What real liberals were really like

Sam Smith - Since well over half of the country hasn't ever seen a real liberal president in office, and since the media has generally bought the GOP line on liberalism, it might be useful to consider what life would be like if it hadn't been for liberals in the White House. Here are a …

Why the Schneiderman saga is especially grim

Sam Smith – I had my money on Eric Schneiderman as the last play in bringing Trump down and saving what’s left of America’s democracy – after perhaps the firing of Mueller and the legal dehydration of the New York US Attorney. Schneiderman, after all, had handled the Trump University case well and was reportedly …

Brighten things up with a new America

Sam Smith - Okay, we get it. Trump is mentally unstable, cruel, incompetent and dishonest. But if we only talk about Trump & Co, we will end up with a singularly depressive image of our land and its people. I know it's easy to do. Hell, I've been doing it myself, but increasingly I've been …

When television took over politics

Sam Smith - It's been my long held thesis that few things have altered American politics more than the arrival of television's popularity as a source of news and opinion.  As noted here before, for example, it had a profound effect on political corruption. Prior to television, corruption was a feudal arrangement i.e. politicians were …

Hey, it’s okay to talk about fascism

Sam Smith - One of the ways the editor of a progressive journal knows that things are changing is when a proposition he put forth as far back as a dozen years ago suddenly becomes respectable. This is not typically a joy but just reassurance that he wasn't as crazy as some thought back then. …

Grifter in Chief

Sam Smith - As I was continuing to puzzle over why it was so easy for me to see Donald Trump as a lying con man while millions of Americans still don't understand it, I happened to pick up an old Raymond Chandler novel, Big Sleep, featuring detective Philip Marlowe. As a teenager I had …

Reflections of a grumpy Green

Sam Smith – Although I was among those who got the national Green Party going in the 1990s, enthusiastic as I was about its goals, I was never fully pleased with some of its strategies. Even back then, fellow founder Lunda Martin called me a curmudgeon. I felt at times as though I had joined …

How we got into this mess

Sam Smith -  Disasters like President Trump don’t just happen; they typically have years of unattended, unnoticed and uncorrected precedents. For example, I have argued for at least a decade and a half that America had quietly ended its first republic and that we were in an ill-defined succession perhaps best described by a term …

Trump’s new confederacy

Sam Smith - Almost 60 years ago, when I first started covering Washington, it occurred to me that while the South had lost aspects of the Civil War, such as slavery and secession, it continued to exercise stunning power over a nation that had allegedly defeated it.  Congress at the time seemed almost a southern …

A few thoughts for those looking for a presidential candidate

Sam Smith Politics is not a religion in which your faith is being judged, but rather a pragmatic community matter based on consensus. It is okay to support someone who doesn't meet all your standards if they generally good and stand the best chance of winning. There is no lord of politics who won't forgive …

What life would be like without liberals

Sam Smith - People who complain about liberals are like the man from Virginia who went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid …

Finding greener pastures and greener voters

From a talk to the Green Party of Montgomery County, MD, May 14, 2005 Sam Smith - Ten years ago next month a small group of us staged a conference of third party activists that led to several other meetings culminating in this country's first Green presidential campaign in 1996 and, in suitably confused order, …

There’s no business like show business. . .and certainly not politics

Sam Smith – The other day I came across a poem I wrote about a week after the first Kennedy-Nixon debate (probably for Roll Call newspaper where I was working at the time): I’ll Take My Candidate Without Cream or Sugar, Thank You Pollster, spare that candidate Give him a chance to run Free from …

What we can learn from the South

Sam Smith, November 2017 - The potential rise of Roy Moore to the United States Senate is another reminder that the Civil War is not yet fully behind us. For example, there were eleven Confederate states, which now constitute about 30% of the electoral vote of the country at large. In the past 15 presidential elections, …

Trump’s lack of 5th grade skills

Sam Smith - Early this year Sarah Sloat, in Inverse, reported that a “2016 analysis found that Trump’s grammar was roughly at the fifth-grade level. While most GOP candidates used words and grammar on the campaign trail that would be associated with students in grades six through eight, Trump’s were deemed the most immature, the …