Category: All Hail Freedonia!

Riffs on politics and the mindless jingoism Americans exhibit on the least disturbance of their shopping experience. All God’s chillun got guns!

July 28, 2016

Fellow Travelers: Trump and Putin

Nicholas Kristof (Did Putin Try to Steal an American Election?) correctly cautions against viewing the apparent Trump-Putin political alliance in terms of cold war conspiracy. Trump is not some “Siberian Candidate,” a deep cover agent for Moscow. It’s worse than that. Trump’s is not an ideological or moral commitment to a foreign adversary. His willingness…
August 30, 2008

Miss Congeniality

Let us consider the assumed symmetries: Obama’s inexperience =~ Palin’s inexperience Biden’s experience (6 terms in Senate; worst vices: likes to talk too much and has sense of humor) =~ McCain’s experience (4 terms in Senate, worst vices: violent temper and see-no-evil, hear-no-evil relation to lobbyist buddies — poster-child for enlightening & ennobling effects of…
July 28, 2007

Voting Republican

Occasionally, a friend who is fond of me, will send me columns by Maureen Dowd, hoping to expand my somewhat limited political sensibilities. There was one recently, “Brothers and Sisters, July 25, 2007, NY Times” (Free Democracy link), that addressed the effect Bush is having in turning previously staunch Republicans into Democrats. Well, that is…
July 20, 2007

The God Vote

Sitting around in a hotel room, as I seem to be doing quite a lot of these days, and attempting to avoid doing whatever it was that I should have been doing, having also sacificed my laptop to the male members of the family, there was naught to do but watch CNN on TV. Repeatedly,…
March 20, 2007

Iraq: A Republican War

Whether a consequence of principle or politics, one thing is clear from public polling at the four year mark: George Bush’s war in Iraq has become indisputably a minority, one-party, Republican War. Now supported by only 32% of Americans according to a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll (Poll: Support for the Iraq war deteriorates, March 19,…
May 26, 2006

Neil Young’s Articles of Impeachment

Article I Let’s impeach the president for lyin’ Misleading our country into WAR Abusing all the power that we gave him And shipping all our money out the door Who’s the man who hired all the criminals The white house shadows who hide behind closed doors And bend the facts to fit with their new…
January 18, 2005

Bush Baby-Boomers Take Care of Their Own

GEN-X BEWARE! And all you ever-ambiguous Blank Generation folk, among whom I number myself, you ought to wake up too. For once again, the post-war Baby-Boomers, arguably the most pampered, selfish and programmatically self-indulgent generation in American history, are preparing to take care of themselves at the direct expense of their younger brothers and sisters,…
December 19, 2004

Bush’s Social InSecurity Plan

Just keeping track of the shifting lies, misrepresentations and bait-and-switch tactics of the Bush Administration as it slithers toward that Holy Grail of Right-Wing American politics, the dismemberment and destruction of the New Deal’s Covenant with America, the 1935 Social Security Act, is a dizzying, mind-numbing task. And it’s meant to be. It’s among the…
December 10, 2004

A Fighting Faith

As if the Cold War nostalgia of the Bush League of Neo-Con Beltway Imperialists and God-Is-On-Our-Side Red State Evangelicals weren’t bad enough, now comes the purportedly left of center editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart, issuing his own retro clarion call for “a new liberalism,” A Fighting Faith, as he styles it, in a black and white world of American might and right locked in another life or death, existential battle with the forces of totalitarian darkness and their fellow travelers at home and abroad.