Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison catches New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie with his hair, if not his pants down, and the results are seriously horrific. Speaking at an AIPAC get-together, Chris let fly with the following hyperbole: “Both Americans and Israelis believe—we know deep in our bones—that if the Islamic Republic of Iran…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Monday fun
For official, New Yorker-approved humor, go here. “The silent treatment, huh? Fine. I charge double for the silent treatment.” “You feel like a shadow of your former self. You feel you have no depth. You feel that if you turned sideways you’d be invisible. You feel that you’re two-dimensional. Don’t you see, Bob? There’s a…
Vile thoughts, vilely expressed
A few weeks ago New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier discarded his usual pose as a cranky, polysyllabic intellectual demi-god and wrote a shockingly intelligent piece on the rise of fundamentalist fanaticism in Israel. Among other things, Wieseltier said the following: “Like all liberal societies, Israeli society contains anti-liberal elements, and these anti-liberal elements, both religious…
Peace? Sure! Peace with frequent random murders and the occasional contrived crisis
Yesterday’s post, which implied, to quote Henry Kissinger, that peace is at hand, perhaps suggested that I’ve grown optimistic about our future. Well, not so much. Americans, and the American establishment, may be growing tired of our Afghanistan adventure, but we have yet to abandon the joys of remote-controlled murder. The Bureau of Investigatory Journalism…
Rick Santorum, God’s gift to pundits
Thank God for Rick Santorum! Just when the punditocracy was reduced to writing articles about pundits writing articles about pundits so desperate for something to write about that they will pretend that someone other than Borin’ George Romney* could win the Republican nomination, the two-term, lost by 18 points the second time around former Senator…
Suppose you gave a war and everybody got so bored they wanted to go home?
That seems to be the way things are shaking down in Afghanistan. As Slateman Fred Kaplan notes, when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated, rather offhandedly, on February 1 that “hopefully” the U.S. would be “transitioning” [that is, getting the hell out of Kabul] in 2013, rather than the previously announced/anointed victory year of 2014,…
The Upper Austrian Jazz Orchestra—“Ask Me Now”
Arranged & conducted by Michael Gibbs, featuring Christian Maurer on tenor saxophone and Primus Sitter on guitar. Recorded on April 16th 2010 in Zagreb at the Vatroslav Lisinski Hall. Posted by UAJO1991
NYT TV critic discovers sex, is not amused
Got a column to fill and nothing to fill it with? NYT scribe Neil Genzlinger knows the feeling. Although he claims he enjoys looking at naked women as much as a “crisply turned double play”—which I somehow doubt—he claims to be appalled by the rampant use of strip clubs as settings for TV shows when…
So not the New Yorker
For official humor, go here. “You don’t need a helmet. You’ve got a halo. That takes care of everything.” “Yeah, I was expecting an English racer too.” “Welcome to Hell, dude. Yeah, that’s right, Hell. You didn’t believe in global warming either, did you? Here’s how it’s going to be, for all eternity: only one…
The New York Times, Ethan Bronner, and Israel: Getting very, very desperate
“A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the missile testing site near Tehran that was destroyed in a huge explosion three months ago was developing missiles with a range of some 6,000 miles aimed at the United States,” according to Ethan Bronner, reporting in yesterday’s New York Times. According to Bronner, the official further…