Further Confessions of a Republican(?): Current Republican nominees are worse...
Earlier this month, snowman3 did a story on a 1964 LBJ political ad called “Confessions of a Republican.” More recently (yesterday, in fact), Mother Jones also noted the ad for the eerie similarities...
View ArticleHistory is a moving train: From Nixon and Goldwater to Donald Trump and the...
American political culture celebrates the idea of protest and dissent. But it is often extremely hostile to the dissenters and protesters themselves. America loves its civic martyrs and freedom...
View ArticleGoldwater v McGovern
For all the recent references to the aftereffects of the presidential runs of Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Democrat George McGovern in 1972, there's been remarkably little comparison of how...
View ArticleOnly Democratic voters can put Trump back in his cage
Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1964, with his appeal to angry white male voters, and subsequent GOP pandering to the farthest edges of the right-wing fringe since, created the...
View ArticleRacism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious bigotry
all seem far too prevalent among the followers of the presumptive Republican nominee. In a sense we should not be surprised. First, his rhetoric has fueled a lot of it, legitimizing open expressions...
View ArticleRepublican Party acts like it can't figure out how it spawned both Donald...
Over at The Atlantic, Michelle Cottle has penned a piece looking at some of the hand-wringing going on over Louisiana’s David Duke and his foray back into state politics. State Republican politicos...
View ArticleTrump 77: Mentality
The question had arisen before, but it blew up at the Democratic National Convention after former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had this to say in urging a presidential vote against Donald Trump:...
View ArticleAtlantic Magazine makes only 3rd endorsement in its history
In a piece for the November issue titled Against Donald Trump, the subtitle informs readersFor the third time since The Atlantic’s founding, the editors endorse a candidate for president. The case for...
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Virginia Congressional District Results, 1964; an Election Retrospective, Part 1
IntroductionPolitics in may ways is much more uniform today than it was a few decades ago, when there were conservatives and liberals and moderates in both parties. This could often result in...
View ArticleClinton uses adult 'Daisy' in new ad to link Trump, Goldwater and nuclear...
What Barry Goldwater was to nuclear weapons is what Donald Trump is to … nuclear weapons, that’s what Hillary Clinton’s latest ad seems to suggest.Clinton's new spot features Monique Luiz, the actress...
View Article"Daisy" - Redux
Perhaps the singular most famous political ad of all times ran in 1964. Lyndon Johnson ran it against Barry Goldwater by implication, as being reckless with nuclear weapons.Here is that adxYouTube...
View ArticleNovember 2016 - America at the Dawn of the Great Dismal
In mid-October Hillary Clinton was ahead of Donald Trump by 11 points, as of this morning, 11/6/16, most of that lead had dissipated thanks to the latest batch of e-mails, which may have been...
View ArticleRequiem for Republicans
The above quote by “Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater brought me up short and highlighted for me just how far the Republican Party has fallen. I doubt that Goldwater would recognize his own party...
View ArticleMartin Luther King's 1964 London speech, part 3 -- #BHM-90
In December of 1964 Martin Luther King made a speech in London — a speech which was largely lost to us until recently when a recording was discovered. You can listen to the entire speech on a recent...
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Cartoon: GOP Inspires Mental Health Care Debate
Script/Layout: Bill Prendergast Art: Will Dinski
View ArticleJournalist James Fallows thinks this is worse than Watergate
as he writes in The Atlantic in a piece titled Five Reasons Why the Comey Affair Is Worse Than Watergate.Fallows had joined the staff of Washington Monthly upon leaving graduate school in 1972, and...
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Vic Gold, An Appreciation
I first became aware of speechwriter and Washington flack Victor Gold in 1975, when my mom brought home his memoir “I Don’t Need You when I’m Right.” Mom herself was a speechwriter and Washington flack...
View ArticleThis 2016 anti-Trump ad is eerily prophetic
Everyone in the world is terrified right now that a toxic orange cloud of pure destruction might explode in front of them at any moment … and even worse, that he might use nuclear weapons.We were...
View ArticleRoy Moore win means GOP civil war? Please. Rich man's tax cut shows what...
The New York Times had a headline that read: “Roy Moore’s Alabama Victory Sets Off Talk of a G.O.P. Insurrection.” Here’s a headline from the Washington Post: “After Alabama, GOP anti-establishment...
View ArticleThe Conservative Base is Scared Witless. And Has Been for Years.
Conservatives love to be scared. And Trump loves to scare them. Rational Americans look at a caravan of desperate, hungry, thirsty, dirty vagabonds and see a people yearning to be free. But Trump...
View ArticleDonald Trump is Not the Main Problem
Yes, Donald Trump is a problem. He is a short term, immediate problem, who should be excised from office with all deliberate speed, so he won’t become a more severe longer term problem. However, he is...
View ArticleThere really is a vast right wing conspiracy.
On the yahoo.com front page there was a story with this title:“The left is abandoning consensus that immigrants are not entitled to public welfare”The phrasing immediately made my spidey sense tingle....
View ArticleI'm with Bernie Sanders, the "Lion-Hearted": Courageous, Consistent and...
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:Like many others on the left, I wondered what a post-heart attack, stent implanted Bernie Sanders would look like when he took the stage on October 15 for the...
View ArticleWhat Age are We In? The Age of Inequality. Thus the Tectonic Plates of...
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:As is often the case with New York Times’ columns by Mr. Thomas B. Edsall, I strongly disagree with his spin, his pleading for tepid solutions — and temperaments to...
View ArticleWho Can Unite the Democrats - and stop "The Right"? And Upon Which Passionate...
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:Michael Tomasky, the main New York Review of Books (NYRB) political commentator, writes in “Who Can Unite the Democrats?” (December 5, 2019 print edition) that...
View ArticleThe impeachment letter Trump could have sent to Nancy Pelosi
December 22, 2019The Honorable Nancy PelosiSpeaker of the House of RepresentativesWashington, D.C. 20515Dear Madam Speaker:I wrote you this past Tuesday to protest in the strongest possible terms the...
View Article2020 is not 1972
2020 is not 1972Recently, I’ve seen several comments on Daily Kos in which people expressed the fear that if Bernie Sanders were to become the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, the results of the...
View ArticleBarry Goldwater vs Today's GOP
Multiple requests to post a comment I made in yesterday's piece by voidstuff on Steve Schmidt into a freestanding diary have prompted me to go ahead. (Over the past 24 hours my anger about my phone...
View ArticleMaryanne Trump Barry - Will there ever be a straw.....?
I’ve voted in every election since Jimmy Carter was elected, and the only candidate who has come remotely close to the maniac in the oval office is Barry Goldwater — at least he was smart and sane. At...
View ArticleBooker, Trumpism, and neo-Confederate Rand Paul
This article originally appeared in Forward KentuckyBy BERRY CRAIGThe Civil War's outcome was still in doubt in July, 1864. But President Abraham Lincoln got some welcome news from the battlefield.Gen....
View ArticleRepublicans' Texas move on abortion, like all their rotten agenda, was 40...
Thirty-seven years ago, I wrote this editorial for Front Range Press (RIP) where I was editor/publisher at the time. The boldfacing did not appear in the original:Twenty years ago, after Barry...
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Countering the "Make America Great" Slogan and Others
The Republicans always use classless slogans. Trump’s “Make America Great” slogan relates to an abstract nationalist concept. I say abstract because a nation is many different people from different...
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David Corn: It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP...
Many people would like to believe if Donald Trump could magically be made irrelevant, the Republican Party would become…. ‘normal’ again, and not the party of American-style fascism it is today.David...
View ArticleThe Trumpist claim that we're 'a republic, not a democracy' is even more...
Trumpist Republicans are lately in the habit of repeating this doozy of a notion that the United States of America is “a republic, not a democracy” (RNAD). Often, this comes as a response to statements...
View ArticleWhy Graham falls flat.
With regards to Senator Lindsay Graham and his recent submission of a bill to criminalize abortion nationwide, much ink has already been spilled. Indeed, I come not to get into the nitty-gritty of his...
View Article"Republicans follow the Hitler line..." JFK Motivational quotes for the next...
When I awakened today, I needed motivation to do everything I can in the next few days...leading up to the midterms. I had been thinking that our current crop of Republicans are the very worst I’ve...
View ArticleWORTH REPEATING
Dear Kossacks:The recent comment by our fellow Kossack new10 (in quotes and augmented by my own comments in parentheses) is worth repeating:"Why/how the GOP has come to this (the precipice of the...
View ArticleHOW HISTORIC LIBERALISM BECAME TODAY’S RADICAL CONSERVATISM
What today’s free-market radicals and anti-others social reactionaries have in common is their willingness to impose their values on unwilling others – and a resulting rejection of both democracy and...
View ArticlePatriotic Republicans helped save the country 49 years ago. Will any step up...
On Aug. 7, 1974—49 years ago this week—three powerful Republican lawmakers met with then-President Richard Nixon and told him he wasn’t going to find a reprieve through them: He was going to be...
View ArticleExtremism is no defense, moderation, no vice. The GOP is whistling past its...
...a choice not an echo...This week's headlines bring into sharp focus the incessant strain of extremism in our lives. Extremists live among us like viruses that appear at random to create their havoc....
View ArticleMaking Goldwater Great Again
Not all that long ago, I was driving down South Broadway in St. Louis. I found myself following a Rambler American. Probably a 1963, though my knowledge of old Ramblers has grown cold over the years....
View ArticleTrump's unhinged and dystopian "Agenda 47" is his blueprint to build a...
Donald Trump is not hiding his program if he returns to power. He calls his 46 policies “Agenda 47” (an overlooked opportunity, or can’t he count?). At least he has the Nazis beat. They only had a...
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Time To Attack Trump/Vance on Competency to Hold the Nuclear Codes?
President Johnson and Barry Goldwater.In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, no angel himself, ran a campaign ad that forever changed the national landscape for political ads.Senator Barry Goldwater, his...
View ArticleLet's Beat Barry!
No, that’s not let’s go Brandon. I know that Let’s Go Brandon would have attracted more immediate notice, but I don’t like clickbait any more than you do.So, it’s Let’s Beat Barry!For those not old...
View ArticleBump And Thump
Bump is a rise in the polls after a convention or some other significant event. Thump is what the party or candidate on the other end of the bump experiences (a drop in the polls). The Democratic...
View ArticleBarry Goldwater Said What? Sixty Years ago!
Running for the presidency in the early 1960s, Barry M. Goldwater defined conservatism as needing to refrain from insisting that biblical morality, such as it is, be any part of political governance....
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Sixty years ago LBJ went all the way to win a landslide over a dangerously...
In the 1964 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, ignoring his advisers, insisted on using the campaign slogan,"In Your Heart, You Know He's Right," suggesting that he was only...
View ArticleI Dread The Next Two Years
Republicans (and Evangelical Christians) in the U.S. have become just as intolerant as the Taliban when it comes to things like abortion rights and LGBTQ rights and immigrants and on and on. They’re...
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Trump revels in lawlessness at CPAC
Donald told us Saturday morning that he was going to CPAC.He stood in adulation to a rabid crowd that had been entertained by Elon Musk the day before with a chainsaw, and the soon to be impeached...
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