The following three articles have recently floated across my computer screen and are worth a read. Hat tips to The Smirking Chimp and Arts & Letters Daily for bringing them to my attention.

  • “Bush, The Spoiled Man-Child” by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle

    I’ve linked to Morford before — he’s a wonderful writer with a biting wit. Conservatives hate him, but he doesn’t pull any punches. This week he discusses Bush’s childishness and the implications of that character trait.

    Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and hollow and oddly deflated type of language that offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought to the political or cultural dialogue, other than to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing Bushisms.

    It’s all merely a crayon drawing, an intellectual wading pool, a big messy cartoon world populated by manly white good guys and fanged dark evil guys and we are good and They are evil and that’s all there is to it so please stop asking weird tricky polysyllabic questions.

  • “What’s the Matter with Liberals?” by Thomas Frank in The New York Review of Books

    Frank is the author of What’s The Matter With Kansas? and this article is the foreword to the paperback edition. He argues that conservatives have leveraged the “backlash narrative” that had previously been the calling card of progressive liberals.

    A newcomer to American politics, after observing this strategy in action in 2004, would have been justified in believing that the Democrats were the party in power, so complacent did they seem and so unwilling were they to criticize the actual occupant of the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, were playing another game entirely. The hallmark of a “backlash conservative” is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.” These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.

  • “Bush lies should get him tossed out” by Dave Zweifel in the Madison Capital Times

    The Editor of the Capital Times, Zweifel briefly explains the Downing Street Memo (why does it matter?) and argues that it is a justification for impeaching Bush.

    Democrats in Congress have been trying to get the Republican majority to call for congressional hearings on the memo. They have so far been stonewalled with the White House contending that “it is just flat out wrong.”

    It is clear that an investigation ought to be conducted to determine just how accurate this memo is.

    Frankly, if Bill Clinton needed to be impeached for lying about sex with an intern, George Bush ought to be tossed out of office for purposely lying to the American people.

Yes, I’m an angry, bitter liberal and a dirty hippie.