What if the South had won the Civil War? Hardly a new question, and it's doubtless one of the most common counterfactual thought exercises in American history. It's also already been recently asked--though not answered seriously--in the 2004 mockumentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America. Nevertheless, HBO is turning to some of the folks who […]

In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, former Vice President Al Gore warned about what he saw as a dire threat to American democracy. "The 'well-informed citizenry,'" Gore fretted, "is in danger of becoming the 'well-amused audience.'" In a presentation on Super Tuesday 2008 ("That's Entertainment: Politics as Theater in Campaign '08"), I elaborated […]

From the moment Donald Trump won his surprising victory on Election Day, a new cottage industry sprung up to offer sympathetic profiles of the supposedly long-overlooked and long-suffering voters who rallied to him. The New York Times has been at the forefront, delivering on-the-ground stories from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan within days of the balloting. […]

House Speaker Paul Ryan recently told National Review editor Rich Lowry that the House GOP plan to cap Medicaid and send it back to states represents what "we've been dreaming of this since I've been around -- since you and I were drinking at a keg." So, here's a look back at: Paul Ryan's "I Have a […]

On Feb. 8, 2009, CNBC talking head Rick Santelli helped launched the tea party movement with an epic rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But eight years later, as Republicans are now learning the hard way, the tea bag is on the other cheek. The signs of sizable, sustained, and seriously angry […]

So a former reality TV star won the 2016 presidential election on Tuesday. While deeply disturbing, that victory by Donald Trump was somehow altogether fitting. After all, as research from Harvard revealed, throughout the 2016 election cycle "policy issues [were] nearly absent in presidential campaign 'coverage.'" Even during the four weeks surrounding the parties' nominating […]

Washington is experiencing a bipartisan furor over the spiraling price hikes of EpiPen, the life-saving Epinephrine injector tens of thousands of American allergy sufferers depend on in case of emergency. On Wednesday, Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Republican Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee blasted Mylan CEO Heather Bresch over […]

The article below ("The Othering of the President") originally appeared on February 23, 2015 in response to Rudy Giuliani's obscene claim that "I do not believe that the president loves America." But with Donald Trump's presidential campaign trying replace its old Birther slander with a new one (that the Birther movement itself was started by […]

In 1993, the late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous paper, titled "Defining Deviancy Down." Lamenting the rising rates of crime, homelessness, and family breakdown among other American pathologies, the social scientist and member of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations warned, "We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt […]

For the second straight week, Republican nominee Donald Trump has continued his much-hyped "outreach" effort to black voters. But as the recent polling suggests, Trump is failing to convince African-Americans that he will "build the future" of the Party of Lincoln "on his legacy." That's in large part because in words and in deeds, Donald […]