Safire: "Phony Toughness "v. "Demonstrated Tough-Mindedness"
Safire this Monday in the NY Times brought up for me the question, as he often does: Does any part of him believe what he's writing or is his cynicism simply out of control? The premise of the column...
View ArticleNader's Sophistry
Here's how my dictionary defines sophistry: "a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning." It's the word that came to mind reading Ralph Nader's remarks in...
View ArticleThe Dog Ate My Homework Administration
Americans hate excuses. And excuse makers. The Kerry campagin needs to make use of this. This Administration is the opposite of Harry Truman and the 'buck stops here'. They are the Dog Ate My Homework...
View Article"We are Changing the World"
There is a cat-out-of-the-bag quality to Bush's repeated use of the phrase "We are changing the world" at his news conference last night. Never mind the massive contradication of this compared to...
View ArticleBrooks Concedes the Basic Neocon Premise in Iraq is Wrong
Maybe I've missed it, but I expected to see a blogosphere explosion over David Brooks's Saturday column in the NY Times, "A More Humble Hawk." (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/opinion/17BROO.html)...
View ArticleSafire: A Primer on Projection.
The historian Robert Heilbroner pointed out forty years ago the tendency toward paranoia typical of extreme American right-wing thinking. Often overlooked is paranoia's first cousin, projection, which...
View ArticleThe Skinny on Nader
Check out Harry Levine's article which reveals the self-serving and vengeful motivations that led the erstwhile St. Ralph to usher in an era of neocon war and government bankruptcy. It's a case-closed...
View ArticleThe Far Right on the Iraq Prison Scandal
One of the leading edges of far right-wingism has a revealing take on the Iraq torture scandal: a report on a psychic's reading on the matter. Coming from a psychic, what we have here is right-wing...
View ArticleWhy Kerry Should Choose Wes Clark
Have any of you tried talking to people who have managed to allow all the disasters of Bush's adventure in Iraq to wash over them, who continue to maintain that Iraq is the major event in the...
View Article"Who you gonna believe...."
Americans love this line:"Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?" Kerry/Edwards need something to synthesize their barrage of arguments--on the state of Iraq, on job creation, on the deficit, on...
View Articlean irrationality so vast....
i think we all have our breaking points. for me, it's an argument bush used yesterday finding himself down in the QaaQaa arms dumps. bush said, if john kerry were president then saddam hussein would...
View Articlemy predictions go a bit haywire
i responded late last night to a friend's request for predictions: the true predictor's art is in the electoral votes. so here's the money prediction: kerry by 321 to 217 electoral votes. (go ahead....
View ArticleThe Rope-a-Dope War
Wasn't it a Muslim American who invented the term "rope-a-dope?" Maybe Muhammed Ali brought more Islamic culture to bear in developing the rope-a-dope strategy with which he felled the mighty George...
View Articlea berkeley baby boomer explains obama to his italian friend
The extraordinary fact about Obama is that his campaign is more like a movement than an ordinary American political campaign. It is like the Dean phenomenon of four years ago, but way, way surpassing...
View ArticlePalin: The New Identity Politics
The most important identity-politics politician in America today is Sarah Palin. If you’re wondering why that sounds strange, it’s because identity politics in America is firmly associated with...
View ArticleThe Stakes: Koch & Co. Aim for a Revolution in 2016
The agenda of the Koch faction of the Republican Party.....The 2016 election ambitions of the Koch brothers and what they represent on the Republican right wing, free-market absolutism, are nothing...
View ArticleTrump 2016: Archie Bunker Runs for President diary
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...Over the course of the past three-and-a-half decades the Republican far right has resembled the successive generations of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County,...
View ArticleBrexit: A Cousin Of Trumpism? A Distant Cousin Of Fascism?
In Britain and the USA, conservatives believing they could control the extremists to their right have both come a cropper this year. In the US, this comes after decades of far-right Republicans...
View Articleunspooling Trump
if, like me, you are feeling confused and baffled and wondering how in the holy hell we got into this Trump-o-rama, look no further. this amazing and lengthy article explains what led us to this...
View ArticleThe Donald and the Duce
More than any time in over fifty years, Donald Trump's 2016 campaign has provoked a serious discussion of the threat of fascism at the level of presidential politics. Martin O'Malley twice called Trump...
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