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Profile of an Obamacan: Francis Fukuyama
In an interview with Eleanor Hall in Australia (h/t Sullivan) FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, it is a little bit difficult. In my own thinking since I have to vote in this next election, I personally actually don't want to see a Republican re-elected because I have a general view of the way democratic processes should work
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Future of the GOP II
As a way of advancing the argument I've made recently in my posts about the Futures of the Republicans and the Democrats, this New Yorker article by George Packer's entitled "The Fall of Conservatism" makes a similar case. He begins with the story, largely told by Rick Perlstein's new sequel to his earlier Before the
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RFK Assassination
I look at it the same way I do the Bittergate controversy and the brouhaha about Jeremiah Wright. I don't think these kind of remarks are worth even a 10th of the attention that they get, and this hysteria about them is in large part what is broken about our system. Olbermann's thing last night
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Obama’s Race Speech II
On one level, this is a statement of racial solidarity. But on another, it’s an argument that the church is the embodiment of the community it serves, with all its imperfections, which Obama bluntly describes. This is a very old, very "Catholic" idea of the church as an organic expression of "the people" as they
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Political Immaturity
I was googling this morning looking for the original 1997 article written by David Brooks and Bill Kristol about "national greatness conservatism", and I came across this article by Jonah Goldberg written in May 2001 entitled "Grading Greatness." In it, just a few months before 9/11, Goldberg wrestles with the Kristol/Brooks idea, which he is
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“Souled Out” Discussion at TPM Book Club
E.J. Dionne’s new book, Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over, is the discussion topic at TPM Book Club this week. From his Dionne’s post this morning: On significant parts of the right and left, there is a sense that religion always has been and always will be a conservative force.
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It’s about “Ending the Mindset . . .
. . .that got us into the war in the first place." In case you need reminding: The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous
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Sick Leave
I’ve been down with an intestinal bug of some kind. Not much energy for anything. I’ll be a couple of days before I’m back. Till then, chew on this: Cheney famously said "Reagan proved deficits don’t matter." He will very likely be likewise telling his little friends at cocktail parties a couple of years from
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Masked Religion
Safranski’s bio on Heidegger provides a wonder lived feeling for the intellectual ferment in the first part of the 20th Century. I like this description about Christian Bry’s book, Masked Religions, a best seller in the 1920s. Anything, Bry wrote, can become a "masked religion," if it becomes "monomaniacally," the sole principle for interpretation of
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Housekeeping
I’ve been working to update the "Don’t Miss" and archival lists. If you click on "Archives" you’ll be sent to a page that gives you the choice of looking at them either choronologically or by category. I’ve been working to make the categories more useful, so if your interested in my pieces trying to understand