This column is at best a year too early. [CONGRESS CIRCA 112 – Issue: 1/12/11] Save it and reprint it next year if your prognostications come true. To be signaling the death knell for the 112th two days in, tears or not, is a bit drastic. So too is your vote of no confidence in the Tea Partiers, but it’s understandable after all the veiled and failed promises by Dems and Repubs alike over 40-plus years of ineptitude. And you should mean Hoover, not Coolidge, being the prelude to what was the complete disaster of FDR and his New Deal. If it weren’t for Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff and Woodrow Wilson’s Federal Reserve the ’29 crash would never have happened and would have rendered FDR’s presidential run in ’32 as lame as his polio-stricken legs.
—Ken Eustace
Excellent point about Coolidge, who is always given a pass over the vilifying Herbert Hoover for the horrors of the Great Depression. While Hoover fiddled like Nero while America burned, the man who held the match to the fire hazard of unregulated greed and stupidity is unquestionably Coolidge.
Nice job. Not an easy argument especially in this new deregulation climate.
—Bobby Mead
Sir,
“Anyone who has the balls to label yours truly a cynic after this recidivist crap needs to rub the fairy dust and red white & blue gook from their peepers and salute your commemorative Ollie North plate” is incredible.
Please never stop writing this column.
You sick bastard…
—SRI517220
I wouldn’t call you cynical, I would say dismayed.
—J.young
I believe you are a cynic. Because, you see, I have trusted in your usual libertarian harangue, assuming you must have some tingles where it counts on what the Republican congress will do or undo this coming year. It is the only chance to get anything back for this handout brigade run by Pelosi and Reid. I’m not one of those neophyte whiners on the Net or FOXNews simps who paints the president or those two idiots as socialists, but come on! What is the point of a national Health Care bill of that size and scope if not to restructure how the government runs the system? It is without question a broken one, but nowhere in my experience of dealing with government intervention has the state been able to fix a problem without first or permanently exacerbating it.
While it is true that it will probably all be smoke, mirrors and a lot of name-calling, I still think a change is in order. And I cannot in good conscience see how anyone with your astute observational skills and I think fairly well-rounded political views can ignore it unless you are a cynic.
So there!
—Marilyn Cho
I think cynicism is underrated. Is it realism? And who could read what you wrote and not come away defeated. Maybe it is a fixed game. Why do we vote? Really. Excellent question.
—Saint II
This is hard to digest. [THE ECHOES OF TUCSON IN THE UNITED STATES OF FANTASYLAND – Issue: 1/19/11] I am sure it took guts to write this and send it to press. It took even greater guts I think to just allow the words to come in the first place. I mean, people think this, but do they ever say it or put it out there, and not anonymously, but hardcore, like this. Seriously hardcore, dude. What the fuck? This was like three or four days after that massacre, and people everywhere are pulling in the reigns and you’re spouting ultra-freedom shit. It is unbelievable. How do you sleep?
Fucked up.
—Kiley
Thank God for you, Mr. Campion. Did you hear those fucking nuts on Meet The Press talking about forcing people to take meds or institutionalizing people based on shit they put on the Net? How about that kook congressman with his proposed bills to ban people from holding guns within 400 yards of government people? What about us? They get to fire off weapons at us? Fuck these assholes.
—Japeier Salvino
I do think a certain – not all! – blame has to go to someone like Sarah Palin, because of the unabashed odes to violence she wears like a cape. Gun sites, shooting animals, using mamma grizzly references, and these juvenile fighting references all the time like she wants to be some kind of tough guy. It’s true. I think she suffers from a clinical case of penis envy and has casually flaunted it to feel less like a wallflower. I think you may have been right way back when you called her a prom queen, or something like that. She runs from it like a scared little girl. There is a part of her that sounds so completely dull when she tries to pull it together, but far more comfortable shouting aggressive things to crowds. Again, I am not saying she is to blame, of course no one is except those who ultimately pull the trigger, but it’s there. No one can deny it.
And I think it was cute you snuck in the mosque controversy. So many people who were crying about poor Sarah Palin being roped in with lunatics were the same ones roping the ones who wanted to innocently and legally buy a spot in lower Manhattan to build an Islamic center. It’s weird how pushing one agenda further off the reality path seems to get traction, while still another is considered a witch hunt.
—Carol V.
James,
America SHOULD exist in a “what should be” state of mind, otherwise we never would have gotten rid of slavery, given women the right to vote, or cleaned up New York City from the days of Fort Apache, crack and worse. Just because the U.S.A. has a cowboy mentality that we may never shed doesn’t mean that things should, can and will get better in many (most) ways. Heck, if a complete fuck up like Robert Downey Jr. can right his own ship, anybody can.
—Chris Barrera
Why do liberals always take the opportunity to bash groups when individuals act violently? Is there a new Michael Moore film far behind?
—The Gary
Here’s to hoping James Campion isn’t in on this new civil discourse. Long live Reality Check!
—TT Roef
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of Deep Tank Jersey, Fear No Art, Trailing Jesus and Midnight For Cinderella.
