Current Wisdom

...And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine...

...All of Bush's extremism comes from the Reagan years...

...The public outrage confirms that deeper values have indeed changed beneath the surfaces of public life—that what was tolerated or excused in public figures in the recent past is now intolerable and effectively forbidden...

...December 17, 2002] THE NEW REPUBLIC The susceptible Martin Peretz, editor in chief of the venerable New Republic, eulogizes a political messiah and alas falls prey to the conspiracy theorists of Clintonland, where the Paranoid Style c'est l'homme: Now that Al Gore has withdrawn from the campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, the media has [sic] rediscovered his virtues...

...Henry Kissinger is compelled to retreat from public life because he cannot bear to disclose the facts of the deals he does with foreign governments for corporate clients...

...Sometimes I have the feeling that I no longer live in one of the world's oldest democracies, but in the Philippines under a new Marcos...

...January 2003] "NOW" WITH BILL MOYERS (PBS) Ironic expressions of discomfort over "God in government" from an esteemed ecclesiastic in the Church of the Good Liberal, the Reverend Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson's conscience: "And for the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire government—the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary—is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate...

...December 30, 2002] UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE How soon we forget...

...Seeds could come from various parts of the world and grow into a living example of our cultural diversity...

...I now find myself once again as the lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption...

...The second coming of Mark Hanna may be cause for concern...

...Some of this was ideological—hatched in the Fox News-Wall Street Journal editorial page-Rush Limbaugh echo chamber...

...Imagine an orchard with hundreds of varieties of apples, where people could stroll down the alleys of the trees—enjoying the shade and witnessing the gradual cycle from flower to fruit...

...Suffering the progressives' heightening hysteria over a widely popular president, columnist Ted Rall forgets his numerous nights of bedwetting during the Nixon Madness, the Reagan Madness, and Bush I. Still worse, he slights the "Soviet totalitarianism" of yesteryear—the triumph of liberals in a hurry...

...December 10, 2002] THE NEW YORK TIMES From that great therapy center looking out on the Pacific Ocean, Michael Ableman, leading Maharishi of the Center for Urban Agriculture, propounds a fifteenth-century vision for downtown Manhattan, proving that Tudor England has a place in these here United States of America, post-September II: Proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site were unveiled this week—a collective vision of towering skyscrapers, amphitheaters, and broad avenues...

...Engaging in an obsessive campaign of domestic spying, assassinating American citizens, provoking baseless wars, and furiously unraveling civil protections and rights that we hold dear, George W. Bush's ersatz presidency is working hard to transform the United States from a law-abiding republic into a postmodern blend of late-Soviet totalitarianism and gold rush-era company town...

...The Republican Party can no longer wink at its past...

...And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture...

...Ask the people who know me best and I think you'll find I'm a kind of guy who is capable of hugging somebody who lost somebody and crying with them, and laughing outrageously and going out and having a good time...

...Communities across America could send handfuls of earth, thereby building the farm from the soil of the entire nation...

...December 30, 2002 & January 6, 2003] INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE While being interviewed about his possible plan to deliver America from the Bush cabal, the Honorable John Kerry breaks into a goofball narcissistic arpeggio, proving that the presidential longings of such coo-coo birds as Al Gore, Howard Dean, Gary Hartpence, and Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown, all from the Democratic Party, were not mere coincidences: "Maybe it comes from having a craggy face and being six-foot-four and a big shock of hair or something," he said...

...And so I'd like to add something to the mix: an urban farm to be built on a portion of the trade center [sic] site...

...THE PROGRESSIVE London-based fabulist John Pilger provides a reassuring report on the prodigious intellectual origins of the present administration: I interviewed Perle when he was buzzing around the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and I was struck by how truly fanatical this man was...

...December 30, 2002...

...the second coming of McKinley is cause for alarm...

...Trent Lott appears headed toward being brought down by his own words, revealing only what we already knew about the man...

...Lott, Kissinger, and Law, all unhorsed...

...But I laugh at myself all the time around here...

...No political figure in living memory has been as targeted by the media as Gore, so relentlessly ridiculed for offenses invented mostly by the media itself...

...Two to three acres could feed hundreds of people, provide employment for many, and connect New Yorkers to the source of their food...

...He was then voicing the views of total war...

...Bernard Cardinal Law, leading archbishop of the American Catholic Church, resigns when faced with the damning evidence of his own behavior, facts that might have sent a less prestigious citizen to prison...

...another Summer of Love is at hand: Mt is still startling to experience a trifecta of come-uppances with the wondrous quickness of modern American life...

...But these short bouts of praise have been the exception...

...Almost completely missing from the plans, though, was an essential element—a sense of the earth...

...The truth may be slow, but it is not impotent...

...Amnesia can be cruel: American democracy now faces its greatest menace since Joseph McCarthy, not from foreign terrorists or invaders but from cynical extremists occupying the White House...

...These folks don't even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God?' [November 11, 2002] THE NATION In the chill months following Election Day 2002, the revolutionary cadres at the Nation commune go to fantastical lengths to rekindle the old spirit of the barricades...

...If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what's coming...

...December 23, 2002] DER SPIEGEL Enron beneficiary Paul Krugman aloft again in delusions of grandeur: "It is pretty amazing the distance that this administration will go in trying to fool the public...

...As with all agriculture, the foundation of the project would be soil and seeds...

...We may never know how this right-wing onslaught influenced the campaign...

...That's why people like Perle, Wolfowitz, and other refugees from that period have found favor again...

...January 6, 2003] THE AMERICAN PROSPECT Professor Harold Meyerson, fretting in the tremulous pages of Bill Moyers's favorite charity, makes us all proud of the Florida electorate—literates and illiterates alike: Bush is the most nakedly imperial president we've had in 100 years...

...As a generator of jobs and food, a downtown farm would demonstrate that a successful economy can have local roots—that it need not only be global...

...Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life...

...November 2002] THE PROGRESSIVE Physiological observations from another of TP's dirty-minded gals, this being Kate Clinton, identified as "a humorist" by a typically agelastic TP editor: If an asshole's a muscle, Bush is a strongman...

...December 21, 2002] THE NEW REPUBLIC The baleful influence of too much Hollywood on an impressionable young mind, namely, that of the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, another of the American Left's Antsy Young Men: One of the things that has [sic] fascinated me about the Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain the level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies...

...In these events, we see confirmation for all those who over many years have patiently stuck to the hard facts and tried to persuade the country that ugly realities must be faced in order to alter things...