It’s “amusing”—I’m pretty sure that’s a smile (of sorts) on my face rather than a rictus of despair—watching Republican senators attempt to swallow their “pride” and pretend that Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Miami Matt Gaetz, aka “the Viceman”, is “appropriate”. The same may be said for Robert F. “Vaccine Man” Kennedy, and, well,…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Daron Acemoğlu is an idiot!
Sure, schooling Nobel Prize-winning Ph.D.s from the London Schol of Economics on the folly/hypocrisy of cherry-picking is an ugly job, but someone’s got to do it! And who better, really, than someone with a BA in English from Oberlin College? Yeah, ole Daron put his foot in it, all right, and I’m just the guy…
Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the truth prevail
On November 8, 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s first triumph, I wrote “It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear.” Today, we are not so lucky. What I had to say in my earlier post, which bore the…
Mind at the end of its tether, more or less.
If, in January 2015, someone had asked me if I could imagine that, in November 2024, the American people would be ready to re-elect as president a man who, on losing his first attempt at re-election in 2020 had summoned a mob on January 6, 2021 with the express purpose of pressuring the U.S. Congress…
Jeff Bezos thinks you’re stupid
Jeff Bezos, shown here with his lovely fiancé Lauren Sánchez, clearly has bigger things on his mind than the freedom of the press, and, really, who can blame him? Jeff, who, his intimates say, prefers to be addressed as “Hef”, also has to think about things like, well, his space program “Blue Origin”—which, unlike, say,…
A Trump victory in November will usher in a period of overt lawlessness at the national level without parallel in our history
As you may have heard, Amazon Chief and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has decided to pull an Elon Musk and grab ankles for the pleasure of his all-conquering Jefe, El Donaldo, even before Trump is in the White House. Because after Trump is in the White House, he’s going to remember, all too well,…
Why Harris is struggling: Joe Biden’s record
Kamala Harris came out of the gate like gangbusters, but now she’s slowed to an indifferent cantor. What’s the deal? The deal is, largely, the same as Hubert Humphrey’s, Al Gore’s, and Hillary Clinton’s: they can’t run away from their president’s record. Now, it’s easy to say that Joe was the victim of circumstance, though…
Lawrence Freedman and Eliot Cohen: The Silence of Two Very Black Pots
Lawrence Freedman—or “Sir Lawrence” as they call him at Kings College in London, where he is Emeritus Professor of War Studies—has an interesting blog, “Comment Is Freed”, and an interesting post at that blog, Assessing the Assessors What did analysts get wrong about the Russian invasion?, which considers a recent paper, The Russia-Ukraine War: A…
Samantha Power, powerless in Gaza
One would have to be cynical indeed—and I am not such—to enjoy the dilemma of Samantha Power, who once advocated U.S. intervention to avert whatever even looked like genocide at the drop of a hat, and who is now, as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, presiding over what looks an awful lot…
Literature R Us is moving to Substack!
Yes, I have joined the crowd. All previous posts—all 3,000 of ’em—will remain here. Enjoy!