When did “regime change” become the mark of a “real” president? Well, not to keep you in suspense, but it was in the brief reign of George Herbert Walker “Bad Ass” Bush. While still a mere VP, Georgie wanted President Reagan to green light the removal of Panama strongman Manuel Noriega—basically a CIA “asset” gone…
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Watch Jonah Goldberg morph into Donald Trump
Yes, it’s taken awhile. National Review conservatives like Jonah Goldberg were repelled by Donald Trump’s vicious nativism, his embrace of those good people who shout “Jews, you will not replace us”, plus all his wild talk about how we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan and that he always thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad…
What’s worse than suffering through the faux double entendres in those insufferable Duluth Trading Co. ads? Suffering through the insufferable whining of New York Times “conservatives”
Yes, NYT-approved conservatives Ross Douthat, who has, on occasion, received a hearty thumb’s up from me, and Trump-hatin’ Bret Stephens, whom I’ve basically ignored, have both been actin’ conservative and actin’ out in recent days. First up, and the more dispensable, is Ross, who’s actin’ all Catholic and accusatory, heading off a recent column on…
Two or three, or four, or more things I hate about Harvard
The hits just keep coming, don’t they? This piece is a bit of a recapitulation—aka I’ve been lying down on the job—but Harvard, fair Harvard, whom I’ve booted around before in the past two weeks with no mean gusto—is back in the news, and not in a good way. First, and most ghastly, is the…
A World of Struggle at Harvard Law
(Author’s Note: The following is a sprawling takedown of David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle, a book that clearly got my goat.) Pankaj Mishra is the author of several fascinating books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and his new one Age of Anger, which I am struggling to get…
I cannot keep silent! Part Deux
This not talking shit is hard! Yesterday, I couldn’t/wouldn’t keep silent about some year-old bullshit from David Ignatius. Well, today it’s the National Review’s Rich Lowry, opining about General Trump’s plans to reignite the war in Afghanistan: “At the end of the day, this is Trump concluding that he doesn’t want to lose a war…
“We” married him? John, honey, you created him!
John Podhoretz, like me, wishing the hell that Donald Trump wasn’t president, writes the following: “The issue with Trump is that his approach can only be called ‘the politics of unseriousness.’ He engages with no issue, merely offers a hostile and pithy soundbite bromide about it. He yammers. He describes how wonderful things will be…
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…
David French, daring to speak the unspeakable, so to speak
“Make no mistake,” the National Review’s sometimes rational (but not this time) David French warns us in light of the recent Manchester bombing, “there is an emerging bipartisan consensus that a certain amount of terrorism is just the price we have to pay to live the way we want to live. Now, to be clear,…
William Kristol no longer my least favorite neoconservative. For a while, anyway.
For a long time, Bill Kristol, self-anointed “boss” of the Weekly Standard (for so his minions refer to him), has been my least favorite neocon. Billie Boy bears more responsibility than any other non-government official for the trillion-dollar tragedy known as “Operation Enduring Freedom”,1 better described as “Operation Enduring Disaster”, an unforced error that cost…