The Political Animal

The Nativist GOP and MSM Dereliction

February 20, 2012

. What is happening to the Republican Party is historic, and mainstream news organizations are missing the story. They are missing the story because they are a part of a governing-media complex that revels in its centrality to power and the clubbiness of its associations. Nowhere is this clubbiness more seductive and debilitating of the [...]

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Trita Parsi’s Three-Card Monte Argument Against Iran Sanctions

February 16, 2012

. Trita Parsi is never at a loss to provide excuses for Iran or explanations for how U.S. and Western policies toward Iran are mistaken. If you believe Parsi, those policies are even the source of conflict. Parsi’s latest argument appears at the Boston Review Online. Titled “Blunt Instrument: Sanctions Don’t Promote Democratic Change,” the [...]

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Why Obama’s Contraception Mandate for Religiously Affiliated Hospitals is Right

February 5, 2012

. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” It’s the old categorical confusion again, doubly so in this debate. Religious freedom is protected in religious practice. Once cannot reasonably extend the umbrella of religious exception to the public sphere. The limited exemption (human sacrifice is frowned upon) of recognized [...]

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From the People Who Brought You Richard Nixon & George W. Bush

January 30, 2012

. Who has a shorter memory than the perpetual loser? Over and over the perpetual loser performs the same self-defeating act. Again and again, the loser fails, and failing, finds cause for failure in the inadequacy of others. Charlie Brown runs, as he has run countless times before, for the football Lucy holds to the [...]

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The Matter of Glenn Greenwald

January 24, 2012

. Let a hundred blogs bloom: let a hundred schools of condign retribution contend. Something like that. Mao was so ahead of his time in so many ways. In this blooming bloggery, stars arise, tall stalks that reach for the sky. Lesser plants, leaning toward the light, bend in their direction. They lean toward Glenn Greenwald. [...]

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Bile as Argument

January 23, 2012

. Several days ago, a late reader of my post “Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas” sent me an insulting private email. Since this is a blog with a public commenting apparatus, I am always struck when people choose to insult me privately rather than offer counter-arguments and insult in the public [...]

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Libertarians: Call Them Irresponsible

January 18, 2012

. The full range of Ron Paul’s reeking extremism was exposed yesterday by The New Republic. Ron Paul has recently suggestedthere was only a “total of about eight or ten sentences” of “bad stuff” in the newsletters that he regularly used to publish under his name. This assertion was patently false: As TNR has shown, the newsletters [...]

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GOP Incoherence and Mendacity

January 11, 2012

. It is a kind of intellectual zone defense  to respond to accusations of bad behavior by noting that others are sometimes bad too. Political parties should rise and fall on the basis of the their own incoherence and mendacity, and the contemporary GOP, reaching new depths since the 2010 elections, will be recorded for [...]

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The Reactionary Libertarian

January 10, 2012

. I said in “Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism” that libertarianism is a disposition claiming an offense, a cranky warning to other people to bugger off. I closed by characterizing it as a rejection of modernity. This is so of most contemporary American conservatisms, but the libertarian rejection is different, not simply conservative in the [...]

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The Libertarian Delusion

January 5, 2012

. One of the signatures of the fallen human state is how precipitously and flat seemingly reasonable people can land on their cogitative rears. Accordingly, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on ourselves. You watch me, friend. I’ll be checking you. For now, we have Ron Paul. In addition to certain strains of [...]

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In Their Own Words: Glenn Greenwald, Armatya Sen, John Gray

January 3, 2012

. Glenn Greenwald, considering Christopher Hitchens and George Packer and aiming the gun at his own head. Is it really “a sign of decency” to refuse to view any political ideas as not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense, but as a reflection of the person’s character? Obviously, there are many political disagreements — most — [...]

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Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism

January 2, 2012

. Here’s the thing about Ron Paul – he’s not an outlier. I don’t mean that every libertarian is as bad as the worst of what is on the record of what Ron Paul has published in his name or believes or may privately feel. I mean that libertarianism by nature – which is to [...]

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Living in History

December 29, 2011

. I am reading Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. I would be interested in the history anyway, but I have a personal interest too. Snyder identifies the “bloodlands” thus: The bloodlands were where most of Europe’s Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin’s imperial plans overlapped, where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet [...]

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Tea Party Bolshevism

December 22, 2011

. Today is a good day to reiterate the essential nature of the Tea Party and contemporary GOP political impulse in practice. As even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell calls on House Republicans to compromise and pass the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, we need understand not how, but why we got here. What we [...]

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Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas

December 21, 2011

. John Cook of Gawker writes of Christopher Hitchens that he “loathed sentiment, welcomed combat, and delighted in inflicting hard truths.” Cook undoubtedly means “sentimentality,” which masquerades everywhere as sentiment, in which case he is indisputably right about Hitchens, who would have begrudged those now attacking him only the regrettable spectacle (he surely would have [...]

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Perspective (Oh, Yeah) on Israel and the U.S.

December 15, 2011

. Two days ago, in a column causing some commotion – “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” – Tom Friedman wrote this: It confuses [many Jewish American students] to read a Financial Times article from Israel on Monday, that said: “In recent weeks, the country has been consumed by an anguished debate over [...]

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Myanmar, Not Forgotten in the Darkness

December 6, 2011

. During the 1990s and into the next century, I was a member of a local Amnesty International group. We were a rich and varied assemblage: Iranian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Swedish, Jewish and other American-born, Spanish; businessmen, professors, students, JPL employees, journalists, future lawyers. Among the central tasks of a local Amnesty group is to take [...]

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Everything Old is Newt Again

December 2, 2011

. I’ve taken some time off for real life this week – that oddly embodied and sensate earthly manifestation so much more vivid than Cyberlife. It’s been a trip. I kinda liked it, so – I don’t know – worldly. Still, I have received communiqués from that way station between the two worlds – political [...]

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Occupy Distraction

November 21, 2011

Some quick thoughts on continuing Occupy Wall Street developments. A few recent dispersals of protestors, especially the much viewed UC Davis pepper spraying over the weekend, have called attention to unhappy trends in policing over the past decade. James Fallows, Alexis Madrigal, and Ta-Nahisi Coates, all at the Atlantic, had good thoughts about it all. [...]

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I, Governor

November 8, 2011

. Americans love personality. In the centuries since each individual in his distinction from every other unlike him was raised above competing notions of identity, no culture has exalted the individual personality more than that of the American. It is the altar of existential and political personhood. Be any wild and unaccountable thing, but above [...]

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Razing Cain

November 2, 2011

. American public life is an embarrassment. This is not a relative judgment. The fact that it’s better than Nigeria’s should not be a comfort. Russia? Well, we’re not killing journalists yet, but that may begin with their not doing any work that would merit it by powers threatened by them. Why bother? Far from [...]

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