Tag Archives: tea partiers

Nate Cohn on the Republican Path to Victory in 2016

It’s narrow. Here’s Nate Cohn at The New Republic: [I]t looks like Republicans will need to count on the appeal of their 2016 presidential candidate and economic fundamentals to overcome the party’s limited appeal. In other words, Republicans need a … Continue reading

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“The Jesus Candidate”: Rick Santorum’s Messiah Complex

ABC News reports a weird rally declaration made by Rick Santorum this week. He sees himself as the presidential “Jesus candidate”: Santorum told the audience about a radio interview out of Boston he did earlier today [Thursday]. According to Santorum, … Continue reading

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Occupy Wall Street: The Left’s Answer to the Tea Party?

My guess is that the “occupiers” of Wall Street are on the cusp of an activist movement that will rival the Tea Party in influence: the right has its contemporary movement for underground men and the left now has its equivalent. … Continue reading

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Let My People Go: Reconsidering the Tea Party

I have of late been rethinking the meaning of the Tea Party to American politics. My first take was dismissive: this movement is the same type of Herderian nationalism that, last century, brought Hitler and his merry band of crazed … Continue reading

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The Debt Crisis: Niall Ferguson Said It Would Come To This

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, back in November of 2009, wrote the following for Newsweek: History strongly supports the proposition that major financial crises are followed by major fiscal crises. . . . This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt … Continue reading

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American Tea Party Politics Arrives in China?

Mark Lilla, writing in the New Republic, tells a fascinating anecdote, which occurred just a few years back, of an end-of-semester discussion that he had in his office with a bright student from Beijing that he taught at the University … Continue reading

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Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Human Toll

A news article in the Los Angeles Times this morning cited a statistic that startled me. I had no idea that this many service members have been dismissed from the armed services in the United States, since the early 1990s, as a result … Continue reading

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Treat China Like the Old Soviet Union: E. J. Dionne’s Awful Solution to America’s (Perceived) Decline

E. J. Dionne, in a recent piece at Truthdig, gives a tart and accurate summary of the past decade: [I]n the first decade of the new millennium, our country squandered its international advantages, degraded its power with a long and … Continue reading

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Ed Kilgore on the old in and out (groups)

At the New Republic today, Ed Kilgore has a new essay analyzing American attitudes toward broad Enlightenment values and civil libertarian principles. His bottom line: most Americans want to know whether you’re “in” or “out” before worrying about whether you should have liberty, justice, … Continue reading

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Palin-Huckabee 2012 and George Carlin

About 20 years ago, when George W. Bush’s father was president of the United States, George Carlin, in one of his stand-up routines, observed that there are three groups of dismaying people in this world, the first of which are those who are … Continue reading

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Adam Smith Specialization v. Sarah Palin Generalization

A global human society that has any chance of prospering is rational and efficient. This means that each citizen of the world selects one job (that is, one specialized activity) that he or she does for income. This is Adam Smith … Continue reading

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Total Message Control Solution #1: Just Handcuff Any Journalist Who Asks Questions That You Don’t Want to Answer

Total message control (that is, the Palin model) was on disturbing display on Sunday in Alaska. This from Glenn Greenwald: [P]rivate “guards” working for GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller forcibly detained and handcuffed a journalist as he tried to ask the candidate questions … Continue reading

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Carl Jung, Alien Longing, Dante’s Beatrice—and Sarah Palin?

In a recent Washington Post review of a couple of UFO books that have just come out, there’s a sentence that I think nicely summarizes Carl Jung’s thesis on UFOs: [P]sychologist Carl Jung proposed that UFOs symbolized a wish that … Continue reading

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Chris Hedges on the Tea Birchers

In a recent TruthDig essay, Chris Hedges (I think accurately) sizes up the Herderian Tea Party movement in America, and where it is moving us: There is a yearning by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement, … Continue reading

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Shrill and Shriller: Barack Obama is Still the Scary Black Man (to key GOP constituents)

The New York Times today had an interesting piece on how Republican Party hacks continue to demonize Barack Obama as the alien “other” in the White House, and do so in ways that are designed to keep in high alarm mode the party’s … Continue reading

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We the (White) Sheeple

Glenn Beck’s followers speak:

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Herderian Religious Cleansing, 1930s style, in Malaysia and the United States

Here’s an image of a book burning in Berlin, May 10, 1933: And here’s an image of a burned out synagogue after Krisallnacht (November, 1938): These two images are what anti-Enlightenment Herderian political action so readily devolves into. And now here … Continue reading

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Jeffersonian Islam: Feisel Abdul Rauf, the Mosque Near Ground Zero, and the Book He Wrote Six Years Ago

Feisel Abdul Rauf is the imam (preacher) at the center of the ground zero mosque controversy, and so I thought it would be interesting to read the book that he wrote six years prior to the controversy: What’s Right with Islam: … Continue reading

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Tea Party Herderian Terrorism? Mosque Building Site Fire in Tennessee Ruled an Arson

This at CBS News last night: Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb. Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF … Continue reading

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Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin Have No Jeffersonian Clothes: Ron Paul Favors the Building of the Ground Zero Mosque and Castigates Its Opponents

The so-called ground zero mosque is generating a rift between Jeffersonian libertarian conservatives and those who identify with the Herderite Tea Partiers. The latest evidence of this split can be found in a statement released by the libertarian congressman, Ron Paul, who wrote … Continue reading

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