Politics
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Religion and Politics II
I’ve been arguing for some time now that it’s clarifying to think of the cultural sphere as separate from the political sphere. There is obviously overlap, but I think a lot of our current confusion and poor judgment in the political sphere lies in incorrectly understanding what politics is really about and what culture is
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The Pew Report and Democrats’ Wishful Thinking
There’s an emerging conventional wisdom narrative that the Republican party is broken and ain’t nobody gonna fix it soon. (See also here and here.) The White House is there for the taking by the Dems, and they’ll be able to hold it for years to come. The reasoning behind this lies in the polling data
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The Radically Centrist Narrative
I have been over many months now arguing that the terms conservative and liberal don’t really mean much and create more confusion than they clarify. At the root of the meaning of conservative is to conserve, but the people who call themselves conservative in this country are not conserving but destroying a system set up
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Inquiring Minds Want to Know
Robert Parry: When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, one of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass. How could major news
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Controlling the Narrative
One of the basic presuppositions that lies behind everything I write in this blog is that people operate largely unconsciously with presuppositions. We all have biases, and those biases are rooted in narratives that organize reality for us, and we don’t give up on them until the evidence becomes so overwhelming that the narrative can
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Repudiation of the American Right
It ain’t gonna happen so long as MSM outlets like Time prop up the fantasy that Ronald Reagan was an admirable president. Americans who buy into this fantasy fail to understand that the mess we’re in now is the direct result of movement conservatives in the Reagan mold having taken over the levers of power
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Powerlust and Powerlessness
I was preparing a post on the the American right’s obsession with power and the use of violent force as rooted in its feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, but Greenwald does the job for me in this Salon post. Powerlust is a symptom of a pathology rooted in the feeling that one has so little
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The Phantom Extremist Left
Kevin Drum has an interesting post that helps me to understand the reaction of a lot of commenters to a post I put up at Donklephant last June. I was amazed at how many people, particularly Libertarian types, think of the greatest threat to American society coming from the left. "What world are they living
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Clark on the Military Commissions Act
Well, I think the first thing Congress should do is repeal the Military Commissions Act. I’m very disturbed that a number of people who are looking at the highest office in the land have supported an act which advertently or inadvertently authorizes the admission into evidence of information gained through torture. That’s not the America
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The Neocon Nightmare World
When I first picked up Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in the nineties, I feared that it would be a Rush Limbaugh-like rant against Liberal decadence. In some ways you could say it is, but unlike Limbaugh, you have to take Bloom seriously. He's got a case to make, and both he and Christopher