He’s Not a Racist; He’s a Machiavellian Opportunist

Biden Needs to Address Why He Threw Black Males Under the Bus

Last Thursday’s debate among 10 Democratic candidates included front-runner Joe Biden. The high point of the debate was when Kamala Harris pressed hard on Biden about his views in opposition to busing to de-segregate schools. “There was a little girl in California,” she said, looking right at him, “who was part of the second class …

Trump to World: Accept You're a Loser and We Can Be Friends

Genius President Plays with Fire

Did President Donald Trump go soft at the last minute and decide the 150 Iranian souls expected to die in an attack that was “10 minutes away” should live? We’re told the planes were in the air when he had his magnanimous, humanitarian moment. It reminds me of the story told by Fyodor Dostoevsky about …

Will They Find Their Backbone?

Congress Is Being Punked

  [T]he culture rewards smartness with success because “smartness” is, definitionally, the ability to succeed in the culture. -Robert Hayman, The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law No one suggests Donald Trump is not “smart.” He has certainly figured out how to succeed in the corrupt culture we live in. But does that mean he …

Venezuelans Need To Find Their Own Solution

Trump Venezuela Coup Will End Badly For US

Rick Sanchez, an anchor for Russia’s RT-America, reported last week of “Signs that the US attempt to change-out presidents in Venezuela may be falling flat.” He was speaking about the in-plain-sight US coup attempt unfolding on the northern coast of South America against the elected president of Venezuela. Lucas Koerner, a reporter with Venezuela Analysis, …

Machiavellian from the Corporate State of Delaware

Joe Biden: Crime Fighter From Hell

I just listened to Joe Biden’s seventeen-and-a-half minute 2003 eulogy for his political friend Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat segregationist from South Carolina who became a Republican in 1964. It’s clear Biden liked the man, who he worked closely with to pass crime bills in the early 1980s.  As Thurmond’s replacement as chairman of the …

Anti-imperial ideas and my Cassandra complex

Revise the National Security Act of 1947

No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan. – Robert Kaplan, New York Times, January 1, 2019 Robert Kaplan is too much of an imperialist-military cheerleader for my taste. His 2005 book, Imperial Grunts, was an account of travels around the world reporting on the US …

An Essay on the Film VICE

Tale of a Number One Cold-Blooded Bastard

Anyone who has ever questioned the Iraq War and Dick Cheney as a vice president expropriating power as second banana to a shallow man ill-equipped to lead anything has to see the Adam McKay film Vice. It’s nothing short of incredible. The filmmaker has created a hybrid genre that’s part narrative, part essay; most important, …

A call for a more sane, more humane border

An Encounter on the US/Mexico Border

As gullible North Americans were told of disease-ridden Mexican and Central American rapists, killers and ISIS terrorists invading America from the infernal regions of the western hemisphere, on November 17 and 18, Veterans For Peace and other activist organizations sponsored a two-day border-straddling demonstration in Ambos Nogales, the term that covers both Nogales, Arizona (population …

Ahhh, the Smell of Corruption In the Morning

“Awesome Uncontrollable Male Passion” Meets Its Match

There’s so much bald-faced lying going on among Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee that the media needs to stop accepting this condition as normal and “to penetrate that lie.” That’s the view of Lawrence O’Donnell, a self-proclaimed mainstream socialist who isn’t afraid of controversy, a man who has worked in a number of roles …