I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Al Gore, A Touch of Class
Back in the day, I was never an Al Gore guy, though I certainly saw him as preferable to either George Bush or Bill Clinton. Al was Al, a stolid, earnest “idealist”, whose every ideal required a costly, centralized government program to bring it into being. The fact that such “solutions” rarely did much more…
Mike does Stuart: Michael Grunwald holds Stuart Stevens’ turncoat Republican feet to the fire, with interesting results
In a recent—well, “tirade” is probably too strong a word, but “riff” is a bit cute—in a recent post on “conscience Republican” Ross Douthat’s semi-snarky take on Republican with a different conscience Stuart Stevens’ mea culpa It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, I noted that Stu, unintentionally, I’m sure,…
Yo, Edward Gibbon! Here’s a news flash! Only MAN is “vile”!
Escape from Rome! Would that thou couldst! A number of months ago, I stumbled across Walter Scheidel’s Escape From Rome, which I thought was just the bestest book on Rome ever—the bestest I had ever read, at least—arguing that Rome “fell” in very large part because its creation was an anomaly. Unlike the other “classic”…
Alan Greenspan: More Mush from the Wimp
Alan Greenspan, 94 years young and still a pain in the ass, has some words of, well, they’re definitely, you know, words! Here are some of them: China’s current success is happening at a time when the United States sometimes looks as if it has lost its way. America’s politics have taken a populist turn….
Political Notes from All Over: Paul Krugman is cool, Ross Douthat is mad, Kamala Harris is “necessary” (probably), and Black Lives Matter is living down to Billy Barr’s expectations
Tough to be a man! Or a woman! Or even just a little kid. But stuff happens, as Donnie Rumsfeld liked to say, and this is some of the stuff that’s happening. First up is the good news: Paul Krugman is cool! I’ve frequently though not necessarily bitched about the way the Krugman too often,…
Leighton Harrell Quartet—“Let’s Cool One”
Definitely a dark night at the club, specifically, the Poetry Jazz Café, last October, featuring Virginia MacDonald, clarinet, Ben Maclean, guitar, Leighton Harrell, bass, and Graham Villette, drums. Posted by Jacob C. For more on the Quartet, go here
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…
Black Lives Matter, but so does the Magnificent Mile
Massive downtown looting in Chicago? You can bet that Fox News filmed every second of it and will be replaying that footage from now until election day and beyond. I don’t know if Chicago police “stood aside”, as they certainly did in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992,1 but I do know…
NYT “America COVID-19 Culpa” soft-pedals Northeast Disaster
Yes, Donald Trump is an asshole, as the New York Times reports in its feature article “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus”, but there’s more to the story than that. Bill de Blasio isn’t so hot either! Near the end of its long “what went wrong” piece/morality tale, the Times acknowledges that the…