Friday, 28 June 2013 on Truthout Link to article and comments The Gallup organization has released yet another dog-bites-man opinion poll which found that Americans’ confidence in Congress has fallen to a record low of 10 percent. This result is a continuation of a decades-long trend of declining approval ratings for Congress, and is justifiable based on…
Galleries
American Exceptionalism: Alibi of a Nation
Posted June 14 on Truthout. Link to article and comments Whenever a public figure bloviates about American Exceptionalism and the country’s purported heavenly mission, one is reminded of the quip attributed to Bismarck: that divine providence looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America. Accordingly, one is always on the lookout for anyone…
Christiane Amanpour Shills for U.S. Intervention in Syria
Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments Having once misled the public during the year prior to the invasion of Iraq, the media appear to be reprising that role in order to lend an air of inevitability to potential U.S. military intervention in Syria. Exhibit A is the appearance of Christiane Amanpour on The Daily…
Is War Good for the Economy?
Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments The 1960s comedy show Laugh-In included an occasional sketch in which co-host Dan Rowan played a comic general whose tag-line was “war is good for business!” In an ironic echo of that skit, an April 27 Washington Post story delivers the same message: “A steep slowdown in defense spending tied…
Crackpot Realism and the Education of David Stockman
Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments In a previous article I examined sociologist C. Wright Mills’ thesis that American foreign policy in the post-World War II era has been dominated by the crackpot realist. Briefly, Mills held that our foreign policy elites evince a groupthink, endlessly reverberated in the echo chamber of modern…
Iraq: 10 Years After, Have We Learned a Thing?
On the decennial of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the persons responsible have shown remarkably little guilt over launching an unprovoked war of aggression, even when the lamentable results might be expected to give one pause to rethink the enterprise. Marveling at the complacency about Iraq of America’s foreign policy elite as they are fawningly…
A country with bad political theater
Posted March 01, 2013 in the Washington Post “Opinions” Since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, a recurring theme of our political discourse has been how crazy Republicans appear to have become. Birthers, death panels, Sharia law, legitimate rape: The heretofore successfully repressed tendencies of the Reagan coalition blossomed like a noxious flower and have become…