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 [...]
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 [...]
Growing up, my sister had a doll named Chatty Cathy. She was a large doll, a life-size 3-year old girl (but oddly with a flip hairdo like the sorority girls in Animal House, especially at first…) whom, when a string was pulled in her back, a paleotechnic speaker in her chest would squawk out something [...]
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 [...]
That was the name of a punk band that played at Sigma Nu during my freshman year at U of O, way back in 1982, and at the time I didn’t yet see that America was becoming that; I was still a Republican, after all. We went from the Great Society to the Punitive Society [...]
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, [...]
Already the teabaggers (and the media who worship them) are declaring tomorrow’s elections to be a stinging defeat for Democrats, all but certain to hobble Obama’s nine-month (or, according to the strange calendar of the media, who can’t wait that long, one year…) presidency. How many facts must one ignore, and how much Fox must [...]
It’s been curious, in the most delightful way possible, to watch the Republican party rise from the ashes of its last two defeats carried on wings of insular delusion into the ether of pure crazy. This has been happening for some time, of course, but under the careful eye of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay, [...]