Whenever George Will feels like phoning it in, which is every other week or so, he will find a radical feminist to make fun of. Fortunately for George, they just keep coming. A case in point is an unintentionally hilarious twofer at the New Republic, an idiot review of an idiot book, Ann Friedman’s take…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Ramesh Ponnuru—“Yes, I am a partisan hack. Why do you ask?”
Several dog years ago I pegged, or tabbed, Ramesh Ponnuru as an intelligent conservative. Obviously, Ramesh resented the charge and has been doing his level best to refute it. He’s at it again here, with the seriously fatuous “Obama’s Second Term Already Looks Like a Failure,” aggressively gliding over such Republican embarrassments as the virtual…
Murderers, left, right, and center
Everybody’s doing it, so it must be good, right? Michael Moynihan leads off the hit parade at the Daily Beast with “How 1960s Radicals Ended Up Teaching Your Kids,” detailing American academia’s endless fascination with murderers—left-wing murderers, of course. They’re so gosh-darn authentic! The murderers in residence currently include Cathy Boudin, already a member of…
Lexington High School—“Stuffy Turkey”
Another obscure Monk tune, which can sound a lot like “Flat Foot Floogie” if the musicians aren’t careful. When Monk first signed with Riverside Records, producer Orrin Keepnews had the great idea, which probably was a pretty good idea, to start off by featuring Monk playing tunes that people knew—an album of Ellington tunes and…
Steven Greenhouse, ignorant snob
Jonathan Cohn, writing in the April 29 issue of the New Republic, moans about the “Hell of American Day Care”. In France, of course, they do things much better, devoting about 1 percent of GNP to pre-school services, more than twice the U.S. budget, according to Cohn. He cites New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse,…
The war crimes of Barack Obama
The New York Times opens a window on oppression, American Style, with a powerful statement by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, an 11 year inmate at Guantánamo (11 years without being charged of an actual crime). I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime….
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “It was Albert’s particular wish that the announcement of each entre be followed by restrained yet intense applause.” “For my part, I will always remember Albert as the chef who reinvented Caneton à l’Orange for the 21st Century.” “Albert believed that God created geese to serve man, and not the other way…
Rand Paul: “When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, how should I presume?”
Anything that can make a libertarian quote T.S. Eliot can’t be all bad.* Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul took his libertarian act into the lion’s den, or at least Howard University, and tried to explain to a skeptical crowd that the Republicans are the good guys. Lincoln freed the slaves, after all. And Ronald Reagan, though…
It’s not too soon to tell that Paul Wolfowitz is a lying asshole
Yes, Paul Wolfowitz, everyone’s favorite lying asshole, is up to his old tricks again, acting like the lying asshole he is, claiming that “it is too soon to tell” if the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. After all, Paulie tells us, for decades after the Korean War ended, South Korea “struggled.” But sixty…
Margaret’s Ironies, aka Maggie we hardly knew ye
The law, or at least the likelihood, of unintended consequences rarely worked so well for humanity, I would say, as in the case of Margaret Thatcher. As I wrote earlier in a discussion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Thatcher’s massive budget cuts drastically reduced Britain’s naval presence in the Falklands, budget cuts…