With the election upon us, I’ll post this list of reversals, things the conservatives accused liberals of that have proved to be true of them, (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
What’s on YOUR internet?
10/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI guess browser is the proper word. Anyway, in the face of trolls and internet racists we can find really nice things on the internet. (Continue Reading)
The phony Romans
10/17/2020 Pat Barrett Add Comment“The embrace of demographic determinism is self-defeating: it causes the right to cease any attempt to do the hard work of persuasion and winning new (Continue Reading)
The Great Migration
10/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentNo, not the one Wilkerson wrote so brilliantly about. The one Brian Williams denominated thus in reference to the Republicans edging away from Donald Trump (Continue Reading)
Flotsam and jetsam of the great GOP foundering
10/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAs pieces of reality float by, I grasp at one after the other, hoping to find one large enough and stable enough to carry me (Continue Reading)
Divided
10/03/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWe live in a democracy where urging people to vote has become a “partisan issue.”
From here? Straight down or straight up?
10/03/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe HVAC guy was over today, a guy in his 50s, who casually mentioned Obama’s foreign birth and a few other Fox News hunks of (Continue Reading)
Who Are These People?
09/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentJoe Scarborough this morning asked, Who are these people? referring to people at the Trump rally who cheered when he described a reporter being injured (Continue Reading)
R.I.P. R.B.G.
09/18/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhat we hoped against has come. Before he body was cold, McConnell declared a nominee would be brought to the floor for a vote quickly. (Continue Reading)
Peer Review
09/17/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOnly one instance of this term appears in this blog:” I found that people whose knowledge and wisdom I had reason to respect presented this (Continue Reading)
whistleblew
09/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentFor the first time I heard the verb ‘whistleblow’. I don’t know if this goes under ‘language change’ or ‘from under the bus’. A very (Continue Reading)
Donald Trump wants to believe he matters……..
09/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThat is a line in John Dean and Bob Altemeyer’s new book on Trump, “Authoritarian Nightmare.” After doing a decent job of outlining Trump’s childhood, (Continue Reading)
One Trumper got it right
08/14/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAn administration official said that voting rights are a liberal left priority. He is right. The right has always gone along with efforts to keep (Continue Reading)
What Are They Clapping For?
08/09/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentTrump held a “press conference” at his country club and a reporter (the A.M. Joy host Zerlina Maxwell noted they were all females) kept pressing (Continue Reading)
To S & D
08/08/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentSo long……. For the second to the last quarter of my life (I hope) I have been trying to get to just what conservatism is. (Continue Reading)
I’ve got my answer!!
08/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentFor some years I’ve been cudgeling my brain and writing about the two tiers of what Americans call conservatism. There are the rank and file (Continue Reading)
The Final Chapter? and Where Do They Come From?
07/20/2020 Pat Barrett 3 CommentsCommunist take-overs, Fascist take-overs, we’ve seen them all and now we can sit comfortably in our living rooms and watch it happen here.It’s just in (Continue Reading)
A very partial scandal list
07/10/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentRachel Maddow made a short list of Trump scandals to show how quickly we forget. One just nudges the last one out until we have (Continue Reading)
The Tale of Little Katie Miller
07/07/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe excerpt Maddow published on the show quoted Miller as telling Soboroff: “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think (Continue Reading)
Beginnings of a long piece
02/19/2020 Pat Barrett 4 Comments[Originally published in 2017 except for the last paragraph] The arc of history sounds a bit pompous, but an ignorance of it is far-reaching in (Continue Reading)
What did you call me?
10/27/2019 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsTry to think of a word, a label, an epithet, that can be applied to White people with anything like the force the N word (Continue Reading)
What’s in Barr’s head?
10/12/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentThis one is not a fill-in-the-blank question. It is very serious. Serious because William Barr is a serious guy who had immense education, training, and (Continue Reading)
Three big things going on now that don’t involve subpoenas
05/16/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentIt is May 16, 2019 and do you know where your country is headed? We have a task force in the Persian Gulf and John (Continue Reading)