The Political Animal

Boycotting Rush, or Citizens United

May 14, 2012

. It isn’t that you boycott.  It’s what you boycott. And why. As the ends don’t justify the means (most people would agree), ends don’t illegitimize the means either. Reasons matter. Aims matter. We can pursue good ends through bad means, and for bad reasons. We can likewise use a good – or at least [...]

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United We Fall

May 10, 2012

. The question is who we are to each other. It’s at the beginning and end of every political argument, regardless of whether anyone raises it. Are we lone figures passing on a cold tundra, or do we pause to stand, and even stay, in fellowship? And what will break it? Every other consideration is [...]

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New Communism, Old Totalitarianism

May 8, 2012

. Alan Johnson has a bracing roundup in the May-June issue of World Affairs of the latest in communist theorizing. Entitled The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion, it begins so: A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of “new communism.” A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than [...]

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Letter from Guatemala, Part 2

May 3, 2012

. Development Ideology – Fraud or Nuisance? (II) by Dercum Over (Dercum Over recently completed a two-year service with the Peace Corps as a volunteer Healthy Schools coordinator. The Peace Corps officially discourages independent journalistic expression by serving volunteers, so he waited until his two years were concluded before writing this essay. Parts of it [...]

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Letter from Guatemala

May 2, 2012

. Development Ideology – Fraud or Nuisance? by Dercum Over (Dercum Over recently completed a two-year service with the Peace Corps as a volunteer Healthy Schools coordinator. The Peace Corps officially discourages independent journalistic expression by serving volunteers, so he waited until his two years were concluded before writing this essay. Parts of it were [...]

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A Conservative Trifecta

April 19, 2012

  1. Here is Michael Tomasky in yesterday’s Daily Beast on the disease of moderation mania. It is an illness that arises, in one origin, from being so systemically embedded that one cannot think outside of it. (That would be the box, for you phrase hogs.) To be making these proposals after the past nearly four [...]

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Anders Breivik and the Mystery of Judgment

April 17, 2012

. I admit to the acts, but not to criminal guilt. I do not plead guilty, I was acting in self-defence. Those are the words of Anders Breivik at his trial in Norway. [T]he self-confessed mass killer tried to cast himself in the role of Norway’s lone crusader against the forces of pernicious multiculturalism. There [...]

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Limbaugh: Censor or Censure?

April 6, 2012

. My post on “Rush Limbaugh and the Free Market of Speech” drew a comment from JP that is thoughtful and challenging, and I think my responding to it at length can deepen the exploration and understanding of what opponents of Limbaugh are doing in the media campaign against him and of what it is [...]

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The Duty to Retreat from Standing Your Ground

March 27, 2012

. When awful incidents like that of the Trayvon Williams killing occur, good outcomes are the attention they draw to existent social conditions, such as the continuing role of race in our relations and the advent of “stand your ground” laws in so many states. A characteristic bad outcome is how the discussion of these [...]

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Santorumville

March 25, 2012

. There is no shortage of contenders for the worst in human nature, but the union of faith and cynicism, righteousness and arrogance makes its own historical claim. Join a politician who casts his candidacy as the preservation of religious traditions with the corruption of public discourse that is political media and we arrive at [...]

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Thinking Through the Iranian Dilemma

March 19, 2012

. Attempting to think through a dilemma like the threat of a nuclear Iran is like trying to make one’s way through a windstorm. For most people, who have none of the inside information of those in various official roles, or the view from the doorway of the analysts with access, all of the details [...]

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Time for a Different Kind of “Game Change”

March 12, 2012

. Sometimes, often, watching the Sunday Morning news programs  (like any other of their kind) can cause near combustion in one’s cranium. The sheer hackneyed handicapping of “the game,” the crony punditry and homogenized thinking are mental toxins. Here is George Stephanopoulos leading and permitting this palaverous exchange about HBO’s film version of Game Change. [...]

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Obama, Holder & the Altered Paradigm of War

March 9, 2012

. There is no better way to keep an argument going – that is, to halt any progress in the exploration of its critical ideas – than to simply ignore the claims of one’s opponent. At the very least, to acknowledge and contend with particular and supporting claims is to focus the field of dispute [...]

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States Rights and Transnational Law

March 8, 2012

. Jonathan Fisher for the UK based The Henry Jackson Society has produced a paper that considers the United Kingdom’s involvement in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its judicial body, the European Court of Human Rights. It suggests a fascinating parallel. This paper addresses the key human rights question in Britain today – Should the United Kingdom [...]

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Divided America, or Boys & Girls Not Together

March 6, 2012

. What is there really to work out in the current American divides – which is to ask, what really can be worked out? If you are a politician, an office seeker, hopefulness and the rhetoric that summons a people movingly to common purpose is the lingua franca of your own success. It takes a [...]

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No Cant or Sanctimony on Andrew Breitbart

March 1, 2012

. Consider that Andrew Breitbart was a contemporary new media turn on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Imagine either of those two dying not in the faded aftermath of their celebrity and achievements, as they were, but at the height of their notoriety. That said, I will be very surprised to read a fairer, wiser consideration [...]

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Freedom from Religion

February 26, 2012

. If freedom of religion as a concept is to be understood in its fullest sense, it must include freedom from religion. To have the freedom to practice one’s own religion must perforce mean to be free of the impositions of other religions, or of any religion at all. The “no establishment” clause of the [...]

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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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