The truth can be ugly, can’t it? Here are, courtesy of frequent good guy yet employed by the American Enterprise Institute James Pethokoukis, a number of cogent (I think) charts to illustrate a recent cogent (I think) talk by Larry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “What Should the 2023 Washington Consensus Be?”,…
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The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2: Matthew Continetti and The Right
A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!
At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
I did not see this coming! The B-21 bomber is so dumb, even the Washington Post is making fun of it!
Hell no I did not! The Washington Post, not known for its skepticism regarding America’s military intellectual complex—because it’s a charter member!—just can’t stop snickering at the B-21 “bomber”, sounding a hell of lot like me! Noting that Congress has kept the big boy’s budget secret, and that the plane’s recent roll-out was as primly…
The new B-21 Bomber? Don’t you mean B-2B?
I have been making fun of the B-21 bomber, under development by the defense firm of Northrup-Grumman, and its bumbling predecessors in uselessness, the B-1 and B-2, for years. Well, we now have gotten our first look at the newbie, shown above, and, wonder of wonders, it looks exactly like the B-2, also produced by…
Another $2 trillion down the rathole
“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion! Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25…
George F. Will showing some signs of improvement. Emphasis on the “some”
Recently, I’ve slackened off making fun of George F. “the ‘F’ stands for ‘Frabjous’, son” Will, first because George has largely been a good boy, leaving the Republican Party in disgust with its abandonment of free market policies, doubling down on that disgust at the nomination of Donald Trump, and going the extra mile by…
I should grow the hell up, Daniel Drezner? I think maybe YOU should grow the hell up!
Yeah, I got Daniel Drezner—“Obfuscatin’ Dan”, I like to call him—on my mind, on my mind. I got Daniel Drezner on my mind. Again! I just got finished praising ole Obfuscatin’ Dan to the skies in a recent post for his recent post at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, calling it “absolute gold”. As…
Old Man War Machine, he jes’ keep rollin’ along
(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.) The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify…
Samantha Power and the art of looking away
(Editor’s note. Sometimes I write ‘em short, and sometimes I can’t shut up. This is one of the latter occasions.) Several hundred news cycles ago, Samantha Power’s autobiography/memoir The Education of an Idealist was in the news. Well, I am nothing if not slow, so I am just getting caught up with Samantha, who really…