We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie […]
Forbes and D’Souza’s Basement Journalism
The Newt Gingrich comments about President Obama to National Review online, about which I’ve been blogging the past week, and based on the Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, have drawn renewed attention to the empty intellectual shell of contemporary American conservatism. Beyond the obvious media hacks and charlatans like Limbaugh and Beck, and their political […]
Incoherence on Race and Culture
Christelle Nadia at The Republic of Dissent begs to differ (dissent, as it were) with my post The Churchill Doctrine. Before I differ with her differing, let’s examine, first, how she does her differing. She begins by characterizing the post – or what she quotes of it; this point is unclear – as “self-indulgent fluff.” […]
Founding Fathers Not Partiers’ Cup of Tea Only
Among the many mistaken and, frankly, repellent notions of today’s Right is its nearly constant invocation of the nation’s origins and its founders as somehow ideologically ancestral only to them. Here is a very fine reminder that the truth is very different, from Ron Chernow’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Op-Ed Contributor – The […]
The Selling of American Democracy
Free speech in an America of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. Under a Tax-Exempt Cloak, Dollars Flow to Political Causes With every election cycle comes a shadow army of benignly titled nonprofit groups like Americans for Job Security, devoted to politically charged “issue advocacy,” much of it negative. But they are […]