02 Sep 2004
At the risk of turning this blog into an endless list of political essays you should read elsewhere, here are a couple more:
High plains grifter: The life and crimes of George W. Bush is sort of a Cliff’s notes version of Molly Ivins’ excellent
Shrub for people who don’t have time to read that. Incidentally, everyone who didn’t already read
Shrub years ago should really do so.
The Great Divide offers a new approach to dividing the American nation into two: Instead of republican vs. democrat, it’s “metro vs. retro”. I haven’t read this yet, but it seems interesting, not least because in addition to being able to
buy it from Amazon, you can also
download the whole thing for free, which I heartily applaud.
Read on →
31 Aug 2004
In democratic circles, John McCain is often considered to be fairly tolerable (for a republican), and is sometimes thought to be somewhat “like us”, since he has had some public disagreements with Bush’s policies.
At the
RNC yesterday, however, most of this went out the window, at least as far as I’m concerned. McCain made a clear jab at Michael Moore (which Moore seemed to take pretty well) in the midst of his praise of the Bush regime’s foreign policy mess:
“Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — not our political opponents, and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker […] who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when, in fact, it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.”
Frankly, I’m beginning to get pretty tired of this sort of straw-man argument where the liars of the right claim that anyone who questions Bush’s policies is actually a big Saddam supporter. When has Moore, or any liberal for that matter, ever claimed that “Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace” or anything similar? On the contrary, well-informed liberals have been critical of Saddam since the 70’s and 80’s, since even before the time when the Gipper sent Rummy to shake the old bastard’s hand and sell him some weapons.
Read on →
30 Aug 2004
Garrison Keiller wrote a nice essay with the incredibly long title "We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore: How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk? — In These Times" which everybody should read. A choice quote:
[…] angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is another term of date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
Read on →
19 Aug 2004
An interesting but huge article explains what conservatism really boils down to (maintaining a ruling aristocracy) and the tricks used to keep this antiquated world-view in power. Check it out if you’ve got a half-hour to burn.
Read on →
18 Aug 2004
Check out William Rivers Pitt’s excellent open letter to George W. Bush. Good stuff from truthout.
Read on →