Preoccupations.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Column

Well, the election season is now in full sway, and I've got to admit I've been observing the Republican race with a mixture of delight and disgust: delight that it's been such a bad carnival act, with one candidate after another falling off the trapeze; disgust that the antipathy toward government is so intense, and the idolatry of the free market so perfervid, especially after what this socalled free market has done to our economy.

I don't get paid enough to watch all the Republican debates, but I saw enough of them to recoil. Here are two appalling remarks that barely received any attention.

Newt Gingrich on October 19: "How can I trust you with power if you don't pray?" The former Speaker and smug historian appears not to know that it's unconstitutional to apply a religious test for the holding of public office.

Mitt Romney on November 22: In defending his stance that the United States should not "cut and run" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said we should stick by our allies, as we did with "Indonesia back in the 1960s." Said Romney: "We helped Indonesia move toward modernity with new leadership." That new leadership was the dictator Suharto, who killed between 500,000 and one million of his own citizens with the help of the CIA.

Acouple of subscribers contacted me back in the fall wondering why we were neglecting the Occupy movement.

I tried to explain that, because of our publication schedule, we weren't able to sneak in even a passing reference to it until our November issue. That didn't mean we were neglecting it; we were just trapped by the old technology of the printing press and the U.S. mail. I did mention, however, that we'd dedicated a whole section on our homepage at progressive.org to covering the Occupy movement as it's been developing, and I urged them to seek...