One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts: Hendrik Hertzberg : The New Yorker
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Today's internet affords us an excellent opportunity to read the words of those to whom think in the exact opposite terms, to understand what is on their minds. What is on the minds of this New Yorker columnist is the destruction of the constitution and the the creation of a European style parliamentary system that would allow our quicker decent into socialism and the loss of "American exceptionalism", a noxious term for those of the left. He is pretty direct about his desire to somehow dispense with the horror of "Republicans", we can be thankful he has spared us the gory details of just how.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Today's internet affords us an excellent opportunity to read the words of those to whom think in the exact opposite terms, to understand what is on their minds. What is on the minds of this New Yorker columnist is the destruction of the constitution and the the creation of a European style parliamentary system that would allow our quicker decent into socialism and the loss of "American exceptionalism", a noxious term for those of the left. He is pretty direct about his desire to somehow dispense with the horror of "Republicans", we can be thankful he has spared us the gory details of just how.
Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.
