Could Gary Johnson end the drug war? Libertarian candidate’s presidential bid could put sane drug policy in our grasp
Published: Salon (June 1, 2016) A recent survey found that Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who was just nominated to be the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, does surprisingly well against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump. Although his 10 percent is nothing compared to Clinton’s 38 percent and Trump’s 35 percent, it’s enough to...
My Ghostbusters Quandary
Published: The Good Men Project (May 28, 2016) When I first saw that the Ghostbusters reboot had acquired more downvotes than any other movie trailer in YouTube history, my heart sank. Sure, I’d written an article deconstructing the trailer and denouncing its flaws; then again, a year-and-a-half earlier, I’d written another piece praising the new movie for its boldness in assembling an...
On the Police
Published: The Good Men Project (May 26, 2016) As a progressive, I've found there is an argument that seems to be effective in debates with conservatives on law and order issues. What I'll say is that police officers have an inherent civic responsibility to be responsive to the concerns of their left-wing critics because they are, in a literal sense, the most important and powerful agents of the...
Lessons from “All the Way”: 3 big take-aways from LBJ’s victories that progressives can’t afford to ignore
Published: Salon (May 23, 2016) When HBO announced in 2014 that it was going to release a cinematic adaptation of “All the Way,” Robert Schenkkan’s Tony Award-winning play about President Lyndon Johnson’s successful mission to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s unlikely they knew how prescient their film would be. The politics of the 1964 election are uncannily similar to those of 2016:...
Donald Trump’s Lesson for Progressive Men
Published: The Huffington Post (May 25, 2016), The Good Men Project (May 17, 2016) I'm not here to write about the total corpus of Donald Trump's sexism. Certainly it is misogynistic to insinuate that a persistent female reporter is menstruating or insult a female lawyer who needs to pump breast milk by calling her "disgusting," but those remarks belong in a different category from the type of...
How Donald Trump would destroy America (and possibly the world)
Published: The Good Men Project (May 19, 2016) America is in a "boy who cried wolf" situation right now. We've grown so accustomed to comparing our presidents with tyrants, or insisting that a candidate's ascent to power will result in calamity, that even those of us who see an actual wolf in our midst aren't being taken seriously. The people voting for Donald Trump are well aware of our...
Right-wing media is just this gross: Donald Trump has unleashed forces more destructive than Fox News
Published: Salon (May 18, 2016) It’s hardly surprising, that Breitbart recently referred to William Kristol as a “renegade Jew” in one of its headlines. The conservative website has been shilling pretty hard for Donald Trump over the past year, so it makes sense that the less savory aspects of Trump’s political style would eventually rub off on them. What is that style, though? Outlets from The...
The Trumpian Foreign Policy in ‘Captain America: Civil War’
Published: The Huffington Post (May 16, 2016), Salon (May 15, 2016), The Good Men Project (May 12, 2016) If you're a fan of movies and haven't visited Red Letter Media's website, you should. The critics there are among the funniest and smartest on the Internet, as evidenced when they started joked about the geopolitics of "Captain America: Civil War." Founding member Rich Evans summed up the...
My Aversion to Twitter and Trump
Published: The Good Men Project (May 14, 2016) Normally when I write about social media, I pepper sources throughout my article. It's a common habit among pundits; even in casual conversation, we frequently find ourselves pulling up sources to inform our audience and legitimize our position. I'm mostly going to resist that impulse here, though, because my aversion to Twitter isn't about some...
Can you be friends with exes?
Published: The Good Men Project (May 10, 2016) The title of this article is a bit misleading. My first thought was to call it, "Can you be friends with individuals of the opposite sex?" Then I realized this wouldn't pose any potential ethical quandaries for homosexuals, so I rephrased it to "Can you be friends with individuals who you could hypothetically find sexually attractive?" That doesn't...
When America Was Almost Vespucia
Published: The Good Men Project (May 7, 2016) Did you know that America was almost called Vespucia? I'm not referring to the United States, by the way. More than five hundred years, the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci determined that the continent "discovered" by Christopher Columbus in 1492 was not, in fact, Asia. This simple realization was apparently enough to warrant naming two continents...
Captain America’s freedom fail: How the powerful few justify answering only to themselves
Published: Salon (May 6, 2016) “If we can’t accept limitations, we’re boundaryless, we’re no better than the bad guys.” So says Iron Man (aka Tony Stark) in “Captain America: Civil War,” perhaps one of the most politically nuanced films ever released as a tentpole in a blockbuster franchise. This is a movie with a distinct social message, one that merits detailed analysis, but in order for that...
Hillary v. Donald is a teachable moment for American feminism
Published: The Good Men Project (May 5, 2016) If I'm lucky enough to be alive in thirty or forty years, I can't wait to read what those historians write about the 2016 presidential election. My guess is that, more than anything else, it will be remembered as one the great epic struggles for women's rights. On the one side you have Hillary Clinton, who went from being America's most powerful...
Bernie Sanders has a big decision ahead
Published: Quartz (May 3, 2016) Staring down the DC press corps on Sunday (May 1), Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders vowed to make Hillary Clinton’s path to the party’s presidential nomination as challenging as possible. “It is virtually impossible for secretary Clinton to reach a majority of convention delegates by June 14 with pledged delegates alone,” Sandersexplained to...
Trump’s 10 Million Votes
Published: Salon (May 3, 2016), The Good Men Project (April 30, 2016) According to a recent article by Kyle Cheney of Politico, Donald Trump is about to win more primary votes than any other Republican presidential candidate... ever. The section of the article delving into this deserves to be quoted in full: "Trump surged to more than 10 million votes, according to totals that include Tuesday’s...
Thank “God” for John Boehner!
Published: The Good Men Project (April 28, 2016) I've never liked John Boehner. From the moment he weaseled his way into the House Republican leadership by virtue of his corporate connections (which, to be fair, is how most modern politicians get the job) to his penchant for maudlin emotionalism, virtually everything about the Ohioan rubbed me the wrong way. I'm still nauseous at the fact that,...
The Trump Jokes Are On Us
Published: Salon (April 26, 2016) There is an element of the Shakespearean to the Donald Trump campaign. Comedy and tragedy are often inextricably linked in melodrama, and as Trump rambles and bloviates his way through the American presidential election process (and perhaps, one fears, to the presidency itself), an intriguing narrative arc is taking shape. It began almost exactly five years ago,...