Uncategorized
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Why Trump Will Lose
The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom. When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying
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The Debate
I really hate these debates. I find them unwatchable. They have become important for all the wrong reasons. They function more along the lines of a sporting event or a cage match. Who wins or loses has more to do with body language and vocal tone, punches that landed and punches that missed, and we
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A Little Help for the Undecided Voter
Sometimes it helps to make lists of pros and cons when you have a tough decision to make. So if you're an Independent or moderate Republican who is still undecided about whether to vote for Trump or not, here's are two checklists that can help you to sort things out. Sometimes it's good to make
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Whither the Dems
Ours is a surreal moment in US politics. In a matter of weeks, the Democratic Party has engineered a near-seamless transfer of political power from President Biden to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, thereby reviving the party’s prospects in all seven of the swing states that will determine the 2024 presidential election. Anxious but hopeful
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Re-Defining What it Means to be a “Real American”
When the books come out telling the inside story of the 2024 campaign, I will be very interested to learn who was the mastermind behind constructing the last four days of the Democratic Convention. I would not have thought the Democrats capable of it, but they seem finally to have left Identitarian Politics behind, and
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The Obamas’ Speeches
I remember asking some Trump supporters back in '16 if they thought that Obama was a citizen, and they mostly said Yes. Then I asked how they could possibly vote for Trump who was the most vicious spreader of the lie that he wasn't. Wasn’t that a litmus test that should be automatically disqualifying for
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Dems Route to a Stable Governing Majority
The Harris team has gotten off to a strong start in the messaging wars. The vibes, for the first time in a long time, are great. But Republicans live to kill Democratic vibes, and they have a tested strategy for doing it — which, in this case, means turning Ms. Harris into a San Francisco
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A Metaphysics of Joy
There are few figures in life or literature that we encounter that we could describe as truly full-spectrum human beings. In English literature surely Shakespeare and Dickens qualify, but there's something about the Russians, and preeminent among them are Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, but especially Dostoyevski. I read somewhere that Tolstoy at first found Dostoyevski repellent
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Trump is Insane: Why Isn’t This Story More Important than Biden’s Being Old?
His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense. And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and
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Integralist Postscript
Damon Linker has a piece yesterday in the Atlantic about the Catholic Integralists entitled "The Post Liberal Catholics Get Their Man." It syncs with most of what I had to say in my post a few weeks ago about the Integralists. The threat they posed then seemed urgent because of the confluence of the SCOTUS