It’s because they hate. There is no other logical explanation. After all, it’s one thing to oppose a piece of legislation and fight to keep it from being passed because you honestly disagree with it as a matter of principle. Decent people can disagree on policy. But it’s quite another to celebrate like frat boys […]
I really can’t figure out what is so hard about this. For Republicans to shut down the government — to cause real pain to hundreds of thousands of families whose members work for various government agencies, and who will now be furloughed, as if they don’t matter, because, ya know, they aren’t hedge fund managers […]
It’s official. The symbolic head of the Republican Party is not Ronald Reagan. It’s Pee-Wee Herman. It was Herman after all, as portrayed by comic actor Paul Reubens, whose only comeback to every criticism was, “I know you are but what am I?” And it is this mantra — this maddening, childlike, playground-worthy, makes-me-wanna-slap-you-in-your-damned-face mantra […]
A shorter and different version of this essay appeared shortly after Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995, in the political newsletter, Counterpunch (September 25, 1995). Some of the quotes for the article appeared in the New Orleans Times Picayune, in a feature story on Gingrich in 1995, while others […]
Published in Z Magazine, February, 1995 Affirmative action: two words that conservatives consider as obscene as any Madonna tell-all book or Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit funded by the beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts. For thirty years, they have claimed that attempts to rectify past and present discrimination by giving “preferential treatment” in employment to minorities […]
