APRIL 26, 2019
Jordan’s Jeremiad: Bunnies, Ballerinas - and the Revenge of the Underclass? OK, I admit it - I’m a cinematic scaredy-cat. Ever since small kid days, horror movies have frightened the hell out of me. The last one I went to see was a 2018 LA Film Festival screening of Spell, which I saw because it was set and shot on location in Iceland, a country I’ve only seen from the sky and am interested in. To tell you the truth, I did manage to get Continue Reading...
This is at least the fourth time over the years that I have put up a blogpost urging Joe Biden not to run for president. My earliest recollections of Joe are from summers at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware where our families vacationed. I would be lying if I said young Joe seemed destined for politics, let alone greatness. He had little to distinguish himself from the older teenaged crowd that I aspired to be part of beyond having overcome a bad Continue Reading...
Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency have been marked by extreme controversy, divisiveness, and partisan polarization. Many contend America hasn’t been this divided since the Civil War. Shortly after 2016’s election, comedian Cecily Strong played CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger in an SNL skit, repeatedly complaining Trump “is not normal.” In fact, one of the rare things an overwhelming majority of Americans can agree on nowadays Continue Reading...
1. When Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for President Donald Trump, said to the House Oversight Committee at his open hearing yesterday, "I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat," it didn't budge the needle one bit on Trump's support among his idiot hordes of voters. They love him because he's a racist, a conman, and a cheat. They love him because he cheated and conned and got away with it and they don't give a Continue Reading...
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday formed an electoral coalition with the extremist Otzma Yehudit(Jewish Power) Party, thus giving followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane a bigger role in Israel politics. Kahane, a major violent hate group leader, founded the Jewish Defense League, seen by the FBI as the most active and dangerous terrorist group in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He also founded the party Kach, Continue Reading...
I have found the intensively covered natterings of the most vocal of freshman congressfolk, who happen to be Democratic women who rode the Blue Wave to upset victories, to be alternately boring and unhelpful. Everywhere you turn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is imparting pearls of her 29-year-old wisdom while Ilhan Omar busily digs holes with ill-advised remarks on Israel, immigration and other hot topics. But as a weary if longtime observer of too Continue Reading...
Defective Defectors Don’t Hit Trifecta Shot in glorious black and white, Cold War’s helmer Pawel Pawlikowski’s won the 2018 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director award and the film was nominated for Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or. Cold War won six European Film Awards and as of this writing has won a total of 20 prizes and been nominated for another 32. In 2015 Pawlikowski’s Ida was nommed for a cinematography Oscar and earned the Best Foreign Continue Reading...
Bureaucratic Brio: The Man Who Would Be Vice President - or Viceroy? Writer/director Adam McKay’s Vice, an all-star biographical movie about Dick Cheney is among Hollywood’s top 2018 political pictures. It’s utterly uncanny how Christian Bale completely disappears into his role as the former vice president, just as John C. Reilly does as Oliver Hardy in another biopic being released in America during the holiday season, Stan & Ollie. With Continue Reading...
At a critical moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and, after presenting them with evidence of Russian tampering, asked that they uniformly condemn it. GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others refused. The evidence just wasn’t there. But it was. And many of the same lawmakers eagerly condemned Hillary Clinton’s perceived misdeed, as reported by the FBI. So much for love of country.
Liberal democracy faces grave dangers, most significantly, perhaps, from rapacious capitalism that unremittingly concentrates wealth. Putin is another threat. After consolidating his own power in Russia, he has stepped up a campaign against liberalism abroad, first in Russia’s “near abroad” in Eastern Europe, and now the US. Is Trump his latest trophy?
For eight years, the GOP employed strategic obstructionism to stymie Obama’s mildly progressive agenda, even when his proposals, such as the Affordable Care Act or the stimulus, closely aligned with their own. Putting country first? Nope. This was pure partisanship in the service of partisanship. And it worked!
Is the so-called “liberal,” “elite” media really as cosseted and cloistered as its critics suggest? Actually, yes. Like the Democracy Party, the media – defined here as the mainstream variety – largely comprises well-educated, coastal types who have little in common (and often disdain) middle-America, working class whites. Little wonder it has earned the latter’s ire.
What happens when the purported party of the working class abandons its proletarian roots, while the other major party pushes crazed conspiracy theories, paranoia, and racism as an obfuscatory tactic to conceal its plutocratic agenda? A virulent populism that threatens the republic. Whose to blame for Trump? We all are.
How did a clownish buffoon rise from obscurity to lead one of the world’s great civilizations that produced soaring art and culture? Historians have been asking the question since the demise of the Third Reich. Hitler confounds. Here are some clues: cunning exploitation of nativist fears, exploitation of irresistible propaganda, and “bottomless mendacity.” Found familiar. It should.
