Left Jabs

Few things seem stupider to me than basing my vote on a candidate’s position on abortion. But that’s what it just came down to. Yes, I know, people with weak brains and poor educations have been doing this for decades, deciding that an innocuous medical procedure — which nobody seeks unless absolutely necessary — is a more important issue than a dying planet, a sabotaged government, and a conspiracy to make things far worse for everyone than they already are. But even as a depressingly lengthy list of overwhelming problems continues to descend upon us from a dozen directions at once, we are now forced to deal with new catastrophes soon to be unleashed by what should have been a non-problem. If abortion was ever a problem, it was one that was solved long ago, and to most of the world’s satisfaction. The case for abortion is unimpeachable from a medical, legal, and societal viewpoint, while abortion itself has become a crucial tool in responsible family planning. There is no ration...

I am a life-long customer of The New York Times, and generally a satisfied one. For sheer news-gathering firepower, they continue to stand out in a tarnished but still important field. They’ve covered — or uncovered — virtually every major story of the last century and a half. Their investigative prowess is unquestioned. Plus, they have Paul Krugman on their op-ed page, an invaluable source of level-headed insights on a wide range of subjects. He combines a Nobel-level knowledge of economics with an astute political eye that is almost always dead on. He alone is worth the paywall, at least to me. But with all that said, the Times has lately been pissing me off. They’ve become unreasonably invested in what Krugman himself has decried as “false equivalency” — better known as “both-siderism.” They continue to pretend that our two major parties are equally engaged in reasonable discourse, and are equally responsible for the fractious and violent state of the nation. The Times scrup...

Vacations, even short ones, can be hell on one’s writing schedule, so once again I offer you a rerun. Last July, I proposed an overriding motive for Trump’s behavior, one that was evident well before 2016. As motives go, it was remarkably obvious, yet to this day it goes virtually unmentioned in the media. Now, as the January 6th committee hearings heat up, it is more clear than ever that fear of punishment was the lodestar that guided Trump’s every move. Rereading this post, I realized that I might have written the exact same piece, practically verbatim, yesterday morning. From July 20, 2021: We have arrived, at long last, at the beginning of what will soon be an avalanche of legal issues that are likely to dominate the rest of Donald Trump’s life. What will come of these cases remains up in the air, and the pace of legal procedure is frustratingly glacial. But regardless of the actual charges — or the evidence being brought — it has been ...

When political discourse turns to pedophilia — which it should never, ever do — it helps to separate fiction from non-fiction. The fictional narrative, widely disseminated by QAnon-addled propagandists, is that the Democratic Party is a vast conspiracy of ravenous child abusers, who just barely managed to cover up Hillary Clinton’s bloodthirsty coven in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor. The non-fiction narrative — profusely-documented but with a much lower profile — is that both the priesthood of the Catholic Church and the ministries of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) have indulged and protected a stunningly large number of child molesters, and allowed them to enjoy long and predatory careers within their respective churches. In the last few weeks, these two stories flew somewhat under the radar, but both are worth looking at, not so much for the staggering hypocrisy of its characters — hypocrisy fatigue has long since rendered us numb — as for its legal and political i...

In the next month, five ultra-Catholic ideologues, unencumbered by any rational thought process, will decide that a fetus has more rights than its mother. When that happens, the legislatures in as many as 26 states will likely enact laws, under which a pregnant woman will, in effect, be legally obligated to carry to term every fetus that takes root in her body. Whether or not she was raped by a stranger, or by her father. Whether or not she miscarries. Whether or not the baby dies in her womb. Whether or not the baby is capable of life outside her womb. Whether or not that baby’s survival is likely to kill her. The rights of her fetus will, apparently in all cases, supercede hers. And her partner’s, too. Because for every beer-soaked asshole who will now be empowered to force his battered wife to carry his baby, there will be hundreds of responsible husbands legally barred from responsibly planning a family, or from ending a family-crippling pregnancy, or from choosing the life...

It would have been nice to see this as an emperor’s-new-clothes moment. For a naïve westerner like me, the storyline of a retired Russian colonel saying forbidden things on a major TV talk show was irresistible. The six-minute clip was pure dynamite, and it left the on-camera panel — and Russia watchers all over the world — speechless. The show was hosted by Olga Skabeeva, star media figure and Kremlin hack of the first order. Think of her as Tucker Carlson in heels. As with all Russian TV — at least as of late February — it is absolutely forbidden to say, imply, or blurt out anything that might be construed as even hinting that all is not right in the world, or that Russia’s image on the world stage is anything but stellar. Yet there was Colonel Mikhail Khodaryonok, on the show to discuss the Ukraine situation from a military standpoint, telling Russian viewers that: [I]n a way, we are in full geopolitical isolation … However much we would hate to admit this, virtually the ...

  From the afterdeck of a cruise ship now entering Nassau harbor, it's hard to summon up the anger so appropriate to these times, and so essential to this blog. A temporary condition, I’m sure. So rather than writing something new, I’m relying instead on a reprise of this post from last September, which foreshadowed several of the key issues we'll all face in the next decade. For ‘Stalin,’ just substitute ‘Putin,' and for ‘Texas,’ substitute ‘every red state,’ and you’ll get the idea. Rage over the new Texas abortion laws comes naturally to anyone with either a heart or a brain, let alone both. But beyond the unspeakably cruel restrictions on reproductive rights, beyond the wanton misogyny and toxic masculinity, beyond the predictable media firestorm that turns outrage into clickbait, there is a larger issue on the table. And it’s one we can only hope is not a trend: Texas Republicans are now openly embracing a culture of citizen-on-citizen informi...