The Red White and Blue Pill
After 100 Days of Trump, America’s Gotten Corruption Fatigue
It’s important to remember that this is not normal. No other administration has acted so shamelessly, no administration has worked to enrich themselves from the public this was. Not normal.
College Kids Aren’t the Only Ones Demanding ‘Safe Spaces’
conservatives who get hysterical about the “delicate snowflakes” on campus should take a look at their own media-consumption habits. It’s hard to imagine anything funnier than a 70-year-old who watches 90 hours of Fox News a week and then rails against college kids who are afraid of new ideas.
But it’s not just Fox viewers. Most of the cable TV news industry is just a series of safe spaces. There are conservative channels and liberal channels, all of them huge seas of more or less unanimous opinion. Viewers tune in, suckle their thumbs, and wait to have their own opinions vomited back at them.
The ones complaining about political correctness the loudest and longest are the ones most guilty of missing the point.
Rudy Giuliani, American Soviet
in 1990, I went to Leningrad to study. The Soviet empire was in its death throes and most people there, particularly the younger ones, knew it.
But some hadn’t gotten the memo yet, and those folks, usually nice enough, often older — university administrators, check-room attendants, security guards, parents of some of my classmates, others — were constantly challenging me and other exchange students to East-versus-West debates, usually with the aim of proving that “their” way of life was better.
…
the problem with exceptionalism is that it can turn unintentionally comic with the drop of a hat. You’re made to believe you’re at the center of an envious universe, but then the world changes just enough and suddenly you’re a punchline clinging to a lot of incoherent emotions. I watched this happen with my own eyes to a lot of people in the former Soviet Union.
Matt Taibbi points out the way Soviet exceptionalism looks embarrassing in retrospect is happening right here to the GOP view of American exceptionalism.
Forbes Calls Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein Holier Than Mother Teresa
there are still huge pockets of these Fountainhead junkies who genuinely believe that the Blankfeins of the world are reviled because they’re bankers and they’re rich, and not because they’re the heads of unprosecutable organized crime syndicates who make their money through mass fraud, manipulation and the shameless burgling of public treasure.
The Ayn Rand crowd insists this is jealousy and not well earned revulsion.
Stephen Stills on Mitt Romney: ‘I Never Thought I’d See a Creepier Politician Than Nixon’
After running for years as a hard-right conservative, Romney is sprinting to the center in the final days of the campaign. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. He cast himself as a moderate back when he became Governor of Massachusetts. He’ll be whatever he thinks he has to be in order to win. He is just raw ambition with no real ideology.