W.J. Astore Continuing our election coverage, I thought I’d try to sum up each major candidate with a single word (excluding profanities). I encourage readers to submit your own words for each candidate in the comments section below. The Democrats Clinton: Compromised. No candidate is more beholden to special interests and the establishment than…
W.J. Astore I watched last night’s Republican debate so you wouldn’t have to. Leaving aside the usual mugging by Donald Trump, the usual jousting over side issues like whether Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen, I thought I’d take an impressionistic approach to the debate. You can read the debate transcript here (if you…
Chris Hedges (Courtesy of Truthdig) The increase in nihilistic violence such as school shootings and Friday’s lethal assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic, the frequent executions of poor people of color by police, and the rise of thuggish demagogues such as Donald Trump are symptoms of the collapse of our political and cultural institutions. These…
Glenn Greenwald [Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at The Intercept.] Bush-era House Speaker Denny Hastert, who was indicted yesterday, is a living, breathing embodiment of everything sleazy and wrong with U.S. politics. That is highlighted not only by his central role in enabling every War on Terror excess, but also by this fact: Hastert’s ability to…
W.J. Astore Hillary Clinton will soon be announcing her candidacy for the presidency. She has learned from 2008, or so reports say, and will be reaching out to voters in “intimate” settings like pseudo-town halls, rather than the mass rallies of her previous candidacy, which were supposed to anoint her as the “inevitable” Democratic candidate…
Henry Pelifian Favoritism in public arenas, to include “private” sectors, has as many pitfalls as there are minds which embrace it. While favoritism in one’s private life is a preference that one may embrace as a choice (often involving one’s family and friends), favoritism in public arenas is perilous for it embraces policies and decisions based…
W.J. Astore The more the United States has come to talk about dominance, the less dominant we’ve become. To compensate, we’ve become a steroidal nation, to include the violent side effects associated with steroid use (just look at the latest stories out of the NFL about spousal and child abuse, or our steroidal police forces,…
Michael Murry. Introduction by William Astore. Robert Plant in “Stairway to Heaven” sang that “you know sometimes words have two meanings.” As Michael Murry powerfully shows in his first essay for The Contrary Perspective, nowadays words have innumerable meanings, or simply no meaning at all. And it’s by design. We live, as he memorably suggests,…
b. traven In his new “memoir” Robert Gates bites the hand of President Obama, who foolishly let him stay on as Secretary of Defense from the incompetent administration of George W. Bush. In Gates’s book, which lavishes praise on the steadfastness and intelligence of Bush in pushing war, Gates faults his new boss Barack Obama…
b. traven I am not a New Yorker but I do like that city. I have lived, at one time or another, in all three of the great cities in our country, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Each has its virtues and its downsides and all now seem to be in the hands of…
The Contrary Perspective 