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…
Search Results for: Washington Post
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…
Anne Applebaum sees so much, and misses so much
I originally planned to respond to Anne Applebaum’s new article in the Atlantic, The Bad Guys Are Winning with a super-snarky post, snappily titled “The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum Reupholstered,” bouncing off a long-ago post of mine, The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum, written back in 2008, when she came back from Afghanistan, telling…
University of Austin, fissioning like a motherf*cker
OK, I promise that this blog will not turn into “I Make Jokes About the University of Austin All the Goddamn Time”. Probably. But, hey, this is funny: Exactly a week after former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss unveiled the creation of a hypothetical new “university” stacked with advisers united by “a common…
I invented that! Well, sort of.
Over at Bari Weiss’ substack blog, Common Sense, Pano Kanelos, former President of St. John’s College and now newly minted President of the newly minted University of Austin, explains his game plan: We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One. There is a gaping chasm between the promise and…
Democrats in disarray! Who could have seen this coming?
Well, who but everyone? Yes, Joe Biden and his Merry Band have been hit with lots of bad news beyond their control, like the D variant, which put the kibosh on the back to new normal celebrations of last spring, and the continuing flood of desperate immigrants, and the rise in gas prices, and inflation…
Nice essay, George F. Will! But not, you know, perfect!
Hey, Georgie boy’s snappy retrospective of how a slightly pushy young lad from the sticks became the biggest goddamn Bow Tie the Beltway had ever seen—The pursuit of happiness is happiness—is not at all a bad read, informative and even touching at times, words I haven’t always used when discussing Mr. Will. I was particularly…
Colin Powell, a four-star disappointment
The death of Colin Powell at age 84 has brought forth lots of eulogies and a few accurate criticisms, like this one, posted at Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America And Produced Trump. Ackerman focuses almost exclusively on what one might call the “mysterious incident…
Sandra Oh and “The Chair”: Sorry, I can’t see the plot for the clichés!
I have not been “on campus” for (checks notes) 49 years, for which I thank God on my knees every fucking day—and that ain’t no lie. So I am not the best person to review The Chair, a Netflix mini-series that has gotten props for taking a reasonably honest look at political correctness, sexism, racism,…
Political Notes from All Over
George F. Will, critical race theorist par excellance There was a time when I made a virtual albeit entirely unpaid cottage industry out of making fun of George F. Will, working up such labored funnies as Two-parent families iz da bomb, says Ramblin’ George Will, snickering at the twice married, frequently adulterous when married and…