Tina Dupuy

Recently, I went to the Broadway revival of the 1960 Tony Award-nominated play "The Best Man," written by the late Gore Vidal. John Larroquette plays Secretary William Russell, the womanizing candidate in a sham marriage who’s the more scrupulous of the two politicians vying for the presidential nomination in this imagined 1960 convention in Philadelphia. The other, Senator Joseph Cantwell, played by the other 1980s sitcom star, John Stamos, is a young conservative, ruthless and willing to do whatever it takes to win.

Presumptive nominee Mitt Romney is seemingly fixated on apologies. He’s obsessed with apologies like Bristol Palin is obsessed with teen abstinence—like BP is obsessed with clean energy—Marcus Bachmann with curing homosexual men ...

We can all stop pretending continued Republican anger about the Affordable Care Act is news. Some figured a Supreme Court ruling would settle things. And since the GOP said it was unconstitutional with the same fervor as people who’ve read the Constitution — it was easy to assume a decision from the nine justices in the highest court in the land—regardless of the outcome — would chill them out.

You can't run government like a business anymore than you can run business like a government. GOP presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, burned corporations to the ground and made millions selling off the charcoal. This private sector experience is being touted as his qualification to be president. This expertise of bankaneering--corporate raiding--is so sexy to Republicans they now parrot the line, "President Obama doesn't understand the economy," implying Romney does because he's been in the trenches breathing the fumes of leveraged buyouts.

That's like a fox claiming he has the insider knowledge to properly guard the hen house. "The farmer just doesn't understand poultry."

The future is always a dystopia and the past is always better than this mess we live in right now. That's if literature has any ability to tell us about ourselves. Stories about the future: Forewarning. Stories about the good ol' days: Heartening. Somewhere in our collective unconscious we believe there was a golden era of innocence and irresistible quaintness. The present is far from that -- so the future has to be worse. Most likely involving robots ... emoting and plotting their revenge.

The future scares us and we wish it could be more like it used to be. Therefore we freak out about change and demand tradition because it connects us to this proverbial Garden of Eden in our minds.

Republicans didn't set out to have a war on women; they wanted a war on religion. Their intention was to march two Republican-created boogiemen into a battle that would make the War on Christmas cringe: ObamaCare and ObamaIsAMuslim. The Affordable Care Act stipulates birth control be included in insurance coverage instead of forcing women to pay out of pocket for such medications. This was the shot across the bow for the GOP to start their war. Republican sage, Congressman Darrell Issa, called a bunch of men of faith (yes, all men) to testify to Congress how the provision in the health care law regarding birth control would adversely affect them.

Then the right-wing echosphere spent the next week bouncing the sound bite: "This isn't about contraception, this is about religious freedom."

America's right-wing: Afraid of Muslims, suspicious of Mormons, terrified of atheists and martyrs of religious freedom.