Blankets, Guns and Plumbers →

The letter was an extraordinary brew of mean-spiritedness, cruelty, insensitivity, arrogance and egotism. The most quoted line from that letter, written by a man singularly incapable of empathy was "your dead kids don't trump my constitutional rights." That line is painful to read and probably makes many people angry with Joe the Plumber. The extraordinary chutzpah required to write something like that to a total stranger who has just lost a child and does not care about your opinion notwithstanding, the worst thing about that line is that it is essentially the official position of the US government.

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Who's the Socialist Now, Mitt? →

Unfortunately, Romney's expensive failure in the 2008 presidential campaign was not the last we have heard from the former liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts turned standard bearer for the far right. In the last few weeks, Romney has resurfaced helping to lead the Republican charge against President Obama's effort to pass a stimulus bill and help point the American economy towards recovery. Romney's reasons for opposing the stimulus are not that different from what we have heard from most Republicans: government spending is bad, tax cuts are the answer to everything, helping poor people is socialism and the usual nonsense that passes for economic policy from the party that essentially created this mess.

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The Republican Race that Wasn't →

There was one part of this election season, however, which was a real disappointment. That, of course, was the Republican primary. For pure theater, the cast of characters seeking the Republican nomination promised perhaps even greater drama than the Democratic primary. The Republican primary had a 1970s style curmudgeonly Cold Warrior, a slick and well-spoken 21st century capitalist, a charmingly reactionary evangelist, a perpetually angry former mayor of New York City whose personal life had been an ongoing soap opera for years, a very thoughtful and serious 19th century Whig, and, for good measure, a conservative southern senator who almost literally came from central casting.

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Joe the Plumber, Smokey the Bear and Alexander the Great

Sarah Palin and John McCain are beginning to remind me of an old, and dumb joke, that I remember from my childhood which goes something like "What does Smokey the Bear and Alexander the Great have in common?" The answer is, of course, their middle names. It seems like everybody in Sarah Palin's world has the same middle name. On the one hand, it is easy to laugh at the vice-presidential nominee's ability to take the politics of George Wallace and put it in the language of Richard Scarry, but the Republican focus on the Joe the Plumbers of America would not help that party win this election, even if they were running a better campaign.

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Lincoln Mitchell