Are you as tired of reading my snark on neocon windbags as I am writing it? Well, I thought so. Anyway, poor Mickey Rooney finally bought the big one. The New York Times gives a nice recap of his life and frequent hard times, noting that the one-time Hollywood box office king (three years in…
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N. Gregory Mankiw, aka Jivemaster Greg
Over at New York, Jonathan Chait points me over to the New York Times, where Harvard big-shot Gregory Mankiw is holding forth on the wonders of Robert Downy, Jr., noting that Bob’s latest performance as “Iron Man” was so abfab that the $50 mil Downy got up front for the film doesn’t upset people—“ when…
Hey de Blasio! Forget the snow! Watch the dough!
If I were a conservative, I’d be laughing. But as a liberal, my chuckles ring pretty hollow at the sight of Bill de Blasio struggling with New York’s 152 public sector unions, all fighting for first place at the trough. The big dog that’s barking loudest right now, according to Steven Greenhouse and Kate Taylor…
Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: Why was this book written?
Christopher Clark is no amateur historian. He is a professor of modern history at Cambridge University and author of Iron Kingdom: The rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, among other works. His current bestseller, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914, was acclaimed one of the best books of 2013 by the New…
“The Ayatollah’s Disarming Wit”—because what’s funnier than a fatwa!
Roya Hakakian, a producer at 60 Minutes and author of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, must be easily amused. Her column in yesterday’s New York Times, “The Ayatollah’s Disarming Wit,” claims that living under Iran’s theocratic regime, “more brutal than the one they overthrew in 1979,” is a barrel of laughs. Those ayatollahs! They’re wacky!…
What Robert Gates said that no one said he said
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, former Secretary of State Robert Gates’ memoirs of his years as SecDef, have been excerpted and/or discussed by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. If you follow this sort of thing, you know that Bob loved Hillary, definitely a feather in her…
Obama: “You say ‘fascism’ like it was a bad thing!”
Is President Obama a fascist, or has he merely sold his sold his soul to them? Call me a sentimental fool if you like, but I think the president is not entirely a fascist; he’s just very, very sensitive. And when people hurt his feelings—for example, by exposing all the lies he and his administration…
Robert Gates and Leon Panetta: They’ll none of them be missed
Last week, that music hall pair, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, aka Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, brought their good cop/bad cop routine to Dallas, Texas to answer questions about President Obama’s proposed incredibly small bombing of Syria. Gates, aka “The Thoughtful One,” said it was a bad idea while Panetta, aka “The…
The Silence of the Hawks
One would have thought that Vladimir Putin’s* end zone victory dance in the New York Times would have produced an outraged chorus of right-wing “I told you so’s” loud enough to be heard on Mars—if, contrary to fact, sound waves could travel through a vacuum. But even they could, they still wouldn’t, because the right’s…
President Obama’s Excellent Syrian Adventure
Was there ever a schadenfreude so multi-faceted? One would think that the Republican Establishment would be roaring with delight as the leading lights of the Obama Administration take turns shooting the President in the foot—Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice in particular lying their bureaucratic buttocks off, frenziedly concocting non-existent…