For decades now conservatives have been aided by the knee-jerk tendency of many journalists to assert a false equivalency between truth claims. ("Does the sun revolve around the earth? We'll hear both sides of this fierce debate.")

In the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections Republicans deftly exploited this tendency....

Some readers may be old enough to remember that affable confabulator-in-chief, Ronald Reagan, who notoriously conflated movie roles with real events, insisted that 80 percent of air pollution came from trees (30 years before California Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher's similar assertion in May), and claimed that, "in the Russian language...

Washington, DC - Yesterday, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that granted full legal rights to male genitals. In a 7 to 2 decision, the high court agreed with the finding of the US Court of Appeals, Eleventh District, in the case of Johnson v. Planned Parenthood. In...

Washington, D.C. - As part of what the president has dubbed his "National Healing Initiative," Mr. Obama announced late yesterday that the next recipient of the prestigious Medal of Honor will be former President George W. Bush. This most recent gesture of President Obama's post-election goodwill toward Republicans has stunned...

Washington, DC - In an apparent effort to reach an agreement with his Republican opponents, President Obama today expressed his willingness to reconsider his claims of American birth. Speaking from the Oval Office, he said:

It's time to stop playing the old Washington games. We need to work together...

Make no mistake; Democrats are not simply victims of the developments I've been describing in Parts One and Two of this series on the Tea Party movement. In fact, the Tea Party is as much the political consequence of the Obama administration as it is the...

In Part One of this three-part post, I argued that the Tea Baggers for all their varied expressions constitute more than a rag-tag band of befuddled but well meaning delusional wackos. They are also, and more importantly, the populist face of a highly organized and well-funded effort to...

It is once again the season in which voters are called upon to choose between the frightening and the feckless -- between the ruthless Republican surrogates for corporate predation, on the one hand, and their hand-wringing Democratic appeasers, on the other. Emerging as an apparent alternative is the historically familiar...

The Republican Party may embody a repellent coalition between corporate-funded predators, delusional fundamentalists, and sub-literate paranoid mobs. But they're right about one thing: Democrats, with few exceptions, are weak-willed surrender monkeys (no offense to the simian among us) who won't fight even for themselves, let alone other Americans. How many...

For some time now, whenever contemplating the political events of the day, I find myself wrestling with a troubling uncertainty. At any given moment, it's not entirely clear which group of politicians galls me more. On the one hand, we have the brazen and guiltlessly mendacious sociopaths who are setting...

We are no longer surprised that Republican scandals are so often ripe with the stench of hypocrisy. It is a fetor that frequently accompanies the predictable libidinous lapses of pious "family values" conservatives. Sanford, Ensign, Craig, Vitter, Haggard, Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Palin are only some of the more recent purveyors...

Romantic love is not for cowards. There are few things as dangerous as allowing someone to become so vitally important that life without them is unimaginable. You are rarely as vulnerable as when you allow one person to simultaneously become the object of your deepest emotional yearnings and your most...

"The Pentagon has decided that it will not award the Purple Heart, the hallowed medal given to those wounded or killed in action, to war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because it is not a physical wound."
--The New York Times, January 8, 2009.

Lesson One:...

"The only thing you'll find in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos...Voters want someone to kick ass on their behalf." When the sagacious Lone Star populist, Jim Hightower, made this observation in 1990, it was as if he was anticipating Nancy Pelosi's recent call for...

The frank comments of unapologetic anti-Obama racists across the country have recently gained a wide national audience. As Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter from Mobile, Alabama, told a New York Times reporter, "He's neither-nor. He's other. It's in the Bible. Come as one. Don't create other breeds." Another denizen of...

The ultimate political power can be defined as the power to define -- the ability to wield such hegemony over the technologies of representation that one can determine the meanings words have for others. To uncritically employ terms and phrases like "liberal," "moderate," "conservative," "elitist," "family values," "patriotism," "Big Government,"...

At this point, to wax rhapsodic over the end of the Bush regime would be a foolishly premature celebration. A lot of damage could be done between now and January of 2009. And, I don't even want to think about the possibility that John McCain could replace the current autocrat-in-chief....

OK, we all knew, deep down, that our wondrous golden boy of change would one day reveal his feet of clay. What most of us did not anticipate was just how easily they would fit into jackboots.

There has emerged a conventional wisdom among progressives that is not entirely...

The racist lynchings of the 19th and 20th centuries featured castration as a central component of those ritualized assaults. The same appears to be true of contemporary rhetorical lynchings visible in the right wing media-scape. First aired on April 23 of this year as a news item, the latest ad...

The beautiful bosom of nature will be exposed to our view. We shall enter its garden and taste of its fruits, and satisfy ourselves with its plenty. - Thomas Sprat, a founding member of the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Science, circa 1662.

Well ... you...