Today former President (!) Richard Nixon would have been 100, and I’m sorry the ol’ creep isn’t still around; since he would undoubtedly be in a very bad mood. You see, his most infamous legal doctrine, “if the President does it, it is not illegal,” once a shockingly outrageous statement, is now comfortably enshrined [...]
Thomas Jefferson, who was constantly and viciously hounded by his opponents in the press, once declared that, given the choice, he’d still rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers. Fortunately, television had not yet been invented, so that Sally Hemings story took a couple of hundred years to take off; maybe [...]
Watergate was undoubtedly the first time I paid attention to politics, mainly because it was suddenly so interesting for a change. Had it played out on the comics pages, or even Perry Mason, I wouldn’t have believed it. I was only a kid at the time, but I was utterly fascinated and delighted when our [...]
Watching President Obama’s Q & A with the Republicans Friday, it became starkly plain why entertaining any notion of “bipartisanship” in Washington is so colossally dumb that the very mention of the word ought to bring in a hail of derisive laughter and rotten vegetables. Bipartisanship, as practiced by the Republicans, means “do what we [...]
There’s a stunning video out of MSNBC’s David Schuster attempting to “interview” bloated righty nutcase Andrew Breitbart about the Teabugger case. In it, Breitbart plays the broken record, yowling about irrelevant and provably false nonsense so that Schuster can’t get a word in edgewise, repeating phrases over and over in the manner Goebbels helpfully suggested [...]
Other blogs may claim higher lineage, but this particular blog owes its existence, basically, to the funny pages. Had it not been for the fact that the funny pages created a Darwinian struggle for the morning newspaper amongst the four of us children that was already well-developed by the time I, third in line, became [...]
UPDATE: Alert Hag reader Sysprog noted, tastefully by email, that my original attribution of “Don’t confuse me with the facts,” and therefore kinda the whole point of this post, were not actually the words of Roman Hruska, but rather the similarly addled Earl Landgrebe. Those wingnuts all look (and sound) alike to me. Someone in [...]
The death of Senator Ted Kennedy marks the death of the last of four brothers who all died trying to save their country from wars waged on innocents by the always-imperial and conquering Right. The first, Joe, was fighting fascism in Europe when he was killed at age 29, John (temporarily) saved us from Richard [...]
Saddled as they are with a great many aberrant and discredited ideas, Republicans have developed a neat way around this seemingly sticky problem, one that plays into the shallow and narrative-driven way the media covers the news; ad hominem attacks in place of engaging critics’ ideas. The dumber, meaner, and more disastrous the idea, [...]