(Political Ramblings from a Little Left of Center)
Today is the one-year anniversary of Parenthetical Politics. I wondered at the start if the frequency of my blog posts would have an exceptionally long wavelength. However, with 66 posts over the past year, I averaged well over one post a week. Not bad for a hobby that mostly serves as my online pressure release…
Understatement of the Year: “He’s a different kind of a guy but they say I’m a different kind of a guy, too.” – Donald Trump on Boris Johnson Today, Boris Johnson was elected as the new leader of the Tory party and will thus become Britain’s next Prime Minister. Johnson is a right-wing anti-intellectual who…
After blissfully avoiding the news on a recent vacation with friends, my impatiently awaiting newsfeed scanned like a notebook of failed B-movie plotlines. At least 1964’s “Seven Days in May” had a great cast. The 2019 version? Not so much. Within a very brief timespan: Trump explicitly sided with a North Korean dictator, calling a…
As an eager nation awaited his learned opinion, Trump finally weighed in on the Kentucky Derby controversy: The Kentucky Derby decision was not a good one. It was a rough & tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an…
Just giving a shout-out to an excellent podcast: The West Wing Weekly. For those of you who pine for the return of President Josiah Bartlet, this may be the next best thing. (For those of you who don’t know who Jed Bartlet is, I have no clue why you’re reading my blog.) Each weekly podcast…
With sincere apologies to William Blake and to a well-remembered English teacher whose passion for “The Tyger” was contagious. [Edit: And to several readers who thought this posting was weird: Yeah. It is.] Donald Donald, breeding blight, In the House that once was White, What indifferent shrug or sigh, Could frame thy imbecility? In what…
I generally find political labels to be rather pointless and I don’t consider myself to be a member of any political party. I also acknowledge that any political positioning on any scale is largely a matter of perspective. That said, I have indeed self-identified as “a little left of center” within this blog. While I…
A friend of mine recently announced the restart of her own blog focused on marketing. Since she’s brilliant, an expert in international marketing, and someone whose opinions I greatly respect, I told her I’d love to read her take on the use of marketing techniques to produce political propaganda. I went so far as to…
I’ve seen a fair number of articles lately discussing Democratic candidate options to take on Trump in 2020. While I fully understand the appeal of looking ahead to a brighter future (and a brighter President), there’s over two years between now and the next Presidential election. In the meantime, the mid-term elections this year might…
I wrote and sent this a while back. I stand by it and thought it appropriate to share in this venue. Dear Mr. President, While I didn’t vote for you, I acknowledge you as the duly-elected President of the United States. I accept that we will never agree on most issues and I will count…