De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Speak nothing but good of the dead? Well, I leave that to the fancy outfits. If you want to read about what a wonderful guy Il Giorgio, aka “Aitch Dubya,” was, well, read the Post or the Times, or whomever. Here at Literature R Us, we mix the good with…
Search Results for: george will
A Star Is Born: You know who I feel sorry for? I feel sorry for the guy who had to pretend he could be punched out by Lady Gaga
Yeah, at 5’1” and (apparently) 108 pounds, I doubt if the Gaga Girl packs much of a punch, but if you believe the latest reiteration of A Star Is Born, she can send a normal size guy reeling with just one blow.1 This is just one of the many questions raised by ASIB, including “Who…
Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: A major mea culpa just a few culpas shy of a load
Max Boot has written another “what happened to conservatism?” book, similar but superior to Charles How the Right Lost its Mind Sykes and Rick Everything Trump Touches Dies Wilson, because Boot, unlike both Sykes and Wilson, is willing to re-examine the historical record and discover, among other things, that, yes, the young William F. Buckley…
Elliott Abrams, Easily Appeased
The recent murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi has upset the Washington establishment in a manner that the deaths of tens of thousands citizens of Yemen have not, presumably because those poor souls had the misfortune not to live in Washington. In any event, everyone who is anyone in Washington now has a conscience about…
Topics
Articles of Lasting Interest: Jazz: I post a jazz video every week, usually but not necessarily featuring a performance of a composition of Thelonious Monk. These videos can be accessed as a group here. “Harvard douchebaggery not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, study reveals” is an unfriendly take on Harvard Professor Robert Barro’s disingenuous claim that…
John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican
John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.” No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan. John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan…
Peter Beinart: Cogent, with a caveat
Actually, more than cogent. Beinart, a chastened former liberal hawk who supported George’s W. Bush’s massively flawed and fraudulent invasion of Iraq, has learned his lesson pretty well, setting forth his conviction that “America Needs an Entirely New Foreign Policy for the Trump Age”, though I would much prefer another term for “the present” than…
Sebastian Mallaby, shamelessly—nay, nakedly—covering Alan’s ass
(Author’s note: What started as a brief headslap directed at Sebastian Mallaby turned into a 3,000+ word semi-diatribe on the subject of the multiple sins of Sebastian, Alan Greenspan, and a few other big-wigs. Read at your own risk.) Okay, not my ass, the other Alan’s ass—Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The…
Unthinking the Unthinkable: All of a sudden it’s 1984 again
If you’re as old as I am you’re probably dead, but if not you might remember the strange foreboding that gripped some of us back in the day when the fateful year of “1984” began to loom on the calendarial horizon: It was actually going to be 1984! We had been bred and baked in…
Daniel Drezner, harrumphing audibly, but not (alas!) intelligibly
Okay, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on here, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on. A couple of weeks ago, WashPost guy Dan Drezner, whom I (sometimes) like, uncorked a whole lotta nonsense due to the death of Princeton professor of international affairs Robert Gilpin, writing in praise of Gilpin in a column bearing the pungent subhead “It’s…