Turnout, Turnout, Turnout! Why Democrats love it and Republicans hate it. Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political centrist after my own heart, has a post up at his Substack blog, The Liberal Patriot, How Not to Build a Coalition, arguing, correctly, in my opinion, “High turnout is just not the magic key to Democratic victories the…
Shorter Paul Krugman: Yes, I am an airhead. Why do you ask?
Okay, a couple of weeks ago I made a pretty cheap joke at the expense of WashPost film critic Ann Hornaday for writing a column I didn’t like—to wit, Shorter Ann Hornaday: Yes, I am an airhead. Why do you ask?—and we at Literature R Us try to be even-handed in passing out the sneers…
Thelonious Monk—“Bright Mississippi”
“Bright Mississippi” is “really” a reworking of the famous old tune, “Sweet Georgia Brown”. Well, Georgia never sounded better. Thelonious with Charlie Rouse on sax, John Ore, bass, and Frankie Dunlop, drums. Bruxelles, 1963. Posted by Mr. Wolf
Is Charlie Sykes the new Dick Morris?
Well, I hope so, and I hope Joe Biden or his “people” will take the hint, if not from Charlie himself then the myriad of excellent sources Charlie collects in his recent piece for “The Bulwark”, Joe Biden Needs Four Sister Souljah Moments, explaining why Joe needs to “get tough” with the Democratic Party’s newly…
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. surprises the heck out of me
He sure the heck does. In his stunningly prescient 1997 essay, Has Democracy a Future? (Foreign Affairs—may be behind a paywall), bow-tied, martini-sippin’ Artie,1 whom I frequently dismissed as the jerkiest of knee-jerk liberals, essentially writes the future as us young folks have lived it in the 21st century. The Arthur Schlesinger I read always…
Daniel Drezner, struggling all too unsuccessfully to keep his peers from making absolute fools of themselves
I have beaten on foreign policy expert Dan Drezner so extensively that I feel a little giddy to “find myself” praising him as a film critic—a field in which I myself sometimes claim some level of expertise. (Go here, or here, or here for more.) It is Dan’s particular, self-chosen mission, so I gather, to…
Yuval Levin (and Ramesh Ponnuru and Ross Douthat) and the utter hypocrisy of the “responsible Republican”
Yuval Levin, hailed by none other than Lyin’ Paulie Ryan as a serious conservative thinker, has a ponderous, and thoroughly repulsive “think piece” up at the New York Times, Democrats, Voting Rights Are Not the Problem, in which he tries to pretend that there are good arguments for election law reform “on both sides”! Because…
Shorter Ann Hornaday: Yes, I am an airhead. Why do you ask?
Because it’s Christmas, the Washington Post has dumped upon its hapless readers several thousand words of breathless prose from film critic Ann Hornaday in the form of a frenzied dithyramb on the very unlikely subject of “America’s Most Dangerous Movie”, Oliver Stone’s JFK, quite possibly the most morally repulsive “major” film ever made in the…
Who could have seen this coming? Drones, and the people who fly them, are stupid and heartless!
Michael Levenson, writing an “overview” of a major investigation into the U.S. “drone war” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria conducted by the New York Times, reports: Drawing on more than 1,300 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, the investigation reveals that, since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed…
Betsy DeVos couldn’t destroy America’s public schools. But Randi Weingarten can.
Yeah, you remember sweet Betsy from Holland, Michigan, the billionaire busybody who came to Washington, DC as secretary of education to serve Jesus Christ and Donald Trump, and not coincidentally wreck the American public school system? Well, sweet Betsy didn’t make much headway with her scheme, but Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of…