I have beaten on foreign policy expert Dan Drezner so extensively that I feel a little giddy to “find myself” praising him as a film critic—a field in which I myself sometimes claim some level of expertise. (Go here, or here, or here for more.) It is Dan’s particular, self-chosen mission, so I gather, to…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Yuval Levin (and Ramesh Ponnuru and Ross Douthat) and the utter hypocrisy of the “responsible Republican”
Yuval Levin, hailed by none other than Lyin’ Paulie Ryan as a serious conservative thinker, has a ponderous, and thoroughly repulsive “think piece” up at the New York Times, Democrats, Voting Rights Are Not the Problem, in which he tries to pretend that there are good arguments for election law reform “on both sides”! Because…
Shorter Ann Hornaday: Yes, I am an airhead. Why do you ask?
Because it’s Christmas, the Washington Post has dumped upon its hapless readers several thousand words of breathless prose from film critic Ann Hornaday in the form of a frenzied dithyramb on the very unlikely subject of “America’s Most Dangerous Movie”, Oliver Stone’s JFK, quite possibly the most morally repulsive “major” film ever made in the…
Who could have seen this coming? Drones, and the people who fly them, are stupid and heartless!
Michael Levenson, writing an “overview” of a major investigation into the U.S. “drone war” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria conducted by the New York Times, reports: Drawing on more than 1,300 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, the investigation reveals that, since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed…
Betsy DeVos couldn’t destroy America’s public schools. But Randi Weingarten can.
Yeah, you remember sweet Betsy from Holland, Michigan, the billionaire busybody who came to Washington, DC as secretary of education to serve Jesus Christ and Donald Trump, and not coincidentally wreck the American public school system? Well, sweet Betsy didn’t make much headway with her scheme, but Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of…
Paul Motian & The Electric Bebop Band—“Brilliant Corners”
Paul on drums, with Jakob Bro and Steve Cardenas, guitars, Chris Cheeck and Tony Malaby, saxes, and Anders Christensen, bass. Chivas Jazz Festival 2003 Directv Music Hall, São Paulo. Posted by chicooceano.
Bob Dole and Fred Hiatt: When pretty good men do pretty bad things.
Speaking ill of the dead? That’s what Literature R Us is all about! At least some of the time. Both former Senator Robert Dole (R-Kansas) and Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt are recently deceased and are the recipients, appropriately enough, of numerous well-deserved encomia, here for Bob and here for Fred. But I’m…
Passive-aggressive hypocrisy hath made its masterpiece: The Volokh Conspiracy’s conspiracy against the rule of law
The Volokh Conspiracy is a website that describes itself as “Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent”. They forgot to add “Frequently Lukidist”. The eponymous founder of said conspiracy is Eugene Volokh. To call Gene’s c.v. “glittering” is probably the understatement of the decade. A bona fide mathematical genius, he…
Hey, hey, President Biden! How many kids did you kill today? Well, not many, as it turns out.
Yes, shocking news reported by The Week’s Ryan Cooper: Joe Biden is a good guy! Who’s all but halted the “blind man’s bluff” approach to targeting “bad guys” and anyone standing next to them initiated by President Barack Obama and heavily juiced by his successor, Donald Trump. Cooper explains how the supposedly fool-proof mechanisms developed…
Ben Smith’s latest post for the New York Times is not a column about “misinformation”. It is a column OF “misinformation”.
NYT Man About the Media Ben Smith has a column up, Inside the ‘Misinformation’ Wars Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer that goes off on quite a bit of a tangent while discussing the first of a series of meetings organized by Harvard University’s Shorenstein…