Enjoying the view from Limbo
The vast majority of Trump supporters who wanted to prevent the certification of the 2020 electoral votes, including those who were prepared to fight on Capitol Hill to stop Joe Biden from becoming president on January 6th, 2021, were not, as per the standard talking point of our day, “trying to overturn an election.” Nor were they “trying to destroy American democracy.” On...
Dr. Oz, a television celebrity who, like his endorser and “friend” Donald Trump, has tried to parlay empty fame and business success into a political career, slightly led Pennsylvania’s GOP senate primary after initial vote counting. Today, it appears that the absentee votes are tipping the scales toward one of Oz’s rivals, Dave MacCormick. Donald Trump’s response to this on social media: He’s...
2020 U.S. Election / America Descending
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 18, 2022 · Last modified May 19, 2022
Ben Shapiro is basically Rush Limbaugh for smug millennials, which is to say a moderately clever profiteer of the Republican establishment, but one who substitutes snotty rich boy arrogance and snide self-certainty for Limbaugh’s everyman persona, playful wit, and self-deflating vanity. Dinesh D’Souza is a less clever and less circumspect version of Shapiro; he doesn’t know how to hedge his bets against future...
The spoils.– Deliberately kill tens of thousands of civilians on the road to victory — “the awful reality of war.” Deliberately kill tens of thousands of civilians on the road to defeat? National ignominy and shame that will live for generations. Russia today, along with, incidentally, all of Vladimir Putin’s well-known international apologists and allies in “alt-right” demagoguery and its media affiliates. French...
Vested emotional interests, almost inescapable in life, are a constant threat to rational deliberation. If heightened by extreme circumstances, they may prove the enemy of reason itself. The current gulf between the two sides in the debate over the 2020 U.S. election and its fallout provides an object lesson in the danger of allowing one’s mind to become immersed in emotional interests, which...
The title of this post could be taken as referring to the entire Trump presidency, from the infamous day in the summer of 2015 when he slithered down the escalator to the January day, five and a half years later, when he incited his followers to threaten the life of his own vice president. But in this instance I am referring simply to...
Seeing the imperfection of things, it is always tempting, at least to those steeped in centuries of progressive thought in all its forms, to allow disappointment with the imperfect to transmogrify into an assumption that things could have been better. But from a non-progressive point of view, it does not follow from the fact that something is disappointingly inadequate that there must have...
Russian forces are withdrawing from the area around Kiev. This is a good sign on its face, and a testament to the will of the Ukrainian population, the courage and competence of their leaders, and the effectiveness of their military. Having said that, it is far from obvious to me that this retreat is an unqualified good, given that the man who ordered...
Donald Trump used a media interview this week to directly ask Vladimir Putin to help him defeat their mutual enemy Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Putin’s state media (the only media allowed to speak in that country anymore), in criticizing Biden and calling for regime change in the U.S., has lamented losing its “partner” Trump….
Here is how Republican congressman Jim Jordan responded to Joe Biden’s supposedly unscripted remark that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”: “Here’s the president potentially having more war-triggering type language than probably any president in American history,” Jordan warned. “We need to be careful and precise in things we say, particularly as commander in chief of our country.” “We need to be careful...
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