What hath COVID wrought? And what will it wreak? Hard to say. If all goes well, we could be back to “normal”, pretty much, this summer. But if things go sideways, with wily new strains that our current miracle vaccines can’t counter, well, unpleasant to think about, especially for us urban liberals, who have been…
Tag: liberalism
Will Geography Damn Us? Probably.
Al Gore won the presidency in 2000 by almost half a million votes. Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by almost three million. Joe Biden would have won the presidency in 2020 sans COVID-19 by, probably, about six million votes. Yet, in fact, Gore lost to Bush, Hillary lost to Trump, and sans COVID Joe very…
Barack Obama, still not getting it after all these years
I confess that I have not read President Obama’s recent memoir, A Promised Land, nor am I likely to, because I have convinced myself that the political pressures on American politicians make it impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely, for them to ever write anything that resembles an honest book. I would say that this…
Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end
When I went to first grade, I learned to print my name and hide under my desk in case of a nuclear blast. When I went to the movies, I saw news reels of U.S. above-ground atomic weapons tests in Nevada. (Nobody worried about fallout then.) In 1968, my parents could stand on their front…
Democrats gone wild! Why the Democrats be acting so crazy.
Well, you’d be acting crazy too if you had just gotten out of jail after 25 long, hard years in the slam. And that’s where the Democrats are coming from. All real Democrats, that is, which doesn’t include squishy neo-lib, “pragmatic”, compromising wimps like me—dudes who believe in free markets (most of the time) and…
Robert Kagan writes an interesting essay, with some stretchers, and not a few omissions
In one way, Robert Kagan’s recent “long-form” (7,000 words) essay in the Washington Post, “The strongmen strike back”, is an honest, intelligent examination of the rise of illiberalism in the modern world, a phenomenon as incontestable as it is dispiriting. In another way, Bob’s latest and longest is a bit of a con job, and…
Can a half-assed, two-headed Democratic Party get its act together? A question to be asked
Yes, it is a little late in the game to be asking this question, or it would be if I had any expectation of being able to influence the answer. The day of the neolibs is done, but who and what will replace it? Hard to say. President Obama, by selecting Tim Geithner as Secretary…
Those Mean Old Disestablishment Blues: Why it’s so hard to put Humpty-Dumpty together again
Dreary old Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by almost three million votes, despite being deeply loathed by millions of voters, many of whom held their noses and voted for snatch snatchin’ Don. Post election, Trump’s poll ratings have never reached the 45% mark, despite a booming stock market and a steadily expanding economy. So why…
Paging Dr. Yeats! Paging Dr. Yeats!
Some time ago, I got so tired of reading about things “slouching towards Bethlehem”, or at least slouching somewheres, that I took upon myself to announce that no one, with the exception of Huckleberry Finn, would be allowed to use that verb, at once so affectedly literary and so uncouth that the poor word was…