From the Left
/Politics
Don't Hate Rush Limbaugh. Copy Him
My death will make some people giddy with joy. That's cool. I like to make people happy.
In the unlikely event that I'm somehow able to witness the gleeful grins and chortles of those who savor the sweet news of my demise, I hope that whatever is left of me on the astral whatever will remain sufficiently objective to recognize the fundamental ...Read more
Biden Offers Moderate Solutions to Radical Problems
"Radical solutions require radical solutions," I wrote in my 2010 book, "The Anti-American Manifesto," a polemic that calls upon us to save ourselves from imminent social, economic and political collapse by overthrowing the system and rebuilding society from the ground up. We currently face several radical problems. But we're not likely to rise ...Read more
It's Not That Biden Is Too Slow. It's That He's Going Too Small
In the intraparty Democratic war between progressive leftists and corporate centrists, each side speaks a different language. The two factions' takes on Joe Biden's first weeks as president starkly demonstrate that inability to communicate.
Biden's base is his centrist supporters, those who backed him against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the ...Read more
No, it's not too early to criticize Joe Biden
Censorship in mainstream corporate American media outlets is subtle. It's not so much that they spin the truth. It's that they omit pertinent facts and exclude relevant points of view.
So it is with politics. Among the tools available to messaging and framing experts is "flooding the field" -- dominating the news with a blizzard of headlines in...Read more
Biden's presidency has already failed
Donald Trump may soon look back at his defeat as the best thing that ever happened to him. The former president has been disgraced and double-impeached, and faces criminal prosecution. Fortunately for him, he slipped out of Washington, D.C., just in time to avoid the blame for an economic catastrophe no one can fix.
No one inside this political...Read more
If you miss Donald Trump, you'll love Joe Biden
From mainstream left to mainstream right, the media deluge of Donald Trump postmortems share the assumption that 45 represented a departure, deviation or innovation from the comportment and policies of previous American heads of state. True, he was the first man elected president without political or military experience. And as I have previously...Read more
Congress votes to arm violent mobs that storm through capitols around the world
Terrified political leaders watched the police who were assigned to protect them melt away. They fled as an angry mob of hooligans, riled up by sketchy allegations of rigged elections, stormed up the stairs of the government building that hosted the debates and deliberations of their venerable democracy. The rioters, reactionary right-wingers ...Read more
Biden and the Democrats could change everything. But they won't try.
"When someone shows you who they are," Maya Angelou said, "believe them the first time." We're about to be reminded who and what the corporate-owned Democratic Party is -- something it showed us in 2009.
A pair of upset victories in the widely watched pair of Georgia senatorial runoff elections has handed Democrats what they said they needed to...Read more
In a crisis, a compromise is worse than no solution at all
Late last month, I wrote that there was a strong chance -- I called it 50-50 -- that Donald Trump would engineer a "self-coup" in order to remain in power despite having lost the election.
The president, I explained, is a desperate cornered rat. Once he leaves office, he becomes vulnerable to a variety of criminal investigations. By far, the ...Read more
In a crisis, a compromise solution is worse than no solution at all
The raging argument on the left between progressives who argue for radical change and centrists who advocate for incrementalism is hardly new. Nearly a century ago, progressive titan and Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt were often at loggerheads over the same question.
Roosevelt, La Follette complained,...Read more
Will the Media's Newfound Stridency Continue Under Biden? No.
"In his first rally since losing the election last month, President Trump continued to spout conspiracy theories about voter fraud, falsely claiming that he had defeated President-elect Joe Biden." That was the lede of a news story in the Dec. 5 Washington Post.
The Associated Press took a similar tack. "President Donald Trump flooded his first...Read more
Why didn't the xenophobe in chief close the borders?
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis tailor-made for a xenophobe like Donald Trump. The coronavirus provided an ideal opportunity to turn the president's biggest liability -- the nativist bigotry that went so far as to lock children in cages and then lose hundreds of their parents, which elicited disgust even among some of his supporters -- into a...Read more
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