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The merry month of March might well have marked the beginning of the end of political lunacy in the United States, replaced by a refreshing maturity among the electorate——never mind the various fevered fanatics currently holding public office, or hoping to. Signs are numerous that zealotry has had its day in the sun, and that radical pragmatism, if you will, shall be the Zeitgeist come November.
The great fear a year ago when President Obama unveiled his budget for 2012 was that he caved to the GOP and Tea Party hardliners, and axed dozens of vital programs and agencies. The screams were long and loud from liberal Democrats that the budget slashes would tar Obama as the first Democratic president to do what no Democrat or GOP president had dared do and that was to slash and restructure Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The fears have mostly proved groundless.
Colorblind racism is the new normal in American conservative political thought. Well after the election of the nation's first African-American president, in 2012 Republican candidates are using egregious signals and dog whistles to incite racial divisiveness as an effective tool for political gain. But when confronted about the nature of their offensive rhetoric, the answer is either an innocuous denial or dismissive retort.
From New America Media and ColorLines: Can GOP voters stomach a presidential candidate who talks about undocumented immigrants without calling them “illegals”? Such are the questions the Republican party has been grappling with in the days since Newt Gingrich, the GOP’s most recent frontrunner, broke away from the pack during CNN’s national security debate last Wednesday and uttered a fairly startling set of words on immigration.
To conservatives, the makers of movies are purveyors of socialism, the disintegration of “traditional values” and the nuclear family. As far back as the McCarthy Hearings in the 1950s, when Republican Senators tried to ferret out communist Hollywood screenwriters, friction has existed between the entertainment industry and conservative entities in the United States.
It is by no means a novel endeavor to denounce conservative media outlets for their often sinister operating practices and wanton dissemination of agenda-driven, sensationalist propaganda, which they distribute rather brazenly under the guise of “factual news.” The rather less-than-ideal qualities of institutions such as Fox News Channel, the cable news channel owned by the Murdoch media leviathan, News Corporation, seem almost so obvious as to make writing about them largely redundant. Yet Fox News Channel has managed to eclipse other cable news networks in popularity for the better part of a decade.
The positions of Ron Paul and other Republicans on the issue of healthcare—whether it be through the advocacy of unrealizable autonomy or the use of various red herrings—serve only as an impediment to access, degree of coverage and improvement in quality of care. The reality of attaining health insurance is not just about choice; for many, it’s about luck. Expanding healthcare coverage diminishes the unjust force luck has in each person’s life.
Will the center-leaning and politically roadblocked President Obama have the force to resurrect t