Anyone reading this under—well, under fifty, I’m afraid—may not get the reference, to the once famous Democratic victory song, which goes back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but getting Donald Trump out of the White House is sweet indeed, though taking the 2020 election results as a whole, it’s rather like sitting down to eat…
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Back to “Normal” in 21? We should be so lucky.
There’s been a meme floating around for the past several years, pushed perhaps most assiduously by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, and given another shove in his recent column “There Will Be No Trump Coup”, picturing that man in the White House as a “noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat”, an embarrassment rather than…
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, she should have retired
Supreme Court justices are the closest thing we have in the U.S. to an aristocracy, maintaining the once-universal situation where the office and the person are one that has otherwise fortunately disappeared. Justice Ginsburg had an extraordinary career, but one must say that the worst part of her life was her delay in leaving office….
Will “Race” Sink the Democrats?
Well, I hope not. But one has to worry. Images of New York, Portland, Minneapolis, and Kenosha burning can have a strong impact on the “I’m no racist, but” crowd, who are not charmed by Trump’s general boorishness but don’t like riots. Smart phones are bringing home the ubiquity of racism in police departments across…
Twilight of Democracy: Anne Applebaum’s front-row seat to disaster
I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different…
Al Gore, A Touch of Class
Back in the day, I was never an Al Gore guy, though I certainly saw him as preferable to either George Bush or Bill Clinton. Al was Al, a stolid, earnest “idealist”, whose every ideal required a costly, centralized government program to bring it into being. The fact that such “solutions” rarely did much more…
Of course we’re in denial! We’re REPUBLICANS!
Over at the anti-Trumpy Dispatch, Christian Schneider explains why even anti-Trump conservatives like himself would be cawazzy to wish for Republicans to lose the Senate as well as the presidency in 2020: “Why Are Some Conservatives Rooting for the GOP to Lose the Senate? Yes, many Republican politicians have behaved badly. But a Biden presidency…
Daniel Drezner, you shall not escape my wrath!
Well, you won’t, Dan. Just because I’m painfully slow and stumbling off the mark, and not much better down the stretch, you thought you could slip a few fast ones by me, but nuh-uh. I’m onto your game, and you’ll pay the price. The first of Dan’s “curve balls” (to vary the metaphor) came a…
Gregg Easterbrook, thou shouldst have been alive at this hour! Oh, wait, you are!
Damn straight he is, alive and kicking at the Atlantic, with an excellent article, “Smart Weapons Need to Be Smarter”, which I’ll discuss/amplify in the Afterwords, but for now what I want to talk about is some beautiful demolition work Gregg performed on racist/fascist television back in 2018, describing the unbridled power worship that was…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?
We’re in such a mess these days, one can either bemoan that mess, or wonder how we got here. I feel a little helpless to be just bemoaning, and, as the situation changes from day to day, one is compelled to constantly update one’s bemoans, which in retrospect can begin to sound both repetitive and…