. I’ve taken some time off for real life this week – that oddly embodied and sensate earthly manifestation so much more vivid than Cyberlife. It’s been a trip. I kinda liked it, so – I don’t know – worldly. Still, I have received communiqués from that way station between the two worlds – political […]
How We Lived on It (38) – Amen, Brother
The riddle is “What’s the difference between Rick Perry and Osama bin Laden?” The answer is “Mohammed Atta.” The mainstream news media played carnival barker to this man’s entry into the GOP presidential primary race, then immediately turned on Perry’s implication of treason against Fed Chair Ben Bernanke as if such behavior from Perry – […]
The GOP’s Media-Manufactured Messiahs
They might have learned something from the original breakfast flake of modern times Ross Perot. But the news media do not learn. They speculate, they trumpet, they pander, they shill – “It’s news! How can we not cover news?!” And who made it news? You’d think certainly they would have learned from Rudy and […]
Michele Bachmann and Christian Taqiyya
Much has been made in recent years of the Islamic doctrine of Taqiyya, which permits and even promotes, according to some, religious concealment and dissimulation in certain contexts and in confronting non-Muslims. What is it that Michele Bachmann did on Meet the Press this Sunday but engage in her own form of Taqiyya on behalf of her […]
The Political Lexicologist: Overreach THIS
What’s the difference between technical jargon and mind-numbing, unthinking cliché? Why, it’s that while I, on occasion, may resort to the former, you, of course, invariably use the latter. In the arid world of politics, however, we are richly blessed with language that is oppressively both and of which the citizenry is the object of […]