The Hallucinated Nation: Living in a Fever Dream
“Well, the train has pulled into the station: It’s putting out a poison steam. The cloud is rolling across the platform; It’s like you’re living in a fever dream…” Don’t Get on the Train, by the Holy Fools One reason why it’s so hard to get a handle on American politics, to say anything sensible […]
Internal Exiles in a Hard-Hearted World
The UK election is over. Now many Britons will have to learn what so many of us Americans learned long ago: you don’t live in the country you thought you lived in. The country you live in is a much colder, meaner, nastier, more bitter, unfeeling and hard-hearted place than you ever imagined. You will […]
Manliness is a Warm Gun (Bang Bang Shoot Shoot): A colloquy with David French of the National Review
In response to the mass slaughters this week, the “writer” and “political thinker” David French tweets: “Few things concentrate the mind more than the terrifying knowledge that a person might want to kill someone you love. It makes you aware of your acute vulnerability. [Here’s] why a criminal who comes to our house will face […]
Witness for the non-Prosecution: Mueller, Pelosi and Trump’s Likely Triumph
Robert Mueller’s testimony on Wednesday was the very definition of anti-climax. After months of frantic build-up by the ‘Resistance’ (“At last, Mueller is going to nail Trump to the wall!”) Mueller merely noted — mildly, haltingly but correctly — that his report laid out evidence of obstruction of justice, and that is up to the […]
No Call for Muellers: Impeachment Made Easy
This is one of my recent columns for the print version of CounterPunch. It was written several weeks ago. But the only thing that’s really changed is that Nancy Pelosi’s resistance to impeachment has grown even more adamant, even as the grounds for impeachment reach ever-more monstrous heights. The impeachment conundrum is remarkably simple. As […]
Bipolar Disorder: America Magnetized by Despair
(This is my column from the latest print version of CounterPunch Magazine.) Looking at America today, you swing back and forth between two poles, both of them magnetized by despair. At one pole, you find yourself saying that things have never been as bad as this: we are in uncharted waters, in a foundering ship […]
CIA Über Alles: The Spooky Loyalties of Evan McMullin
Evan McMullin is a former (presumably) CIA operative who once declared that his main job with the Agency was “to go out and convince al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us.” In 2010 he left the CIA (presumably) to become an investment banker, then served as an adviser and policy director for the berserk right-wing […]
Pence and the Benjamins: An Eternity of Anti-Semitism
There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of anti-Semitism lately. But in the ceaseless and almost entirely cynical media-political imbroglio that has followed the “Benjamins” tweet of Rep. Ilhan Omar, I’ve seen nothing said about perhaps the most intense and thoroughgoing form of anti-Semitism in America today: an anti-Semitism that is […]
Fake News and Phony Watchdogs: Journalists Loving the Liars They Cover
Do the American intelligence services knowingly plant false stories in mainstream newspapers? Do reporters for mainstream news agencies know of this practice? Do they approve of it? Yes, yes and yes. A 2014 story by The Intercept (which I ran across recently) revealed the collusion and kowtowing of an LA Times reporter (now at AP) […]
Don’t Speak, Memory: Resistance Apes Trump in Weaponizing Amnesia
Making the social media rounds at the moment is a transcription of Rachel Maddow’s “utterly terrifying” and “deeply chilling” take on one tidbit from Trump’s surreal and probably drug-addled rambling in front of his Cabinet this week. At one point, Trump said the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to fight Islamic terrorism. But Maddow […]