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Politics

This is the archive for Politics.

• Obama, Faulkner, Mark Antony, and Revolution

  Summer, in her Facebook status, immediately pointed out the immediate point of interest to a literature person about Barack Obama’s speech this morning: He messed up the Faulkner quote.
  In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Obama embellished the quote, saying:
  As William Faulkner once wrote, “The […]

• Posted on Mar 18.08 to Politics   

• Uncommitted Delegates

  [Updated]Post-hiatus Donkey Hottie is about using literature in posts, not just recreating political arguments distilled from a few Daily Kos posts. So as the Obama/Clinton standoff starts inching itself closer and closer to a mess of a convention in Denver, I feel it is useful to bring up a great scene from Fear and Loathing: […]

• Posted on Mar 05.08 to Politics   

• Der Hitlersmiley heutzutage

  Sometime comrade-in-arms but allthetime Virginian Whet has been decrying the Tribune’s hiring of Jonah Goldberg for a while, now, and he enjoys reminding readers every time that Goldberg’s cover image for his book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning—a smiley face with a toothbrush mustache—comes […]

• Posted on Feb 11.08 to Politics, The Real   

• Private Ponzi

  It’s official. The National Guard has become a pyramid scheme. Can you imagine this, now? “No, honey, I don’t want to go to dinner at the Smiths—they’ll take out the charts and the books and the catalogs and the indesctructible containers and pressure me into recruiting.”
  What’s next, boat/vacation giveaways contingent on listening to a “no-pressure […]

• Posted on Dec 02.05 to Politics   

• We’re Just Babies… We’re Just Babies, Man

  I’ve made my share of shameful admissions on this webpage, though, I guess, maybe not that many. Anyway, one of them is that I used to be pro-life. As I write there, I was only ever pro-life in the way that, I think, most of America actually is “pro-life”: in favor of legal abortions but […]

• Posted on Sep 14.05 to Politics   

• Dream Diary n

  I dreamt this morning that George W. Bush had resigned. I woke up convinced that I’d heard it on NPR. Instead, he gets to name the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

• Posted on Sep 03.05 to Politics   

• Bourbondesh

  I feel bad about listing this post under “politics,” but what isn’t political? In any case, I lost it last night. Between watching CNN and reading nearly every major thread on dKos, I just crumbled and started sobbing. I can’t think, write, or even look at pictures of people on rooftops without noticing how […]

• Posted on Sep 02.05 to Politics   

• “Now Watch this Chord” or “Avec moi, le déluge”

  People should already imagine that I generally have only one speed when it comes to dumping shit on the government: Full. As a result, already on Tuesday morning, having just heard about the levees bursting in New Orleans, I was already looking for ways to pin this on the Bush Administration. Of course they […]

• Posted on Aug 31.05 to Politics   

• Seeing through Time

  It’s raining like crazy out here tonight, and it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve been holed up rereading Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and that has sent me (back) to Benjamin. A few lines jumped out at me tonight, and they serve as a good response to Manan’s most recent post about the mess in Iraq. These words […]

• Posted on Aug 20.05 to Politics   

• Turning a Corner

  Today is August 15th. That means that the Iraqis have to submit their constitution, taking that next big step toward getting the US to leave their country and stop the occupation. It is a bitter coincidence, then, that today was the first day that I saw a recruiter. There he was, in his uniform, by […]

• Posted on Aug 15.05 to Politics   

• Dateline: Baghdad, x/x/20xx

  The photo on the left comes to us from the future. There is a helicopter. There is a helipad. It’s Baghdad. Maybe it’s the Baghdad of August 16, 2005, after the Iraqis have submitted their constitution for a democratic republicmini-Iran. Maybe it’s the Baghdad of August 2006, a last ditch ploy to build up […]

• Posted on Aug 14.05 to Politics   

• America Sags, Demands Support

  There’s a degree to which absolutely nothing can be said about the America Supports You Freedom Walk that can be comprehensible, considering that the event, of course, is totally incomprehensible. Whet already tried. Everyone’s already making Riefenstahl jokes left and right, the lyrics to “Iraq and Roll” are getting posted, and noise is being made […]

• Posted on Aug 11.05 to Politics   

• When Gravitas is Insulting

  I know it’s a little early to, again, complain about Morning Edition, but today they played a clip of George Bush’s speech in Texas yesterday about how sad he is that the US has lost 20 Marines this week. I’ve said lots about destroying my clock radio, etc., but now I think I’ve come close […]

• Posted on Aug 04.05 to Politics   

• Cokie Plonk

  My morning routine is simple. I wake up, take a shower, and then sort of nap for about 40–50 minutes with the radio on in the background. I don’t know what started this habit, but I’ve been doing it since high school. Since NPR’s reporting has fallen to shit, I’ve started hitting the snooze bar, […]

• Posted on Aug 01.05 to Politics   

• You Can Still Hate Scalia et al. after Kelo

  IANAL. That’s my disclaimer. Still, Jett wrote on his blog the other day that he felt a little weird being with the dissent on the recent eminent domain case, Kelo v. City of New London. At first blush, I, too, agreed with the dissent, but thinking about it a bit more—as well as spending more […]

• Posted on Jul 05.05 to Politics