Dirty Politics? Are You Kidding? By Jack Engelhard

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[Published a couple of years ago but STILL APPLIES]

Exclusive: Dirty Politics? You Must Be Kidding

Author: Jack Engelhard

Date Published: 2008-01-10

Dirty Politics? You Must Be Kidding

Jack Engelhard

We’ve been warned that as primary season moves along, we’ll, it’s going to get ugly. Get ready for smear campaigns, attack ads – no mercy, no prisoners.

Yes, we’re being told, Dirty Politics will rule. (Ooh. I’m so scared.)

Psst: here’s a tip. We don’t even qualify as amateurs here in America. Take Kenya, please. The whole country is in an uproar because of a dispute as to who won the latest election for the top seat. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have been hacked to death in this tribal bloodbath, villages uprooted, and thousands sent scattering.

That’s dirty politics!

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Imus in the Morning, Lenny Bruce at Night

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By Jack Engelhard

After a draught of some months, I finally got the Cable people to hook me up with Don Imus’s radio program that also appears on TV. What a relief! It’s good to hear all that irreverence and smack amid all the sanctimonious chatter now that we’re deep in the heart of yet another political season.

Here’s what I like about Imus…he tolerates no smugness. Reminds me of Lenny Bruce back when real people ruled the earth.

Today every man is certain of his views and there are no discussions, only dogmas and orthodoxies. People shout at one another. Nobody listens. Liberals especially come boxed and petrified within an agenda. They have the answer to everything. Conservatives aren’t perfect, either.

But Liberals inherited their Liberalism from their fathers and grandfathers of the 1960s and today practice their culture and politics with a vengeance.

This is Liberalism on steroids.

Back then (in the 1960s) we didn’t have answers. We had questions. We were a generation of iconoclasts. We worshipped no idols; neither Left nor Right. We had no fixed positions and we were open to all points of view, especially there at the Hip Bagel over coffee in Greenwich Village. Lenny Bruce showed up regularly as did Mort Sahl and Allen Ginsberg.

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