Nicolle Wallace, host, moderates as Matt Dowd and Eddie Glaude reflect on the testimony of Capitol Police Officer during the Jan. 6 Insurrection hearings. Nothing (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
The Trump Presidential Library
07/25/2021 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsThe Trump Presidential Library is not yet in the offing but it might be on the horizon and what will it look like?A long wall (Continue Reading)
Why voter suppression now?
06/26/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentAnti-Black laws and ordinances depriving Blacks of their civil rights were passed in the ante-bellum North once slavery was outlawed in many states of the (Continue Reading)
Juneteenth
06/17/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentSigned into law today is a new federal holiday celebrating the time in June, 1865, that slaves in Texas found out they had been freed (Continue Reading)
Anne Applebaum hits a new note
01/25/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentThis never occurred to me, that we might just change the subject. That is Anne Applebaum’s suggestion. Why change the subject? Because we will never (Continue Reading)
Back to school……?
01/18/2021 Pat Barrett 1 CommentOur district has voted – the Board – to go back to a choice between in class an on-line program or classroom program. It sounds (Continue Reading)
Another What if….?
01/17/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhat if we had hanged the leaders of the Confederacy? Would Reconstruction have continued? Would Blacks in the South continue living under “slavery by another (Continue Reading)
In Their Bosom
01/01/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe Old South (there is no new South) kept in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction. Fifty-five percent of African-Americans live in the (Continue Reading)
His niece nailed it
12/29/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentMary Trump said Trump will bypass the inauguration of Biden not because he hates he lost or because he hates Biden or because he wants (Continue Reading)
Listen To Donny Deutsch!
12/08/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOn Morning Joe on Dec. 7, 2020, Donny Deutsch made an extremely clear statement. Joe passed over it because I believe he still has trouble (Continue Reading)
Symbols are important
12/02/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOur language sometimes scrunches word meaning down into what is commonly heard. Symbolism is one of those words, as in “It’s only symbolic.” That takes (Continue Reading)
Slicing carefullly what commentators say
11/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentA while back, around 2018, I took Tucker Carlson to task (I hear he was devastated on reading my blog) for saying that demographic change (Continue Reading)
Role Reversal
10/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWith 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)
Many voices make one think
10/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentBack when I worked as a therapist in a mental health center, a psychiatric clinic, we charted our contacts with our patients. The medical model (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)
ad mulierem argument
10/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAn ad hominem argument, from Latin for “to or toward the man/person”, bypasses the elements of fact and evidence in a judgment and judges the (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)
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)
Nowhere to tack this
08/30/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’ve tried finding an entry to tack this latest onto but can’t find anything recent that is appropriate: the showdown in Portland between protesters and (Continue Reading)
Living on stereotypes
08/14/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentRepublicans and conservatives (same thing these days) live on stereotypes. Stereotypes are the bedrock of the way they think, especially about people. Here is an (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)
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)
Baa Baa White Sheep
07/17/2020 Pat Barrett 4 CommentsNow who’s the sheep, doing whatever Trump says, including ditching your mask during a pandemic? Hilarious. That’s how to describe the real sheep after they (Continue Reading)