Yes, the word is that Bill Kristol’s bawling, brawling neocon baby, the Weekly Standard is no more, mourned in predictably fatuous fashion by co-founder John Podhoretz, “The Murder of the Weekly Standard* and long-time contributor David Brooks, among others, for heroically refusing to swallow the Trumpian swill that is now de rigueur on the Right,1…
Search Results for: iraq
H.W.–the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Speak nothing but good of the dead? Well, I leave that to the fancy outfits. If you want to read about what a wonderful guy Il Giorgio, aka “Aitch Dubya,” was, well, read the Post or the Times, or whomever. Here at Literature R Us, we mix the good with…
Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: A major mea culpa just a few culpas shy of a load
Max Boot has written another “what happened to conservatism?” book, similar but superior to Charles How the Right Lost its Mind Sykes and Rick Everything Trump Touches Dies Wilson, because Boot, unlike both Sykes and Wilson, is willing to re-examine the historical record and discover, among other things, that, yes, the young William F. Buckley…
Elliott Abrams, Easily Appeased
The recent murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi has upset the Washington establishment in a manner that the deaths of tens of thousands citizens of Yemen have not, presumably because those poor souls had the misfortune not to live in Washington. In any event, everyone who is anyone in Washington now has a conscience about…
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Articles of Lasting Interest: Jazz: I post a jazz video every week, usually but not necessarily featuring a performance of a composition of Thelonious Monk. These videos can be accessed as a group here. “Harvard douchebaggery not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, study reveals” is an unfriendly take on Harvard Professor Robert Barro’s disingenuous claim that…
John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican
John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.” No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan. John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan…
Peter Beinart: Cogent, with a caveat
Actually, more than cogent. Beinart, a chastened former liberal hawk who supported George’s W. Bush’s massively flawed and fraudulent invasion of Iraq, has learned his lesson pretty well, setting forth his conviction that “America Needs an Entirely New Foreign Policy for the Trump Age”, though I would much prefer another term for “the present” than…
American Catholics and American Jews are not happy campers. And neither, it seems, are America’s evangelicals
This conversation didn’t happen, but it could have: Monseigneur Vivaldi: “Have you read that Pennsylvania grand jury report? Over three hundred priests accused of sex abuse! We’ve hit rock bottom! It can’t get any worse than this!” Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: “Hold my beer.” Yes, Viganò’s now notorious letter is rockin’ the church in ways…
Daniel Drezner, harrumphing audibly, but not (alas!) intelligibly
Okay, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on here, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on. A couple of weeks ago, WashPost guy Dan Drezner, whom I (sometimes) like, uncorked a whole lotta nonsense due to the death of Princeton professor of international affairs Robert Gilpin, writing in praise of Gilpin in a column bearing the pungent subhead “It’s…
David Ignatius, inadvertently stepping on his own phallus
Writes Dave, “With Trump’s acquiescence, Russia’s successful military intervention to rescue Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has made the Kremlin the new indispensable power in the region — simultaneously maintaining close relations with Israel, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.” Why, it’s almost as if none of these countries are really that…