Over at the American Conservative, Gil Barndollar, former Marine Corps officer and currently Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, has an excellent article on the modern American version of Dolchstosslegende (“dagger stab myth”)—the claim made by the German Right and immensely amplified by Adolf Hitler that Germany’s…
Search Results for: WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
Who’s dumber, Trump or the “Intelligence Community”?
I won’t keep you in suspense. IT’S TRUMP! The bad news—or, I guess, the worse news—is, it’s a close contest. And the worst news—for now—is that it’s not just funny dumb but, all too likely, disastrous dumb. Because the real objective for both sides—though they’re choosing different routes—is a new Cold War, with ever-tightening tensions,…
Random Rants
Max Boot, feelin’ full of pith n’ vinegar. Again. Back in the day, when invading other countries first began to seem like a good idea to some people, Max Boot rushed to the very front of the queue o’ stupidity by opining that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands cry out for the sort of enlightened…
Go Donald! Go Donald! (Some of the time)
Yes, it has come to this: the American “Establishment” is so blind, benighted, and beggared that it takes the installation of a complete mountebank1 in the White House to save that Establishment, and the United States as well, from that Establishment’s ever-compounding follies. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of a relative…
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…
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…
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…
Max Boot explains it all for you
Unintentionally (I guess) funny piece by Max Boot, published by those cut-ups at the Weekly Standard. Max explains, and I would say that there’s at least a 57% chance that he’s right, that our “alliance” with Pakistan isn’t worth the pain: it would be better to have them outside the tent pissing in than inside…
We now interrupt this regularly scheduled bad news to bring you much much worse bad news
Several weeks ago—about a decade in Trump years, I would estimate1—I planned to write yet another article ridiculing our nation’s massive addiction to wasteful military spending, category “Star Wars”, springing off an article in Bloomsberg, by “the Editors” themselves, no less, “How to Blow North Korean Missiles Out of the Sky”, bemoaning the fact that,…
For the Right, All Roads Lead Through Russia. Unfortunately.
For the “Respectable Right,” I mean—the Wall Street Journal Right, the National Review Right—the “Thoughtful Right”—I guess you could call them, Big Donnie’s recent speech in Poland, which I, uh, didn’t like, made their little hearts beat faster than Max Roach’s Night in Tunisia drum solo from the Jazz at Massey Hall album (which you…