I have recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s excellent book, Identity The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, published back in 2018, trying to explain why the world isn’t behaving the way Francis and I think it ought, and not doing a bad job of it at all. I’ve written round and about Dr….
Search Results for: george will
U.S. Bombing Raids: American War Crimes or Commie Propaganda? Or both?
George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union whose information apparently led to the deaths of many operatives for British and American espionage agencies, is dead at 98. Blake, who was employed by the British as a spy, was turned by the Soviets after being captured during the Korean War. But, according to his…
Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel
I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American…
Ramesh Ponnuru sincerely wishes that Donald Trump would stop farting so loudly. Particularly when he’s sitting on Mr. Ponnuru’s face
Well, he does. In a recent post, “Trump’s Record on Clemency”, written before the president’s most recent (to date) rogue’s gallery of releases, Mr. Ponnuru acknowledges that, well, the president can do anything he goddamn pleases when it comes to pardons, including pardoning a bunch of murders and corrupt political pals whenever the mood strikes…
Barack Obama, still not getting it after all these years
I confess that I have not read President Obama’s recent memoir, A Promised Land, nor am I likely to, because I have convinced myself that the political pressures on American politicians make it impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely, for them to ever write anything that resembles an honest book. I would say that this…
Political Notes From All Over, Volume II
Barack Obama and the Ministry o’ Truth Oy vey, mon president! In a recent interview with the BBC former President Barack “if you like your health care plan you can keep it” Obama complains about the lack of truthiness currently available in the USA: There are millions of people who subscribed to the notion that…
Yes, Donald Trump is destroying American democracy and the Republican Party is helping. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
Only eight years ago—how time flies!—Republicans were actually embarrassed by the fact that since 1988 their nominee for president had won more votes than his opponent only once, compared to five second-place finishes. Now if you ask a Republican “strategist” about the fact that it’s now one out of eight, he’ll explain to you genially…
Happy Days Are Here Again! Comparatively speaking, I mean.
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…
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….