I'm not about to give up my Pundit Guild card yet but I'm here to own up to some bad prognosticatin'. Early this year I wrote a series of blog posts arguing that the Democratic Party (which I've viewed as the lesser evil, in this era of "Red State Fascism") was...
Madness
Mother Night We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. ~ Kurt Vonnegut   "The Nukes of October": Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon's plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security...
Presidential Eyes
I've expressed my disappointment that the Democratic primaries haven't thrown up a more demographically electable antiwar candidate (here and here). I've been accused of over-emphasizing demographics but, judging by Michael Medved's "The Blue-Eyed Rule," the opposite...
Advice for Obama
David D. Friedman & his readers suggest some things Obama can do get libertarian Republicans to vote for him ("Thoughts for Obama"): "[A] possibility that occurs to me is to take advantage of the budgetary implications of Obama's opposition to the Iraq War. If the...
McCain Victory, Part 2
In my previous post I argued that since (1) the only Dem candidates who've been able to win the presidency in the past 4 decades have been white, Protestant, southern males; (2) the country strongly prefers a Democrat for Pres in '08; and (3) most Americans regret...
The Coming McCain Victory’s Lesson for (Antiwar) Democrats
Polls & the politics betting markets suggest that Obama is the candidate most likely to be elected president. I think a McCain victory is more likely so, to get my 2 cents in before the post-McCain victory deluge, I'll explain in advance why I think the Dems will...
The Need for a Common Enemy
Even monkeys and apes are clever enough to use the threat of a common enemy as a way of reducing within-group tensions. Frans de Waal has seen wild baboons resolve a dispute by jointly threatening the members of another baboon troop, and chimpanzees in a zoo making...
Contaminated
From the May 12-18 Economist: "Soldiers in Iraq: Contaminated": Of the 1,767 troops questioned by the Pentagon's mental-health advisory team last September... less than half (47% of soldiers and 38% of marines) felt that non-combatants should be treated with dignity...
Triumph
HBO: Rome: About the Show Founded on principles of shared power and fierce personal competition, the Republic was created to prevent any one man from seizing absolute control. It is a society where soldiers can rise up from provincial commoners to become national...
The Grand Chessboard
It's so annoying when a newspaper I otherwise like has neo-imperialist politics. Last week's Economist, for example, opines that Britain, a country that has no militarily hostile neighbors and hasn't been invaded in centuries, must have nuclear weapons for...