Blog

16 Dec

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

This is my 2019 end-of-year blog post before the holiday hiatus, so it seems fitting to take stock of where we've been and where we are, especially since we’re unsure—but intrepidly hopeful!—about where we're going. It needn’t be a comprehensive list; in fact, it shouldn't be, because who would want to revisit so many moments of this past year? But if we don’t take the time to notice our victories (eyes always fixed on the next struggles), we can wind up where only the failures feel real. That's what our adversaries focus on, but why should we help them do so? Instead, it's crucial to develop a taste for, a habit for, moving forward. And it's crucial to note that our wins have been considerable. On one end of the spectrum, just this past week Bill Cosby’s appeal of his 2018 sexual-assault conviction has been unanimously denied by a panel of three...

09 Dec

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Ready for another go at language? I'll resist the temptation to rave at length about how Trumpisms have leached into the speech of even serious people, polluting journalists and constitutional lawyers who now find themselves dropping "This I can tell you,” “When you look at . . . ,” and way too many gushes of incredibles and biggests and mosts for comfort.

18 Nov

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Of Donald Trump's many offenses, criminal and moral, let me add his profoundly insulting misuse of "witch hunt" to describe the process of justice now closing around him.

11 Nov

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
In the ancient Greek story, Cassandra could see into the future. She saw and prophesied doom for Troy but the Trojans called her an alarmist and no believed her, because after all who likes doom in their future? What if, we might ask, Cassandra had been prophesying Troy’s eventual victory? They still would not have believed her, because she was a woman and therefore prone to naïveté and sentimental optimism.

21 Oct

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Now that we can anxiously glimpse possible exits from these nine circles of Trump we've been treading for an eternity of three years, I realize that I have PPTSD: Political Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Probably we all do; if you don't yet, I bet you will.

14 Oct

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Okay. So we’ve learned to be alert about Trump’s creativity when it comes to diversionary tactics. To get himself out of a corner, he will do anything, including initiate a war—sacrificing American casualties and, in the case of the Kurds, the lives of allies who’d fought beside GIs against the so-called "Islamic state" caliphate. We’ve learned we need to peer behind the scenes to look for or surmise what’s really going on, which is inevitably nefarious in Trump world. So here are a few things to keep an eye on, especially now, as his lawyers realize they need to lawyer up themselves with lawyers, his minions begin to topple like bowling pins, and the vise tightens around him. Some people say that after the House impeaches him, as begins to look inevitable, the GOP-controlled Senate might actually convict him, despite previous assumptions; the polls are sinking him as if by...

07 Oct

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
At last we can proclaim a sentence so many Americans have been waiting for: the majority of registered voters—not just registered Democratic voters but all registered voters—now believe that Donald Trump should be impeached.

30 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

By the time you read this, everything will have changed again—but a girl can only work with what she’s got, and what I’ve got are words. True to character, I’ve been fascinated by the use of language—hilarious, heartbreaking, and most of all revealing— during this whole Ukraine-gate horror, this hubristic trap self-created by Trump that bodes to be what will finally bring him down. Leave aside for the moment how pundits are busy ”unpacking” the layers of corruption, or how Trump loyalists are “doubling down.” Take, for instance, the most common words used this past week by Republican members of the House and Senate when cornered by the press asking them to describe their reactions to this latest violation of law and betrayal of country by their Beloved Leader. Disturbing is the most commonly used word, barely edging out troubling. Mitt Romney was disturbed. Ben Sasse was troubled. Well,...

24 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

That’s an odd, uncomfortable title for any writing of mine. I thought I thought vengeance a waste of energy. Then a recent barrage of news stories set me off. Nothing unique about any of them, given the pattern we’re used to under patriarchy. But the barrage, across a range of contexts, kept drumming the same insult home. There’s Trump's boy, Brett Kavanaugh, confirmed to the Supreme Court for life by the narrowest of margins, after having been credibly, publicly, convincingly accused of sexual assault, and responding with an indignant tantrum before the Senate committee. Now the story breaks that additional credible witnesses contacted the FBI to testify in agreement with Dr. Blasey Ford, the survivor of his assault—but the FBI refused even to interview them. Did the FBI, pressured by the White House and GOP-dominated Senate, just cave in? Was the FBI worn out by right-wing accusations against its own...