The GOP strategy for achieving its already media-trumpeted 2010 landslide is shaping up, and it has to be admired for its sheer audacity, as well as its desperate but hardly unwarranted reliance on the media continuing to be as stupid as it was throughout the Bush years. Richard Cohen, David Broder, and David Gregory are [...]
Well, it seems that, in the eyes of the gasbags, anyway, the Republicans are headed for a very big 2010… The heady days of the “Contract with America” are here again, though of course no one has bothered to read the fine print, partly because there isn’t any, but partly because they don’t care. You [...]
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 [...]
Admittedly, the Oregonlive comments section isn’t the best place to gauge overall public opinion, since righties have much more spare time than the rest of us, but I admit I was a bit embarrassed to read how many Oregonian readers think Phil Knight is the best thing since sliced bread, and how dumb they are. [...]
Not long after Nixon’s “last press conference” upon losing the California governorship in 1962, that memorably disturbing rant which prompted an amused President Kennedy to prematurely say that if he hadn’t done anything else for America, at least he’d “saved it from Richard Nixon,” Nixon fortuitously met up with one Roger Ailes. The rest, as [...]
What we’re seeing of late plopping out of the rear end of the American Right would, to a normal person, appear to be a Tourette’s-fueled tirade of utter nonsense, and rightly dismissed as such. Michael Steele, Liz Cheney, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin: even the spokesmen are so risibly unqualified and dunderheaded that you’d think the [...]
For whatever reason, and there are many possible ones, political disaffection is measured differently on the left and right. Lefties, as charter members of the reality based community, tend to wait for evidence of malfeasance before they get upset about it, whereas righties can work themselves up into a serious wardrobe malfunction and/or Depends moment [...]
“There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don’t topple them, and indeed in earlier years we had actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting against Iran. The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for [...]
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 [...]
Back in the days when Hitler comparisons were verboten, that is, when we had a far-right President whose social, military, and civil liberties policies looked a lot like Der Fuhrer, I often got a laugh out of them. Hitler, after all, in addition to making the trains run on time, hosted a successful Olympics, built [...]