Many of us who remember the Cold War not only remember reactionaries and other right-wingers hammering anyone to the left of John C. Calhoun as tools of the Kremlin but also those Republicans who erred on the side of decency and bipartisanship. Many of us also remember the incredulity and disgust many of us centrists and progressives had for the real-deal left-wing shameless apologists for the Soviet Union.

We thought it was wrong then and we still think that being a willing tool of Purim’s Kremlin is still a Very Bad Thing.

Here’s looking at you, Tucker.

Glenn is a big boy now and is old enough to know better. If the virus messes up his lungs or he leaves the health care facility in a body bag, it’s on him.

What sympathy I do have is for his caregivers and anyone he might have infected. They didn’t ask for it.

Some guys are playing “ can you top this?” games to see what outrageous falsehoods Qanons and American reactionaries can be scammed into believing next. Considering the numbers of All-American idjits more than willing to believe in pee, viagra, and horse dewormer, I’d say that the trolls are still on a roll.

I would have thought that if somebody mucks up as badly as DeSantis and Rubio have while in office, the voters would have fired them. DeSantis allowed thousands of people to die from COVID while Rubio showed the same sort of epic cowardice at Trump’s impeachment that craven Cuban politicians showed when Fulgencio Batista overthrew the last freely-elected Cuban government back in 1952. A sane electorate would fire both of them.

That the press-titutes working for Faux Noise would claim that people buffaloed by BS and peer pressure into refusing the vaccine are “free thinkers” is irony of epic proportions. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, back when I was in knee britches, one of the Republican Party’s selling points was that they were the party of clear-eyed realists, the people willing to modify their theories and policies when reality proved those theories wrong, the party of realism and reason. (Please don’t laugh, dear readers, this was a major faction of the Republican Party of over half a century ago). And there were just enough Republican politicians of that stripe to make such claims look realistic.

As we have seen, such claims began to lose credence with the rise of Reagan and turned into make-believe bunkum with the rise of people like Grover Morquist and Newt Gingrich.

Free thinking is a trait that hasn’t been encouraged in the Republican Party for over thirty years. The RINO hunters have seen to that.

There may be a handful of free-thinking Republican Party activists who know how to govern competently. At this point, I am forced to believe that the ones who remain are in their mid-nineties and older.

Their successors in the GQP are neither free thinkers or competent.

Let me be up front. I don’t like wearing masks. They’re hot and uncomfortable and even when I speak with my best diction I sound like I’m mumbling. But I wear them anyway.

I don’t know what caused me to change my attitude, that I would comply, even grudgingly. Then I remembered. Several years I took a diving trip to Sipidan. I won’t relate the details about the diving, but it was a long flight back. But what I remembered was that the passenger sitting next to me coughed and sneezed the whole darn flight (Of course I’d forgotten to pack facial tissues or a spare hanky). As a result, I caught the gift that keeps on giving. I came home sick with a cold and feeling ticked off about it. I still blame my seat mate for giving it to me.

I haven’t flown since just after the Pandemic really got going last year. I think I wore a bandana, at least after I took my seat. But for some reason or other, wearing a mask doesn’t bother me too much.

to kill their credulous followers or ruin their followers’ health. The politicians, the propagandists, and their apparatchiks may change their tune as nimbly as the Soviet Union’s Communist Party did several times in the early 1940’s, but their followers will be much longer at changing their thinking—assuming that they ever do.

You know, these righties like to say how much smarter they are than us “Libs.” Surely they heard the story of the little boy who cried “Wolf!” SOMEWHERE before they started wearing trousers?

if they were politically-clueless white southerners who later moved to Cali. Then and now I have no sympathy for those born outside the former Confederacy found waving the Confederate Battle Flag: it’s not part of their heritage and they have no business displaying it.

Moreover, I’d say that 21st century northerners and Midwesterners waving the CBF are not only disrespecting people of color, but also the men from their states of origin who fought and died to defeat the white-supremacist Confederate States of America.

I like to think there’d be room for intelligent, thoughtful former Republicans with ethics and who are solid members of the reality-based community.

On the other hand, I’d be far less welcoming to the opportunistic liars, scammers, and cultists that have run afoul of Orange Julius and seek safer harbors.

Likewise, I don’t think we should welcome former Dixiecrat (turncoats) or their progeny back into our ranks. They not only betrayed us, but their years in the Republican Party have shown what they do when unbound by compromise and feel free to exercise their political and ideological ids to maximum extent. When a man shows you what he is, believe him. And they have shown us what they are.

Let them remain in the political wilderness thrice as long as it took Moses and the Israelites to travel from Egypt to Canaan.!

capitalism are mostly economic illiterates.

I admit that this realization was a shock. I remember right-wing chest-thumpers claiming that”lefties” (is anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan) didn’t understand how the markets worked and they knew what they were doing.(And once upon a time I believed them). I honest-to-gosh thought these guys spent as much time studying economics as I thought they did running their businesses (Yeah, I have high standards. I thought these guys lived up to them. My mistake).

I began to be disabused even while Daddy Bush was in office and was completely disabused by the end of the Former Guy’s term of office. These guys are not just illiterates, but they’re ignoramuses unwilling To observe and tidy the real world to see what’s what.