April 2012
“…we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. “Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.”
—Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, from an op-ed in the Washington Post.
great, great blog.
thank you!
“I always feel bad, man. I promise you there is no white writer out there, who when you read a book by a white person, and you hear other white people being like, ‘Yo this white book makes me look bad.’ I’ve never met a white writer who ever gets asked questions like, ‘Well, don’t you feel bad about the way you represent white people?’ Guys, I’m not representing Dominicans, I’m representing one crazy set of like, what, 11 people? There’s like, what, 12 people in this book? There’s 10 million Dominicans, yo. I just happen to come from a family of crazy people and I think you should be allowed to write about crazy people.”
—
Junot Diaz, at New York City College of Technology in Downtown Brooklyn.
more.
