It may not be impossible to win over the electorate without invoking the deity by name, just as it may not be impossible to please a lover without saying “I love you,” or to work magic without a spell, or to meditate without a mantra, but the strain will tend to be evident, will tend to awaken suspicions, and may generally increase the likelihood of failure.
The TPers think they’re fighting to save capitalism, American freedom as ordained by God, before it’s too late, “too late” amounting to “any day now” by their variously innumerate and fantastical pseudo-calculations. Yet, in a way, kind of a park…
Assuming that 2012 things are about like 2011 things or worse (N.B.: big assume; a few months ago most mainstream economists thought happy days were almost here again), then the election will be a paradigm test: Political pseudo-science calls for…
Gallup is having some difficulty figuring out why the President’s job approval just hit a 16-Month High: It’s often difficult to pinpoint why a president’s job approval rating goes up or goes down. The bin Laden raid was one of…
Howard Portnoy: Kill each other over money and white boys for fun. That line, in case anyone missed it in a previous column on the topic, comes from rapper Common’s song “Don’t Come My Way.” It is a blatantly racist…
Am about to disappear into Lakerdom – either a further descent into tedious misery, a temporary revival on the way to even deeper misery, or the Turning Point we’ve been waiting for and falsely identifying this whole desperately non-compelling season…
(kind of a sample post based on the “How To“) Amazon.com: Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (9780679744757): Benny Morris: Books Really, read this book. Just finished the first world-scene-setting chapter that closes with the birth of…
A reflexive and all-embracing hostility to the state/statism leads the far right toward the ultra-right (and ultra-left): It’s a self-contradictory and philosophically untenable position for anyone who aspires to be accepted within the mainstream of politics – which is a long way of saying that it is irrational, and, when pressed, must manifest as insanity.
Here’s Matt Yglesias today on “Obama’s Obsessive Focus“: [P]olitical success and policy success are deeply intertwined in a recession, and a White House that thinks “too much policy focus” has been its big sin is unlikely to turn things around.…
The Obama Doctrine Has Never Looked Better
Officer Bolton thinks Obama has already “bungled” Libya, but an even better sign for U.S. foreign policy is that Douglas Feith, with Seth Cropsey, has taken to the pages of Commentary to define and indict the entirety of the “Obama…