(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.) The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify…
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Shorter Admiral McRaven: Will invade foreign countries for food
Okay, that should be “Will invade foreign countries for rank and appropriations” but Literature R Us puts snark over accuracy every time. What is indisputable is that retired Admiral William McRaven is shit fit petrified that drunken Donald Trump might actually knock over the punchbowl that has, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ladled…
Who’s dumber, Elizabeth Warren or Max Boot?
To my mind, Elizabeth Warren is basically a Hillary Clinton who doesn’t summer in the Hamptons. That is, a well-meaning know it all who wants to run your life for you. So when disillusioned conservative Max Boot took aim at her in the Washington Post—“Elizabeth Warren has lots of ideas. Bad ideas.”—I was (largely) content…
War! What is it good for! APPROPRIATIONS!
Some time ago—well, thirty years ago, more or less—I read a reminiscence on the journalism biz by Michael Kinsley, recalling the words of journalistic wisdom he received as a tyro from a legendary pundit whose name I have forgotten: “Always sell the same piece at least three times.” By that standard, I’m a motherfucking journalistic…
“Grow up, Conservatives!” bellows the Weekly Standard, in its very best grown-up voice
Yes, grow up, conservatives, demands the Weekly Standard’s Chris Deaton, bemoaning the right’s “short game” critique of U.S. representative-elect and left-wing babe o’ the millennium Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Stop making fun of her wardrobe, particularly when, as it turns out, the outfit was a loaner, and concentrate on refuting her wacko long game, which as it…
Yo, Josh Barro! There is no “tragedy”, and no “dignity”, amongst the GOP! They are Trump’s toadies, one and all!
Josh Barro, who writes for the Business Insider (which describes me perfectly), is not uniformly an idiot. He just writes like one with alarming frequency. A few weeks ago, Mr. Barro chose to descant on the “great tragedy” of Paul Ryan. Well, excuse me while I kiss the sky, and then vomit. Sorry, Josh. To…
We now interrupt this regularly scheduled bad news to bring you much much worse bad news
Several weeks ago—about a decade in Trump years, I would estimate1—I planned to write yet another article ridiculing our nation’s massive addiction to wasteful military spending, category “Star Wars”, springing off an article in Bloomsberg, by “the Editors” themselves, no less, “How to Blow North Korean Missiles Out of the Sky”, bemoaning the fact that,…
Paging Dr. Yeats! Paging Dr. Yeats!
Some time ago, I got so tired of reading about things “slouching towards Bethlehem”, or at least slouching somewheres, that I took upon myself to announce that no one, with the exception of Huckleberry Finn, would be allowed to use that verb, at once so affectedly literary and so uncouth that the poor word was…
Larry Summers is a big, fat liar
Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to “Harvard Sucks”. After spending 9,000+ words last week whaling away, largely on Harvard Law Professor David Kennedy but also on Harvard Law Professor Samuel Moyn, I’m back on the attack, this time beating up on former Harvard President Larry Summers, now “only” Charles W….
George F. Will Explains It All For You. Incorrectly.
George “F for Farrreeeky!” Will has a piece up, “Infrastructure projects aren’t jobs programs”, which, all inadvertently, explains why infrastructure projects are jobs programs. Saith St. George, “New Deal public works gave the nation splendidly useful engineering marvels, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam. It did not, however, significantly reduce unemployment, which…