Throughout this essay I’m afraid I’ll be using the terms ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, and ‘the left’ not quite interchangeably but pretty indistinctly. ... ‘Progressives’ are what liberals call themselves now that ‘liberal’ is a slur ... and as far as I can tell ‘leftists’ are liberals who get mad if you call them liberals because liberals are all bourgeois patsies of The Man.

My feeling toward Republicans is like my feeling about sharks: of course they're stupid and vicious. It's in their nature to be mindless, ravening killing machines. It's nothing personal. They don't know any better. Pretty much the only thing you can do about them is stay out of their waters and, if you're unlucky enough to meet with one, shoot it through its rudimentary brain with a spear gun.

Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.

I’m afraid most people choose political parties based on the same question they ask about regular parties: Who else is going to be there?

The real Machiavellian genius of the First Amendment is that free speech turns out to be mostly harmless — a lot of P.C. nit-picking, dingbat conspiracy theories, tedious libertarian screeds and name calling. The only “free speech” that has any effect in a stable, well-run plutocracy is the kind protected by Buckley vs. Valeo in the form of campaign contributions.