This is Hillary Clinton’s “47%” moment. You can be “right,” but you can also be a gigantic asshole while saying it, and that hit Mitt Romney hard in 2012.
Thidrekr
Thidrekr
Yes, and there’s a name for it: narcissistic projection.
And before that, Theodore Roosevelt. Looking at history, though, Eisenhower was so popular that Truman was trying to get him to run as a Democrat before he settled on the Republican Party, while Roosevelt was an actual Progressive—that is, so far to the left of the GOP mainstream that the party pushed him out and he…
Funny you mention “poutine,” as fries have been standard fare at Taco Bell in Canada for years, so much so that you have to specifically ask for chips if you’d prefer them instead.
Much of this exposes the limitations of American democracy—there’s far too much reliance on the voluntary goodwill of our elected officials. It won’t happen, but here’s where things like having a nonpartisan body select a pool of qualified judicial nominees and independent redistricting would reap dividends, as it’s…
And 44% of 18-21 year-olds voted for Reagan in 1980. Even more apocalyptically, that increased to 61% of 18-24 year-olds in 1984.
The U.S., for all its faults, still has an enormous economy full of opportunity, and despite some obvious issues at present, is considerably more accepting of immigrants than many other Western nations.
Finnegans Wake is perhaps more a triumph of linguistics than literature, an absolutely insane book whose only peer may be the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an Italian book published in 1499 written in a rather impenetrable “Latinate Italian,” sprinkled with some Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, plus a generous mixture of…
That first column also illustrates the dilemma we have. We rely on the press to expose corruption, but the press itself is full of narcissists—like a fox guarding the henhouse, perhaps?
Thanks for the clarification. I would say that the U.S. has a rather particular admiration for narcissists and psychopaths—Ayn Rand comes to mind—but I also think this is a global issue, regrettably. Really shitty people know all too well how to manipulate the system to rise to the top.
A major problem (I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the “only” one) is that our system is very much set up to reward narcissists and psychopaths—they can be extremely superficially charming and confident, which tend to make for very good first impressions in an interview setting, but by the time they have…
Superdelegates are good. They help ensure that the party isn’t forced to nominate someone who has no business being in public office.
109 year old Black woman?
Certainly not now. The majority GOP states would love nothing more than to use a constitutional convention to turn the country into an eternal corporatist theocracy.
When it came to the creation of the reform-minded Progressive Era following the corruption-filled Gilded Age of the late 19th century, both the Republican and Democratic parties were corrupt—money talked then, it certainly talks now. It took decades of relentless activism to enact that change; by comparison, we’ve…
Well, if we’re talking about international taxation, you’re half right. Contrary to what you’ve said here, most nations do have corporate taxation and certainly when we’re talking about first-world industrialized nations, they have corporate taxes.
Unrelated, why do words in other languages that do not use our alphabet get translated in ways where the spelling doesn’t match the pronunciation?
I eat multi-colored heritage eggs that all come from the same farm. White, brown, light-blue, dark-red, and speckled together in the same carton—all very lovely to look at, but they all taste the same with the same consistency. I suspect any differences would mostly have to do with farm conditions and how they’re fed.