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 [...]
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 [...]
Life must be pretty frustrating for third-tier righties these days; for eight long years they dominated the op/ed pages, waxing hawkish and Randian as the country did the same, spreading their tiny wings in the bright dawn of the Permanent Republican Majority. Lack of real world experience or any discernible talent was no obstacle in [...]
UPDATED BELOW: UPDATE II One of the funniest things about the right is that they never lose, even when they do, and they even have rather disturbing success convincing others, or at least the media, that this is so. A lot of us, and certainly any trained psychiatrist, would look at their behavior each day, [...]
Well, the teabaggers “descended” on Washington today, in part courtesy of 40 buses chartered by something called “Americans for Prosperity,” and of course having been heavily promoted on Fox. A “crowd” the police estimated at 3000-3500 came waddling in to generally make asses of themselves, invading the wrong offices, carrying strikingly dumb and offensive signs, [...]
UPDATED BELOW: It’s certainly no mystery why the GOP and its fanboys at Fox and elsewhere are always on the attack. Aside from the fact that only 20% of Americans will still reluctantly admit to being Republicans, the other 80% are always susceptible to inconvenient facts slipping into the conversation, which would clearly make an [...]