing a stir:

• Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution : The move "is in a way an insult to conservatives, because it suggests that in CNN’s mind, such behavior and incivility comes with the conservative package."
• Alex Koppelman, Salon : "With Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, CNN has been trying to position itself as the real news outlet—and it's been working fairly well. These kinds of hires only serve to undermine that."

Behar tells her to 'stop it'

(NEWSER) - Conservative screed scribe Ann Coulter insisted yesterday that every presidential assassin in history has been a liberal. "They're all liberals—assassin by assassin by assassin," she spilled on CNN's Joy Behar Show. An angry Behar retorted: "Wait a minute. Don't make that jump from murder, terrorist to liberals. That is an outrageous statement. They're not liberals, Ann. They're murderers, terrorists. Stop it." More»

They don't make 'em like Safire anymore, writes Times colleague Dowd

(NEWSER) - Bill Safire, to use the phrase he coined, was anything but a "nattering nabob of negativity," writes his New York Times "colleague in columny" Maureen Dowd. The former Nixon speechwriter—who once told Dowd he had been frozen out by the Times' liberal writers until he saved a drowning child at a party—was always gracious, Dowd recalls, who only ever chastised her on a point of language despite their strongly opposed views on the Iraq war. More»