In case you’ve forgotten, Donald Trump descended his golden elevator in Trump Tower to announce his first candidacy on June 16, 2015.  His announcement was a masterpiece of the meandering Trump nonsense we’ve come to know so well that included a joke comparing ISIS to inadequate air conditioning, and this assessment of Mexican immigrants: When…

To be honest, I begin this post in somewhat of a quandary. I know where I want to get with it, but as I gave that some thought, it occurred to me that many people do not understand the difference between a “head of state” and a “head of government,” and so I should touch…

Any cold war spy novel or movie worth your time will eventually mention East Germany’s secret police known as the Stasi, officially called the “Ministry for State Security” (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in German), which operated from 1950 to 1990 and was among the most hated and feared institutions of any of the cold war communist…

I think most of us for most of our lives have been mostly unaware of politics.  By that I do not mean we’ve been ignorant, and obviously it doesn’t apply to people who live and work in that world.  We all want lower grocery prices and charges at the gas pump, reasonable health care costs,…

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity offers us a way to understand the “hold” MAGA has over so many people.  It is important to note at the outset that by “stupidity” he does not mean “dumb.”  Rather than a lack of intelligence, he was describing a psychological state where facts don’t matter, where contradictions aren’t recognized,…