The guy who gets it right: Ron Paul, denouncing Republicans for denouncing Obama for the wrong reasons. Republicans denounce Obama for not being aggressive enough, when, as Paul points out, our problems arise from the fact that Obama was too aggressive, waging an unnecessary, unconstitutional war in Libya, a war in which the Republican Party entirely acquiesced….
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Ramesh Ponnuru—“Yes, I am a partisan hack. Why do you ask?”
Several dog years ago I pegged, or tabbed, Ramesh Ponnuru as an intelligent conservative. Obviously, Ramesh resented the charge and has been doing his level best to refute it. He’s at it again here, with the seriously fatuous “Obama’s Second Term Already Looks Like a Failure,” aggressively gliding over such Republican embarrassments as the virtual…
WMD: The Right Lies Well
The tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq has come and gone. For those of us who always thought that the Bush Administration lied us into a fraudulent war, which they then conducted with stunning and disastrous incompetence (and of course lied about all of that as well), we are, in political terms, remarkably “fortunate”…
Republican Reform, Douthat Style
It’s no secret that the Republican Party is going through an agonizing reappraisal of its policies. Well, the Elephant can stop worrying now, because Ross Douthat has it all figured out. Let’s start with domestic reform. What needs to be done? Ramesh Ponnuru, echoing though not quoting President Obama, says we have a healthcare spending…
The Hagel Hassle: Everybody wins? I don’t fucking think so
Dave Weigel, who raps for Slate these days, is one of my favorites, but he comes a cropper with his too clever to be accurate take on the failure of Senate Democrats to force a vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense. According to Dave, it’s win/win/win/win. Republicans get to act tough, Likudist…
Acela Republicans Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Egos!
Yeah, like that’s going to happen! David Brooks, who’s been pretty damned tired of being a member of the, well, the Yahoo Party, wants to be able to go to a party and have a glass of decent port* without getting an earful of Jesus at the same time. So now he wants to have…
Barack Obama: The Smell of Failure
There are a couple of interesting write-ups on the web interviewing a couple of well-known, undecided, unrelated voters—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, and 24-year-old pre-k teacher and “wage gap” questioner Katherine Fenton. What’s particularly interesting is that both these intelligent, well-informed people 1) don’t really know very much about politics and 2) though…
Imagine if his position hadn’t been his position
Over at the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” page, Ramesh Ponnuru tries to explain how Todd Akin ran off the rails: Akin’s position on abortion inspired some of the controversy, of course. So did his clear implication that some rapes are not real rapes. He managed, however, to add more toxic ingredients to the…
Too gay! Well, except for the Trio
Over at Slate, Dave Weigel is at the scene when Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson engages in a meet and greet along “Dupont Circle’s cafe-lined 17th St. NW in the historical heart of the District’s gay community”—the quote emanating, as far as I can tell, from a Johnson press release. Seventeenth Street is “café-lined,” I…
DC sucks, says geezer
DC sucks, says geezer Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at the Weekly Standard, so much of a geezer, in fact, that he even has a white moustache to prove it. Ferguson holds forth on Reason TV with “Kennedy,”* seated on the lawn of his “beautiful McMansion” (Kennedy’s term), rapping about how the DC economy is largely…