That should be “visited 45 years ago,” because that’s when it happened. I recently came across an article in Jazz Times that revisited the memory of Slugs, a club on the lower East Side that was, according to James Gavin, “jazz’s most notorious nightclub, the gates of the underworld.” “[N]ight fell, and the unlit streets…
Cart before the horse
Daniel Larison has a post about Sen. Ron Johnson’s less than brilliant demand for military action against Iran. Dan remarks that “Iran hawks such as Johnson support preventive war against Iran because they are excessively afraid that Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.” Actually, that’s backwards. It should run like this: “Iran hawks such as Johnson pretend…
The apocalyptic messianism of Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent exercise in arrant knavery has received a gratifying amount of pushback, thanks to Fareed Zakaria, Roger Cohen, and Daniel Larison, among others. As Zakaria emphasizes, the current imbroglio is the result of the Bush Administration’s decision, back in 2005, to torpedo an earlier agreement that would have limited the Iranian…
The less than impeccable logic of William Bratton
Over at Politico, Chris Mitchell has an article on New York’s once and current police commissioner, William Bratton that’s well worth reading, though not without its logical flaws. On page 3 of the article, Mitchell discusses Bratton’s lack of enthusiasm for Mayor William de Blasio’s decision to legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. “The…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Okay, you were right and I was wrong. Global warming is for real. Now will you get off your ass and start swimming?” “I don’t know what to say, Roger. I always thought I’d be the one to give up show business.” “Yeah, and what do we do if the tide isn’t…
The sound of one hand clapping
“Unenthused Rand Paul Lifelessly Applauds Netanyahu Speech” bellows the National Review’s Brendan Bordelon, an outrage that, for many Republicans, seems even to eclipse the latest Hillarygate. Over at The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty points out that applause monitoring has long been a feature of the totalitarian mind-set, citing Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Un, and now…
American Blindness
Matt Yglesias has an article about our doomed American democracy that’s getting a lot of play on the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll bother with a comprehensive “reply,” since I’m more cranky than pessimistic these days, but I would like to call attention to a rather stunning flaw in a quote that Matt takes from…
Joey DeFrancesco—“Evidence”
Joey DeFrancesco (organ); Frank Vignola (guitar); Joe Ascionne (drums). Posted by Roger Bridgland
Alarmism? Oh, yeah, we got alarmism!
“When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years [since] such data has been compiled,” intoned National Intelligence Director James Clapper, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. Of course, the director may have been lying, something Big Jim does on…
Ross versus Ezra: No way! Your crazies are way crazier than our crazies!
Ross Douthat picks a fight with Ezra Klein over whether Obama Derangement Syndrome is more intense than Bush Derangement Syndrome.Klein links BDS to 9/11, but struggles to find comparable causality for ODS: “Bush Derangement Syndrome sought extraordinary explanations for extraordinary events; Obama Derangement Syndrome seeks extraordinary explanations for an ordinary presidency.” Sniffs Ross, “This … does…