The Post-Partisan Emporium

  90 Minutes That Shook the Liberals Awake PATRICK LAWRENCE Give me a sec to think. I need to make a list. Two. The genocide in Gaza, the Middle East tinderbox, Bezalel Smotrich, the lost proxy war in Ukraine, relations with Russia, the danger of nuclear war, the fate of NATO, China, the threat of war with Iran, the emergence of a new world order, Europe’s turn toward populism, third world debt, global inequality, the sharply worsening climate crisis: It is a start on the foreign side, in no particular order. Inter  the endless  alia  in these United States, I’ve got social and economic inequality, money in politics, our drift toward late-imperial bankruptcy, the corruption of the judiciary, the housing crisis from hell, Julian Assange and press freedom, the creeping censorship regime, widespread drug addiction, immigration, the price of eggs, the Pentagon budget: I will leave out Taylor Swift and stop here. So, a brief précis of the imposing problems defining the ta...

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... The Hoi Polloi Are Sick SIMPLICIUS As things dwindle down to the wire, and the country is plunged into historic political divisions pitting one extreme against other, we’re dragged along in a frenzy of misdirected aggression. Paralyzed by limbic hijack, we resort to an imitation of each other’s motions—the wisdom of the crowds replaced with a teeming madness. One of the simplistic ideals we’ve adopted in the heat of struggle is that the government is solely the problem, and that as long as we can uproot the worst of the klepto- and kakistocrats—those entrenched deepstate fungi wracking the nation’s liverspotted trunk—the country will be freed, to blossom anew like a springtime meadow. The ‘System’ as culprit: always the same faceless, nameless System, or its shadow twin of ‘the Man’—as long as we can dethrone them, victory is guaranteed, and America will be free. But in those hallucinatory throes we ignore t...

 Thanks to BrahmaFear for recommending this article... Merle Haggard and the Lost “Free Life” BY   JAMES BOVARD Facebook mail President Nixon shaking hands with country western singer Merle Haggard, and sharing a laugh onstage with the Osborne Brothers singers and The Strangers band after their Evening at White House East Room performance on St. Patrick’s Day. March 17, 1973. Photo: White House. “Is the best of the free life behind us now?” Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song “Okie from Muskogee” for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream in the 1970s, his “free life” song lamented Nixon’s lies, the Vietnam debacle, and the ravages of inflation. The issue of lost freedoms helped spur me 30 years ago to write a book titled  Lost Rights  chronicling how “Americans’ liberty is perishing ...