I have just exported all the posts from this blog into I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing. Maintaining three, count ‘em, three of these things (including Liquid Diet) was more than I could handle, so Mermaids is now where I will post my political commentary as well as everything else.
If you’ve enjoyed what I’ve done here in my brief stay, please come on over and join the ongoing fun. I appreciate your support.
From, of all people, Joe Klein:
[I]n these last, raggedy days of the rightward pendulum swing, with Republicans clogging the jails and Bushian foolishness having demoralized the nation, it is risible for conservatives to even pretend to care about “national improvement.” In our lives, we have seen conservatives use racism as a political tool, war as a witless quest for domination, patriotism as a scourge, government as an instrument of greed, religion and “morality” as camouflage for spreading fear, ignorance and bigotry.
The guy has been under unremitting, and justified, attack by the non-nutcase blogsphere for months and months, but these few words can wipe away a lot of sins. I’ve rarely seen a better summary of the despicable, mindless milieu which the radical right has created for itself, from its most evil and mendacious enablers to its very epicenter.
There’s only one possible choice for the old Straight Shooter, given his campaign to date, and Rob Davis and I are on the case.
The MSNBC post-Democratic debate show is off to a bad start. Keith Olberman, apparently believing that he needs must be more Chris Matthews-like is openly trying to get a dispute going with the liked of Richard Wolfe of Newsweek and the absolutely awful Eugene Robinson of the the Washington Post, who is already willing to play that game and lamented that everything was too cordial and substantive.
Geez, guys, I can get this crap over at Fox.
From the regular Friday email from the always worth reading Charles Pierce at Eric Alterman’s “Altercation site:
As I was watching the debate the other night — the Democratic one where Anderson Cooper came on afterwards and got to pretend to be Angelo Dundee — I was struck by Senator Obama’s resolute assertion that he was the candidate that can come to Washington and work with “independents and Republicans” to get things done. (One of his new ads has him sitting next to Dick Lugar, a Republican senator only slightly more relevant today than is Arthur Vandenberg.) I was struck even harder by it as I watched the Democratic Senate go supine, selling out poor Chris Dodd and the Constitution, and concocting retroactive alibis for the Telecom giants in a week where we finally got the empirical count of prewar Iraq lies. Here’s my deal with His Barackosity. Take the list of Republican congresscritters, House and Senate. Make me a list of 10 of them with whom you think you can work to achieve anything close to the progressive goals you have said you want to achieve. Give me an honest run, and I guarantee you that you can’t do it. You may get “something done” but it’s not going to have anything to do with anything resembling the values of the party you seek to represent. This is a party that has to be forcibly disenthralled from its lunatic base.
Obama’s apparent delusion that it is possible to work with what will be left of the GOP after the next election is my greatest concern as well. The next Democrat in the White House will be as demonized and hated as the last one and the media will play right along with the shit storm that will be stirred up by the Right Wing Scream Machine, except for periodic laments about how it’s the Democrats fault that we can’t all just get along.
If Barack is not ready to face up to that reality, if he doesn’t even recognize its existence, then he is not ready to be president.
My name is Jack Curtin and I am a freelance writer residing in the Philadelphia region, about 30 miles west of the city. I’ve been unemployed, which is to say, freelancing, for nearly four decades and think I’m getting the hang of it.
These days, I write primarily about the world of craft beer and brewing professionally (you can read about all that here), but in my time I have written extensively about business, health care, sports, books, comics and a whole range of topics for both national and regional publications of all sorts, including a bit of fiction when I can, some of it even published and paid for, which was nice.
Message Redacted is a blog about politics and serves as a companion to the weekly Dubya Chronicles, a cartoon I do with Rob Davis. Check that out and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s coming here.
I truly believe that George W. Bush is The. Worst. President. Ever.
This blog is a successor of sorts to The Great Disconnect, my initial political blog, started during the 2000 Presidential Election, and I Can Hear The Mermaids Singing, which was a personal blog with a political bent. Mermaids has been relaunched here and will now be more generally focused on trying to cope with a world in which reality is an outdated concept.
