Since nearly all of what passes for Republican “ideas” are invariably sold with laughably improbable predictions of the dire consequences of not adopting them, rather than their relative merit, I seldom bother to pay much attention to them anymore. I suppose it’s psychologically satisfying, on some level, to know that if a sundry Kristol, Cheney, [...]
The other day Mortimer Zuckerman went on The Ed Show on MSNBC, and blathered on and on about how all his fancy-pants “business” friends hated Obama because they were, unaccountably, “afraid” of him. This tacit admission that the criminals and incompetents he runs around with know they couldn’t last five minutes without the constant indulgences [...]
Newt Gingrich took to the airwaves today to announce what all of the beltway elite have been talking about with dreary repetitiveness for months…. 2010 is going to be a “wave” election that sweeps Republicans back into power, whereupon the regrettable accident of Democratic government will be well and truly set aside for good. Michele [...]
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 [...]
In the wake of the inciteful words and subsequent violence from the right following the health care vote, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me that no Republican dared to utter an unqualified denunciation of even the acts themselves, much less the violent rhetoric from Fox and talk radio that provoked them. [...]
Lord, but have we been hearing a whole lot about “freedom” lately, and how “government” is its enemy. This message which would have been considered by our lately revered but strategically unremembered founders to be something of a slap in the face, but in today’s climate of unabashed corporate ownership of both our “free” press [...]
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 [...]
Among the punditocracy, which bears so much responsibility for the current disaster in which we find ourselves, the current consensus is that the Democrats are set to lose, and lose big, in November. Of course, since this is the same bunch that bathed Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” in the flattering amber glow of inevitability [...]
“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 [...]