Okay, is that enough persiflage for one headline? Sometimes El Nino gets it right, and the “liberals” (seriously “so-called” liberals, in my book) get it wrong, as in U.S. v. Comstock, in which only Justices Scalia and Thomas had the intelligence to argue that the federal government had no authority to imprison convicted sex offenders…
Does ObamaCare Have a Prayer?
A week ago, I would have said yes. I would have said that there was no way that perennial swing man Anthony Kennedy would have the nerve to take the ax to a really major piece of congressional legislation, something that hasn’t happened since 1935. But that was then. The universally derided performance of Solicitor…
How holy art thou?
There is such a thing as exile, an irrevocable renunciation of everything in one’s familiar surroundings that hinders one from attaining the ideal of holiness. Exile is a disciplined heart, unheralded wisdom, an unpublicized understanding, a hidden life, masked ideals. It is unseen meditation, the striving to be humble, a wish for poverty, the longing…
Jonathan Chait, having discovered that Obama isn’t that liberal, prefers not to be reminded of that fact
Last week, Jonathan Chait, heretofore one of President Obama’s most passionate defenders, wrote a bitter piece in New York magazine entitled “How Obama Tried to Sell Out Liberalism in 2011,” bouncing off the latest “what went wrong” tick-tock in a long series of what went wrong tick-tocks on the Obama Administration, this one written by…
The unerring perceptions of David Denby
In his current review of The Hunger Games in the New Yorker, Dave describes Liam Hemsworth as looking “like a larger Taylor Lautner.” This is funnier if, like me, you don’t know who either of these people are. As for the film itself, Dave struggles bravely, yet uselessly, against its ineluctable unavoidability. Leo DiCaprio, move…
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Very pretty! But can it fly?” “You tell him you’re a Guinea Hen. I’ll take my chances.” “Pretty tails hatch no eggs, Helen. Pretty tails hatch no eggs.” “After three drinks they all look pretty to me.” “He’s kind of a one-trick pony, if you know what I mean.” “Well, you ought…
Bluff in the Buff: The Unspeakable Nudity of Jeffrey Goldberg
A few weeks back, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a column, via “Bloomberg View,” that, after a certain amount of adroit throat-clearing, advanced the following thesis: I’m talking about the belief, advanced to me by a former senior Israeli military official, and echoed by other non-insane people, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bluffing: He has…
Not stranger than fiction, but worse
Joe Biden, whom I’ve tagged so frequently as the dumbest man in Washington that I’ve gotten tired of it, isn’t listening to me or Osama bin Laden.* Joe, who may perhaps be forgiven for believing that he wouldn’t be worse than either Obama or Mitt Romney, “has quietly assembled an A-team of advisers who would,…
James Q. Wilson good, James Q. Wilson not so good, Part II
Yesterday I had mostly good things to say about the late John Q. Wilson; today, mostly not so good, taking off from his May 22, 1995 review of Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War in the New Republic (subscription only). Confronting FDR, the liberal god himself, Wilson doesn’t…
Flying Dutchman cracks the Da Vinci Code
Dutchman Jarno Smeets gets his wings. Full details here. Sorry, but I lack the technical expertise to give you the full picture. I also apologize for the “Chariots of Fire” background music, which was not my idea.