When I was growing up, we always laughed at the relentlessly upbeat statements that came from the old Soviet Union, where even disasters were turned into triumphs, and leaders, statues, and the names of places themselves switched magically as fashion and leadership required, which usually worked out better for the places renamed than the people [...]
You know, you really have to hand it to the Republicans. They started out with a plan that was seemingly so audacious and unlikely to succeed that Democrats never saw it coming, much less moved to counter it. Selling plutocracy to the rubes, via a systematically concentrated media, has turned out to be like taking [...]
Yesterday LA Times crack reporter Rick Serrano published a story that was straight off the Republican Noise Machine, willfully deceptive about the nature of our legal system, and, well, old. To do so and make it plausible, he “interviewed” such heavyweights as Sen. Jeff Sessions, a bunch of anonymous Republicans, and carefully pored over a [...]
Is it just me, or is GOP giddiness about their chimerical but purportedly inevitable “sweep” in the next election leading them into near daily outbursts of unseemly candor? Those of us on the left know quite well that they hold their non-rich supporters in utter contempt, but they at least used to recognize that most [...]
My local rag, the Oregonian, has an incurable tendency to take up quixotic and unpopular conservative causes, and then make an ass of itself maniacally defending them against the wishes of all present. When they lose, as they did with assisted suicide and measures 66 and 67, they imperiously scold their readers afterward and hamhandedly [...]
Sheesh, just when I was complaining about this war business again, with the existing two already lost the righties have picked out a neighbor or two to toss on the pile, and from the looks of it, Pakistan’s already on top. It was an awkward revelation when a dozen Americans were killed (and possibly a [...]
UPDATE: The completely unpredicted blizzard that started as I wrote this post is getting bigger and bigger. Picture below.
Elephants have always made a problematic mascot for the GOP: they’re fat, which raises uncomfortable associations with the fat cats the party tirelessly champions; they supposedly have excellent memories, which means that if they were humans they [...]
It’s difficult to pinpoint when the Right figured out that lying was the path to victory, but in the years since Watergate, it’s become not just an expedient stalling tactic for difficult situations, but a way of life. Lying was still considered somewhat distasteful back then, as was the case when, inundated with a wave [...]
Perhaps there’s some significance to the fact that I just ran across Time Magazine’s November 24 article, “A Decade From Hell” on the morning of Black Friday, only to find that that discredited, desperate, and clueless publication blames the disastrous first decade of the 21st century on everything except the despicable media malpractice that made [...]
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, and [...]