Crappy New Year!

... The old order is rapidly fadin'... *


This New Year will bring us another BS-filled presidential campaign, expected to be the dirtiest and most expensive on record as we are napalmed with lies, damned lies and poisonous partisan rhetoric.  We'll all be wanting to pull an Elvis on our TVs before it's all over...

The Euro will most likely collapse; Iraq will descend into a barely-controlled chaos; Afghanistan will remain unchanged, as it has since the dawn of time; the denouement of China’s Potemkin economy will be the centerpiece of a new global recession; and our politicians will continue to promise us lollipops and rainbows, unicorns and free money forever…

A Reasoned Look Back

Ducky has wondered aloud at the rightwing Christian fascination with Christopher Hitchens. And rightly so. My short answer is that Hitchens did not wear ideological or partisan blinders. He was a lover of truth and liberty and those were his guiding lights. We relished it when he took a rhetorical flamethrower to our enemies, but oh how it stung when he turned his rapier intellect on us! But even then, he was just so damned witty and well-reasoned! He made me change my mind on a few things, and caused me to view other things in a whole new light or with a more jaundiced eye.

I can say the same of libertarian magazine, Reason. They will skewer or defend people, politicians and movements based not upon partisanship or ideology, but on liberty and truth. No intellectual exercises to try to rescue a political hero or a cherished program, just cold-hard analysis that is also hip and funny. As they say, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll burn with rage, but you’ll never be bored with the content at Reason.

I tire of all the year end “best of” and “worst of” lists, but Reason's The Five Worst Op-Eds of 2011 is worth reading.  It starts off with a delicious lambasting of full-of-himself progressive pontificator Thomas Friedman, lampooning his famous and fulsome false-mixed-metaphor-dilemmas.  Gene Healy riffs on the headline to one of Friedman's billowy intellectual fluff pieces, "Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?"

If you think about it, we can do both.

You know, Friedman's standard fee is $75,000 a speech. It almost makes you want to go join a drum circle in McPherson Square.

He uses Peter Beinhart’s defense of Anthony Wiener to remind us why we should eschew any sympathy and instead rejoice when a rat fink politician is caught …

Bah, humbug. Political sex scandals are entertaining and edifying—they remind us not to cede power to the political class, whose members are often less responsible and more corrupt than those they seek to rule. Why not kick them when they're down? They kick us when they're up.

I love this anti-establishmentarian slam to the New York Times (moderate) House Conservative, David Brooks’ call for “Service to our Nation.”

This piece from the Times's resident "National Greatness Conservative," won largely on the strength of one line: "Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation." What can you say? Sounds better in the original German?

Strap it on; it's going to be a challenging year...

* - Bob Dylan, The Times the are a changin'