A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

John McCain

  • Blogs of Christmas past

    Since content will likely be light this coming week, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to offer up some representative posts from the previous four Decembers since I started blogging, as a kind of retrospective. (Note: some of these originally appeared on my first blog, “Verbum Ipsum,” but have been imported to WP; Read more

  • Last word

    For what it’s worth (not much at this point, presumably), my top three reasons for supporting Obama: —A saner foreign policy. Hard core peaceniks and non-interventionists (among whom I count myself) will, I suspect, find much to dislike about an Obama foreign policy, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be far Read more

  • Socialism and stuff

    Great piece by Hendrik Hertzberg on the “socialism” nonsense: The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would Read more

  • Unhappy conservatives

    The American Conservative asked an eclectic group of thinkers on the Right (broadly speaking) to offer their endorsements for the election. Interestingly, by my count there are four Obama voters, two McCain voters, and twelve people who say they will either vote third party, write someone in, or not vote at all. This isn’t too Read more

  • Fear of a liberal planet

    Under some circumstances I might be sympathetic to the argument that handing both Congress and the presidency to the same party is a bad idea. After all, our system of government is based on the principle of checks and balances, and one-party rule can lead to corruption and abuse of power in short order. But Read more

  • Annals of pandering

    As a son of western Pennsylvania I’m naturally delighted to learn from John McCain that my ancestral homeland is the most God-loving part of the country! Read more

  • Weak tea

    The RNC is now running this ad (at least in our television market): Are voters not supposed to notice that John McCain also lacks executive experience and hasn’t sat in the Oval Office during a crisis? Weak. They’ve also been running that ridiculous “I’m Joe the Plumber” ad about how that commie Obama will raise Read more

  • Why vote fraud essentially does not exist

    If, like John McCain, you’re were worried about ACORN destroying the fabric of our democracy, you should read this. Read more

  • “Spread the wealth”

    Daniel Larison: […] the idea that the message of Spread The Wealth would be a political loser at the present time is bizarre, which makes McCain’s insistence on identifying Obama as the “spread the wealth” candidate even more bizarre. I mean, does McCain want to get crushed in a landslide? Let’s think about this. There Read more

  • The political theology of mainline Protestants?

    This article at Harper’s argues that the rejection of the McCain/Palin ticket by mainstream Protestants that Steve Waldman described is a matter of theological as much as political differences (via Andrew Sullivan): For the mainstream Protestant, Palin is engaging in what Reinhold Niebuhr calls “the idolatry of America.” As Niebuhr would have it, an American Read more