What has Harvard done to us? I know it’s not surprising that a graduate of Harvard Law School would think like a grad of Harvard Business School, but do they have to be an exact match? That’s what “everyone’ has to be thinking after President Obama’s UN address last week. If George W. Bush didn’t…
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James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide, Part 26
INTRODUCTION This is the 26th episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail. Generally, these appear every Friday. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 26 continues discussion of Thurber’s five-part series on radio…
The War Lovers
From 1929 to 1989, Americans lived in a state of almost perpetual crisis—the Great Depression, World War II, and then forty-four long years of contention with international communism. When the U.S.S.R. finally fell apart, the resulting silence was, it seems, more than America could bear. George H.W. Bush and his gang of “realists” conducted wars…
Nicholas Burns, fortunately no longer with the State Department
“It was one of the most unfortunate weeks of his [Obama’s] presidency,” moaned Nicholas Burns, former State Department official (under George Bush), now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to intrepid Politico reporters Josh Gerstein and David Nather, referring to that shocking occasion when President Obama actually consulted with Congress before launching an assault on…
The dormition of the theocons*
I recently stumbled across a piece by Damon Linker—one not related to the burning question “Would you like your daughter to be a whore?”†—that intrigued me to the point of tracking down and reading his little book The Theocons, published back in 2006, telling the tale of Richard John Neuhaus and the First Things gang,…
Hillary Clinton, Warrior Princess
By now, you may have read that Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg was not quite the unadulterated love-fest that Goldberg described in his intro to the rap session. It was only 99 percent unadulterated. At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky wants us to believe that Hillary isn’t really a neocon. She’s just a “muscular…
Ross Douthat’s Obama Outrage O’ the Week
I’m in the habit of reading Ross Douthat’s blog “Evaluations” at the New York Times, which, when he is not ruminating about the reverberative, not to say rebarbarative, phallocentricity of John Melius, is largely devoted to Ross’s mostly honest account of “thoughtful” conservatives like Ross to craft a domestic policy for the Republican Party that…
The time the U.S. blew up an airliner and lied its ass off trying to cover it up
A serious hat tip to Slate’s Fred Kaplan for refreshing our memory of an unsavory episode from America’s recent past, in July 1988, when a missile launched from the USS Vincennes blew up an Iranian airliner flying a regularly scheduled flight, killing all 290 on board. Fred, in his account, uses a slightly less inflammatory…
John Kerry: Yes, I am beneath contempt and unworthy of high office. Why do you ask?
I guess John Kerry wants me to hate him. Here’s what our secretary of state has to say about Edward Snowden, the dude who exposed massive and ongoing illegal and unconstitutional spying by our government: ““Edward Snowden is a coward. He is a traitor. And he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to…
Larry Summers so very smart and Larry Summers not so very smart
Larry Summers, star-crossed former president of Harvard and, more recently, head of President Obama’s National Economic Council, has written an excellent review of Thomas Piketty’s endlessly reviewed (even by me) best seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, praising Piketty for both his timing (publishing a massively researched book on inequality when the topic is all…