O that Paulie Ryan! He’s so handsome! Isn’t he? Just look at him! Just look! How can he be so cute and, you know, so dishonest and corrupt? Over at the New Yorker, from which I snitched this stunningly sappy photo of Paulie, a bewildered, even broken-hearted Ryan Lizza tries to puzzle the mystery of…
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Paul Ryan, The Policy Wonk That Wasn’t
Unless you’ve been living under a blanket, or have a life, you’re well aware that House Speaker Paul Ryan just had a meeting with Republican presidential nominee to be Donald Trump. Virtually everything about the Republican Party is a joke these days—most of them, of course, very unfunny. The biggest, and least funny is the…
David Bowie versus Hopalong Cassidy—Who was cooler?
I’m in a bit of a rut here, aren’t I? Well, when you’ve got a meme that works, you stick with it. I must admit that I’m more than tardy in paying my respects to Mr. Bowie, but I had more important things to do, like making fun of David Brooks, who just never seems…
Spycraft, a contradiction in terms
I was recently in the WWII section of the DC public library and stumbled across Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat, a (very) long study of a famous British intelligence gambit written up decades earlier in The Man That Never Was. The Brits arranged for a corpse, ostensibly of a major in the Royal Marines, to wash…
Jawohl, Herr Doktor Professor!
Over at Politico, Klaus Larres (German) and Peter Eltsov (Russian) have a quasi-hagiographical take on German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is in fact an impressive figure.1 Unfortunately, Klaus and Peter aren’t always so impressive themselves, swallowing whole Merkel’s “no nonsense” approach to the financial crisis in Greece, groaning that “some well-meaning but perhaps not very…
Obama failed to predict future, experts say
Graeme Wood has an article in the Atlantic that’s getting lots of play, explaining that “we” have been getting those ISIS guys all wrong, that what they really want is a big battle in Dabiq, a place in Syria, to fought by the Muslim faithful against the armies of “Rome,” a battle that will ultimately…
Over 100 innocent children slaughtered in Pakistan. Is that “iconically heartbreaking” enough for Samantha Power? And, if so, what does she intend to do about it?
Surely there’s a “moderate” rebel group we can send arms to, isn’t there? Perhaps we can declare a “no fly zone” of some sort, which we can use as an excuse for further involvement, the way we did in Libya, which, if we’re really lucky, could lead to some boots on the ground thing. Any…
Samantha Power, presumably not a biologist
Over at the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has a fascinating though not very encouraging long-read re Samantha Power, our UN ambassador and President Obama’s whom-shall-we-invade-next gal about town. Amidst much seriousness, Osnos also records this scrap from Samantha about how refreshing it is to get out of DC and into the field (in this case,…
Samantha Power, definitely a casuist extraordinaire
Recently (well, yesterday), I commented on a long article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos on Samantha Power, our ambassador to the UN, whom I described unkindly as “President Obama’s whom-shall-we-invade-next gal about town”, making further fun of her (as who would not?) for not knowing that plants “breathe” carbon dioxide rather than oxygen….
Thurber Farewell
I just completed a 31-part take on the life and work of James Thurber. I’ll be reissuing the whole thing as an ebook, along with half a dozen Thurber-related essays. To help readers to ease off their Thurber jones, I’m running this wonderful 1940 cover Thurber did for the New Yorker.