I recently read a new book by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (if a webpub can be said to possess a man)—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War—which is an interesting read, though I wouldn’t call it “definitive”, unless perhaps when Fred says he’s giving us the “secret history” he implies that he’s…
Search Results for: Washington Post
A Disarray of Democrats
O my party! Oh, my party! Oy, my party! Quelle mess, n’est-ce pas? Yes, Iowa Democrats covered themselves in what I’m pretty sure is a shitload of obloquy, which they heartily deserve, in the biggest Democratic techno-mess since the ObamaCare roll-out. Democrats don’t do technology, it seems. They seem to confuse it with magic, and…
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…
Is Ramesh Ponnuru afraid of a baseball bat? [Short answer: YES!]
In what was once one of the most shocking scenes in American cinema, in Brian De Palma’s 1987 gangster flick The Untouchables, über mobster Al Capone beats three treacherous lieutenants to death with a baseball bat. Ever since, baseball bats have had a way of turning up in the hands of über mobsters like Tony…
Shorter Hillary Clinton: Democrats can so has conspiracy theories!
I can’t be the only Democrat wishing poor Hillary would take a long walk off a short pier. I would like to feel sorry for her (in, fact I have on occasion) but her latest effusions regarding Russian influence in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections suggest that her current chapeau consists of a…
Donald Trump’s Syrian “policy”: At least it’s good for a laugh!
That seems to be the reaction of the great Dan Drezner over at the Washington Post. Ole Dan feels he just has to chuckle at the consternation of his “realist” colleagues, who find that you should be careful what you wish for, a problem, Dan tells us, for all foreign policy mavens. This [the consternation…
Who’s dumber, Elizabeth Warren or Max Boot?
To my mind, Elizabeth Warren is basically a Hillary Clinton who doesn’t summer in the Hamptons. That is, a well-meaning know it all who wants to run your life for you. So when disillusioned conservative Max Boot took aim at her in the Washington Post—“Elizabeth Warren has lots of ideas. Bad ideas.”—I was (largely) content…
The irresistible charm of the outlier updated: New York Times Edition
It seems like only yesterday—because it was— that I was riffing on the tendency of the lamestream media (and everyone else) to generalize on the follies of our times not on the average but the extreme, to wit, an article in the Washington Post decrying the alleged abysmal performance of the Arlington County, Va. English…
Herodotus Redux. Or, the irresistible charm of the outlier
“After three years at one middle school, a student still didn’t know how to use a bilingual dictionary” So read a recent headline on the “front page” of the Washington Post web edition, leading the reader to a story by Theresa Vargas with the headline, “Arlington Schools has agreed to improve how it supports English…