Left Jabs

    It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go. For healthcare, for our climate, for scientists, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO and democracy and decency. It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too, you just don’t realize it yet. -       Jimmy Kimmel, November 6, 2024   H ere we are. First full day of Trump’s second reign. I’m guessing a lot of people will be realizing a lot of unpleasant things in the next few days and weeks. So it seems a good time to revisit Jimmy Kimmel’s apt summation, which can serve us, going forward, as a sort of scorecard. We can use it to keep track of just how much of MAGA’s warped ag...

  Full disclosure: I am still looking for a way to write about the new reality about to descend on us. Meanwhile, please allow me to revisit this piece from August 2020, when Covid was overrunning the country. Remove the initial Covid references and we're left with a lens through which we can see the rise of the American oligarchs who are apparently taking over the country. Back then, I didn’t name names, but since the election, a number of these oligarchs have raised their profiles by an order of magnitude. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and a host of other billionaires have shown their true racist, sexist,   heartless, cruel, and wildly short-sighted colors. What I wrote over four years ago is at least as true now.   Fifty years of Republicanism has brought us to this. A pandemic so out of control, the world sees us as a slow-motion car crash they can’t look away from. An economic nosedive, steeper and f...

  Back when Republicans were just starting to discover the political uses of deception, propaganda, and dirty tricks, one could argue that Jimmy Carter was the first real notch on their belt. Carter’s rise — from way out in left field to the White House — is well-chronicled, and I won’t try to tell it here. But at the time, the GOP was reeling from the fall of Richard Nixon, the first in a long line of bad-faith Republicans whose bad faith does not improve with age. It wasn’t just that Nixon had resigned in the face of his imminent removal from office. It was also that his Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, most of his lawyers, and a rogue’s gallery of underlings and dirty-tricksters had been convicted of felonies and sent to prison. The GOP had been exposed as a party happy to look outside the law for political gain, and they paid a heavy price for it. That was then. Since then, they’ve done far worse, far more often, and caused far more damage, yet they...