W.D. Ehrhart

MAGAVoter’s Lament (a pipe dream)

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First they came for the undocumented immigrants,and I did not speak out because I was happy to get rid of them. Then they came for the foreign students,and I did not speak out because they were foreign. Then they came for the green card holders,and I did not speak out because they were taking Americans’ jobs. Then they came for the Muslims,and I did not speak out because they weren’t Christians. Then they came for the judges who ruled against them,and I did not speak out because judges are usually way too liberal. Then they came for the unions,and I started to get a little …

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What Anti-Semitism Is Not

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by W.D. Ehrhart No thoughtful person could possibly ever justify or condone what Hamas did in southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. But the level of destruction, misery, death, and inhumanity inflicted upon Gaza and the people of Palestine in the 18 months since then just plain beggars the imagination. According to the French ambassador to the United Nations, 80 percent of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed. Every hospital in Gaza has been damaged, and not one is fully functional. Half of them are closed. Famine is widespread, and the entire civilian population has been displaced multiple times. Humanitarian assistance …

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King Arthur May Have Been Right, After All

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by W.D. Ehrhart In a famous scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” King Arthur explains to a peasant named Dennis that he became king after the Lady in the Lake gave him Excalibur. Dennis replies, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” I’ve thought a lot about that scene over the years since I first saw it in 1975. Since then, this nation has been governed by a president who was elected by the voters of a single congressional district in Michigan, a president who used to peddle Chesterfield cigarettes as great Christmas gifts and …

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13 Ways of Looking at Presidents’ Day

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I. Let us combine Washington’s birthday with Lincoln’s birthday so that we can add a holiday for the man who once described the United States government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” II. There are 14 quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. on his memorial in DC, but the quote above was not included. III. Are we supposed to honor all our presidents on Presidents’ Day? IV. William Henry Harrison was our president for 32 days, barely enough time to screw things up. Lucky man. V. Warren G. Harding appointed a US Army deserter to be the first director of the …

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The Second Coming

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by W.D. Ehrhart I woke up this morning thinking of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his unsettling poem ‘The Second Coming.” Yeats wrote it over 100 years ago, and I’m pretty sure that his title is a reference to the long awaited second coming of Jesus Christ; the poem itself, however, is an utter dismissal of whatever positive implications that concept might suggest. Certainly, Yeats could not possibly have imagined the situation here in the United States of America a century after he wrote his poem, and much of the poem bears little resemblance to what we are experiencing with the Second Coming …

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The Myth of American Idealism

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by W.D. Ehrhart I first became aware of Noam Chomsky in the early 1970s after I came back to this country as a Marine Corps veteran of the American War in Vietnam and got involved in the antiwar movement through Vietnam Veterans Against the War. For well over half a century a rare voice of sanity and reason in the wilderness of American hypocrisy, lies, and dissembling, he is high on my list of American patriot heroes. My acquaintance with the very much younger Nathan Robinson, founder and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, is much more recent, but he, too, is a truth-teller. Together they …

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