American Right
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Tom Frank on Fizzling Protests
From a Salon Interview: Occupy once looked like it could play that role. Certainly the focus on income inequality and the concept of the 99 percent never would have resonated without their hard work. And it just … It sort of fizzled. That was a real shame. I was real excited about it at first. There was
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Drove My Chevy to the Levy
Earlier this month in a post entitled Bye Bye Miss American Pie I wrote that traditional America contracted a terminal disease in the twenties and died in the sixties. Don McLean sang the funeral dirge and Marshall McLuhan wrote the obituary. The terminal disease was liberation fever, and the demon spirit that took possession of the corpse
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Red and Blue America
America is more complex, obviously. But I think it's fair to say that there are two poles that define our politics, and every election cycle we find that we're split rather evenly between them. Call these poles Republican and Democrat or Conservative and Liberal, Reactionary and Progressive, or Red and Blue. They are ways of describing
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Bye, Bye Miss American Pie
Several months ago I was watching one of the talking-heads shows on which Pat Buchanan sits in wearing his conservative's hat. I forget what the show's topic was about, but I remember his saying something along the lines that the America he grew up in was a good America, and it isn't good anymore. It
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Practical Wisdom vs Moralism
Nobody with any common sense believes the Warren Commission explanations for the Kennedy assassination. Nobody with any common sense believes that the reason we went into Iraq was to liberate Iraqis from Saddam's despotism. There are the official cover stories, and then there's what really happened. The problem lies in that while the cover stories
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Stemming the Tide of Fanaticism
Since wingers are parties to a hidden truth, it’s critical that their most widely-held beliefs be forcefully rejected by their opponents, otherwise the “truth” would no longer be accessible only to in-group members. When a liberal is mad about climate denial, Obama’s Kenyan roots or the HCR bunkum, it just reinforces their out-group status. Couple that with
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Quote of the Day: Erick Erickson
Out there somewhere is someone who would love to kill Governor Palin. God forbid they do it. But you and I both know there is some crazy MSNBC watcher and Media Matters reader who even now is dreaming of doing so. And should they try, we can be equally sure of something else. The left