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Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He's a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn't as smart as he thinks he is.
Alex Pareene -
For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.
Alex Pareene
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Most of us don't think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting 'comedic' accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
Alex Pareene -
In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.
Alex Pareene -
Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb, rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings.
Alex Pareene -
Some BuzzFeed articles are written by smart people who use complete sentences. Some of the disposable lists are witty and appear to have taken some effort to put together.
Alex Pareene -
Ideally, in the future, you'll just pay your cable company for the stream, which you'll be able to watch and manipulate through whatever means on whatever devices you like.
Alex Pareene -
Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs - like Medicare and crop insurance - that also benefit the rich.
Alex Pareene
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I think humor can be an effective way of getting the point across, but there are definitely times where I just write very earnestly.
Alex Pareene -
Modern political speechwriting is certainly a skill, and one that requires experience and practice to master.
Alex Pareene -
In case you're unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet for free.
Alex Pareene -
We're getting the sort of 'compromise' American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough, the other side will cave.
Alex Pareene -
Freedom from menial work should be a rallying cry, not a cudgel to be used against the Left. How much liberty is there in having to do something you hate in order to survive?
Alex Pareene -
'Political junkies' and liberals will watch MSNBC, and angry, old right-wingers will watch Fox.
Alex Pareene
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The goal isn't, and shouldn't be, to block Hillary Clinton. The goal is to make sure a potential President Clinton is beholden to a better Congress and a better Democratic Party.
Alex Pareene -
'Flash mobs' are reported on extensively because they're novel and can be used to stoke fears of young people and the Internet. The media, of course, have absolutely no clue what they're reporting on.
Alex Pareene -
If some modern-day David Brock wanted to defect from the conservative movement and write a tell-all focused solely on the financial chicanery of the entire right-wing nonprofit/think tank/publishing sphere, I would read the absolute heck out of it.
Alex Pareene -
Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really.
Alex Pareene -
In some future America, there could be a plausible Michael Bloomberg path to the Democratic nomination. I would love to read a column by a smart person actually attempting to persuade me of this, using evidence.
Alex Pareene -
There's no good reason that reliably liberal states should be electing senators as friendly to Wall Street as Cory Booker.
Alex Pareene
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From the late David Broder on down, the most powerful and influential of the great Washington columnists and journalists tend to cultivate the driest, least lively voices possible.
Alex Pareene -
Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people.
Alex Pareene -
The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.
Alex Pareene -
In our system of government, an opposition party doesn't have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up.
Alex Pareene