What seems to define modern Republicanism as we approach the 2012 elections is a firm, Randian belief that the only acceptable model for governance be that of a particularly ruthless and avaricious corporation beset by a self-interested and narcissistic CEO bent on looting it. Like their corporate sponsors, Republicans have abandoned any sense of creating [...]
In a more than usually desperate excuse for a column, even for the WaPoo, chickenhawk David Ignatius thinks he’s come up with a genius idea for resolving the simmering dispute between the oft-allied military dictatorships of Pakistan and the US over the sticky wicket of mercenary Raymond Davis, whose “diplomatic immunity” led him to think [...]
While it is widely understood that reality has a liberal bias, never is this simple fact so glaring as when some righty cabal gets busted cooking up an illegal dirty trick or two; the fact that they don’t accept reality, or must clumsily attempt to create it on the ground, always proves their undoing. So [...]
It’s funny how some people don’t really become legendary until they’re dead, and there’s a reason for it; their carefully crafted images never squared with the reality, and each day they continued in public life they could only grow smaller in the eyes of their fans. Leaving the planet, then, turned out to be quite [...]
Reading what passes for Villager political analysis is never pleasant, but “Mouthpiece Theater’s” former co-star, Chris Cillizza, does it better than anyone else, albeit unintentionally. In the piece below, he attempts to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that the GOP base is too crazy to nominate an electable candidate, and instead finds [...]
One of the more annoying things (and there are many…) about Randian Righties is the way they repeatedly announce, against all evidence, that their destructive, rich-coddling economic policies are the One True Way, handed down to us by the God of the Market, and all we need to do is throw another virgin or two [...]
Thomas Jefferson, who was constantly and viciously hounded by his opponents in the press, once declared that, given the choice, he’d still rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers. Fortunately, television had not yet been invented, so that Sally Hemings story took a couple of hundred years to take off; maybe [...]
The Oregonian has an odd policy about running letters, or rather, not so odd, unfortunately. Like many other withering daily newspapers, it tries to hold onto its old and addled but nonetheless loyal readers at the expense of publishing, daily, such complete nonsense that other readers must find pretty discrediting to the paper, not to [...]
Ted Koppel, one of the last eminences of the old broadcast news era, weighed in some days ago on the never-ending debate about how things just aren’t as august as they used to be (whenever that was) when it comes to informing the American people (instead of just yelling at them). Koppel targeted Fox News [...]
It seems like such a long time ago, when Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, performing in England, told an audience that she was “embarrassed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” As an Oregonian I personally was less embarrassed, but I’d been routinely apologizing to foreign friends about Bush for years; [...]