If you’re looking for “Dante, Part 1”, well, there isn’t any. I’ve never written a piece on the master of disgust, as Professor Artz, and, apparently, no one else, called him in my freshman year at Oberlin. But I alluded to Dante in my recent discussions of such ignoble figures as Dan Drezner, David French,…
Author: Alan Vanneman
How often did the New York Times make an ass of itself in televising its selection process for determining which presidential candidate to endorse in 2020? Let me count the ways.
Well, I would if I had like an infinity calculator, but I don’t so I’ll just have to guess. The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison justly pummels them for at least a dozen good reasons, including their ridiculous, though “typical”, exaggeration of instability in the Middle East, “with a nuclear arms race looking more when than…
Kim, Wootak—“Round Midnight”
Wootak Kim (Koreans like to put the “family” name first), playing a 2001 Greg Smallman. Posted by Partita Studio Need more Monk? Of course you do, Go to Mostly Monk
Trump buys never-Trumper support with Moslem blood, while Iran self-destructs
One hates to see crime rewarded, but that’s what seems to be happening in the Middle East. The outrage over Trump’s outrageous assassination of Qassem Soleimani has been half drowned in the justifiable outrage over Iran’s destruction of a Ukraine International Airlines jet, killing all 176 individuals on board. The Iranian people are mortified by…
David Brooks, also a hypocrite
Okay, that’s old news, definitely, but, well, sometimes one can’t help repeating one’s self. A couple of days ago, I ran a piece nominating Daniel Drezner, David French, Jay Nordlinger, and Ross Douthat as candidates for that wishy-washy band of stand asiders who, in death, stand outside the gates of Hell, rejected by God and…
They’re still alive!
Kidding! Kidding, kidding, kidding. Sure, I knew, or at least assumed that Mary-Kate and Ashley, the Olsen twins, shown here hawking their “Elizabeth and James” fashionware, were still alive, but not that they were, you know, still commercially viable. I mean, wasn’t their shelf-life roughly contemporaneous with the “if there’s grass on the infield, play…
2020 startin’ off moist! “Conservatives” wet their pants with joy, liberals with fear, while only the hypocrites stay dry
Happy New Year, n’est-ce pas? Or, perhaps more appropriately, WTF? I’m getting too old for this shit, and I didn’t sign up for it in the first place. In the old days, like December 31, 2019, one of the harshest, and truest, charges against Vladimir Putin is that he carried out the assassination of people…
Is Bret Stephens too smart for his own good?
Poor Bret Stephens. He went into town, just tryin’ to do right, and look what happened to him! Well, don’t let no one tell you them dogs won’t bite, n’est-ce pas?1 A couple of days ago—well, in dog time—Bret wrote a column “The Secrets of Jewish Genius”, that, in its original form cited a “study”…
Qassem Soleimani didn’t kill 600 American soldiers in Iraq; George Bush did
As “conservatives” rally to explain why murdering a high-ranking official of another country is a good thing, one of the most potent—or at least most frequently repeated—arguments is that Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. The Washington Post tells us of “Soleimani’s legacy: The gruesome,…
Old Man War Machine, he jes’ keep rollin’ along
(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.) The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify…