What would life be without Dan Drezner? Dan is an ever-flowing cornucopia of ideas, most of them irritating, but not a few thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Let’s start with the good, a double surprise, really, because not only is Dan’s column from a few months back, Free Trade With Benefits a good one, for…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Reports of the neocons’ demise have been greatly exaggerated
Weren’t the neocons terrible? Well, they still are, and they’re still running things at both Bloomberg and the New York Times, and they still think it’s “smart” to lie to their readers. Eagle-eyed substacker Daniel Larison brings the sad but unsurprising news on both. First the Bloomberg folks have the “great” idea that President Biden…
Clarence Thomas’ “originalism” too original for Damon Root
It is, I think, “amusing” to expect intellectual consistency from a man who, like four other unscrupulous “conservatives”, found that George Bush had a constitutional right to the presidency, come hell or high water, in the very worst Supreme Court decision ever, Bush v. Gore, whose multiple hypocrisies were ably deconstructed back in the day…
Shorter Ross Douthat: Pay no attention to that orange-haired man with his hand up my ass!
Last Sunday, Ross Douthat ran a column, “Three Paths to Containing Trump”, acknowledging in a fairly straight-forward manner that Donald Trump was a monster, that the danger that he would be the Republican nominee in 2024 was a real one, and that a “strategy” was therefore needed to forestall this danger. The three strategies Ross…
Shorter Joe Biden: I cans so be as stupid as Donald Trump! Even stupider!
Politico has the bad news: “Biden goes ‘full steam ahead’ on Trump’s nuclear expansion despite campaign rhetoric”. An article by Lara Seligman, Bryan Bender, and Connor O’Brien quotes Biden as telling the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a speech given just before the close of the Obama administration in January 2017, the following: If…
Hell freezes over; Satan furious.
Well, who can blame him? The dude gets up in the morning and falls hard on his big red ass—on a floor which is freezing, by the way—all because National Review dude Charles Cooke told his National Review brethren that they should believe the New York Times! Yeah, I know you don’t believe me, so…
Chick Corea with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra—“Rhythm-a-ning”
Chick along with special guests Dan Nimmer (piano) and Alexa Tarantino (sax). No information on the date or the specific personnel, as far as I can tell. Posted by Antonio Crea
Terror From The Skies! Well, sort of.
“Iran-backed militias turn to drone attacks, alarming U.S. forces in Iraq” bellows the headline in the Washington Post. Louisa Loveluck and John Hudson unload a pulse-pounding narrative that is heavy on atmosphere, speculation, and innuendo, but short on, you know, facts, not to mention casualties. Because all this shrieking about those devilish Iranian devils and…
Lest we forget: John Boehner was a sh*t.
Okay, seriously “late” with this one, but I refuse to let my own incompetence mar the historical record, to wit: John Boehner was a shit. Big John got a lot of praise last month with the release of his tell-a-lot reminiscence, On the House, the title reflecting his fondness for, you know, potent potables. The…
Anais Drago—“Rhythm-a-ning”
Posted by Anais Drago. Special bonus feature: Anais plays John Coltrane’s solo on “Giant Steps”: Second special bonus feature! Anais sings legal advice to musicians in Italian, to the melody of John Coltrane’s solo on “Giant Steps”: