When CNN hired the tubby, bigoted know-nothing Erick Erickson from Redstate, I yawned. After all, the New York Times hired Ross Douthat, the Los Angeles Times hired Jonah Goldberg, and no dying media outlet could be without its beady-eyed, teenage water-carrier for for the “kill ‘em all” faction of the right. Notably, Douthat replaced the [...]
Increasingly it seems that Republican candidates are, in the post-Reagan era, chosen solely as spokesmodels; it’s just like choosing an anchorwoman at Fox News, really. Not much upstairs, but what a staircase… You’re hired. This trend has two roots: the first is that Republicans fundamentally believe that intellect, energy, and accomplishment are only found, [...]
Back in 2000, before Republicans had ruined the economy, bankrupted the government, lost two wars, let a huge terror attack occur and an American city drown, they could afford to be, well, civilized. All that fake talk of “Armies of Compassion” and whatnot has long since dropped by the wayside nowadays, and although Hitlerian scapegoating [...]
When I wrote Thursday’s post I could see this coming a mile away, but I hadn’t spotted this little treasure from The Daily Beast, which definitively proves that the right is looking, pretty much everywhere, for some new ACORNs, and as usual is relying on the stupidity and amnesia of the media to put them [...]
As longtime Hag readers know, I had a crazy grandmother who, though quite embarrassing and seemingly anachronistic at the time (she died in 1980…), turned out to be an exact prototype of the American right wing circa 2010. She berated complete strangers in public for speaking a foreign language, she applauded black people who worked [...]
Bereft as they’ve always been for any policies that might actually benefit working Americans, the Republican Party has instead had a strategy of making friends by finding enemies, and happily, this approach turns out to be just as successful at the real goal, influencing people, but without those nagging obligations friendship can entail. No one [...]
One of the most infuriating things about dealing with a cuckoo person is that they simply don’t have separate mental boxes for “real things” and “imagined things.” Their anger, fear, and persecution fantasies are based on things that never happened, won’t happen, and certainly aren’t happening now, but if you try to explain this they’ll [...]
UPDATED BELOW: I continue to be haunted by the right-wing BS I encountered at OregonLive yesterday, and the stunning success it represents in recruiting committed followers to some of the most reprehensible and elitist ideas ever conceived, all in the name of a twisted and yes, Hitlerian “populism.” Reagan may have been a doddering old [...]
When I was a kid back in the 70′s, it was easy to believe that racism in America was on the way out; no one I knew, and certainly no one I respected, was openly racist unless they were old, dumb, and/or ignorant. Racism still existed, of course, but it was as embarrassing in polite [...]
I have often groused dyspeptically about the tawdry circus acts that have replaced political discourse in this country, and the insulting way in which our media stars never fail eat it up, like slow children gazing in slack-jawed amazement at an unusually bad magician. Such misguided adulation then trickles down to the dumber members of [...]