In the annals of ignominious pusillanimity1, few events gleam with a more sickly hue than the recent spat between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump over who was “more” responsible for the “not repeal and not replace” ObamaCare debacle a few months back. It’s only “fitting”, I suppose, that Donnie was “right”:…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Thank you again, John McCain!
Every Republican with a conscience—that is to say, all seven of them—must be down on their knees thanking John McCain for putting what is very probably the last, or at least penultimate, nail in the coffin of the Republican’s grotesque “ZombieCare” bill, so named because the only people who would benefit from its enactment are…
Don Mock—“Round Midnight”
From the VeoJam website. Visit Mock’s site as well.
Two or three, or four, or more things I hate about Harvard
The hits just keep coming, don’t they? This piece is a bit of a recapitulation—aka I’ve been lying down on the job—but Harvard, fair Harvard, whom I’ve booted around before in the past two weeks with no mean gusto—is back in the news, and not in a good way. First, and most ghastly, is the…
Ramesh Ponnuru, defending Trump’s UN speech, lays an inverted curate’s egg
What is a curate’s egg? Webster’s Third International defines it thusly: “something with both good and bad parts or qualities [so called from a cartoon in the weekly Punch depicting a curate who was given a stale egg by his bishop and declared that parts of it were excellent]”. So what is an inverted curate’s…
Alas, Poor Hillary!
Only in America (probably) could a woman running for office who received 2.7 million more votes than her opponent be reviled and ridiculed as a “loser”. Yet such is the hard fate of the hard to love Hillary Rodham Clinton. If I were really mean, I would say that Hillary can’t stop stepping on her…
Larry Summers is a big, fat liar
Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to “Harvard Sucks”. After spending 9,000+ words last week whaling away, largely on Harvard Law Professor David Kennedy but also on Harvard Law Professor Samuel Moyn, I’m back on the attack, this time beating up on former Harvard President Larry Summers, now “only” Charles W….
Oh, Say, Can You Tone It Down A Bit?
Back in the day, there were two things that I actually liked about being in the army. One was free cigarettes, but you had to go to Vietnam to get those. The other was getting to salute the flag—like a damn man, damn it—instead of standing there like an idiot with your hand over your…
Ramesh Ponnuru gives advice to Donald Trump—Yes, he’s that stupid
Over at the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru provides some serious right-wing inside baseball regarding whatever the fuck it is Donald Trump is doing playing footsie with Nancy for God’s sake Pelosi—which, if you like serious, right-wing inside baseball, is worth reading. But in his final paragraph, mighty Ramesh whiffs mightily, as it were, with the…
A World of Struggle at Harvard Law
(Author’s Note: The following is a sprawling takedown of David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle, a book that clearly got my goat.) Pankaj Mishra is the author of several fascinating books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and his new one Age of Anger, which I am struggling to get…