I’ve been known to say both kind and unkind things about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, but last week’s performance earned the big guy a whole year of lazy, tasteless fat jokes. Denouncing the recent, shocking trend among certain “libertarian” types in the Republican Party to consider the endless violations of our civil liberties by…
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This Town boring as this town
This Town, New York Timesman Mark Leibovich’s shocking piss-and-tell, chattering class takedown of the chattering class is, in fact, causing a lot of chatter amidst the chattering class. Old DC hand Lois Romano goes full chattering class in this exercise in suppressed hysteria, accusing “Leibo” of undermining the networks of “dinner parties and receptions [where]…
Don’t Know Much About Communist Spies
Several months ago, in a posting at the American Conservative, bearing the snappy title “Our American Pravda,” Ron Unz bemoaned the many failings of the American media, claiming that, among other things, the media had conspired to conceal the fact that communist penetration of the federal government was rife during the Roosevelt Administration, “Over the…
Barack Obama, sending the Machiavel to school. Again.
Is there glee in the White House over the latest revelations of National Security Agency mega-snooping? I wouldn’t be surprised. Sen. Rand Paul has another arrow in his quiver, and daddy Ron Paul even praised leaker Ron Snowden, saying that Snowden has “done a great service for telling the truth.” That kind of crazy talk…
Hatin’ on Keynes, Part II: Adam Smith, total homo
To return to the topic of whether Keynesian economics should be avoided because Keynes liked boys and ballet better than girls and football, let me point out that Adam Smith, the King of Laissez Faire,* never married, and was suspiciously fond of his mother, kind of like Liberace, without all the furs. As Jeet Heer points out in…
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…
It’s not too soon to tell that Paul Wolfowitz is a lying asshole
Yes, Paul Wolfowitz, everyone’s favorite lying asshole, is up to his old tricks again, acting like the lying asshole he is, claiming that “it is too soon to tell” if the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. After all, Paulie tells us, for decades after the Korean War ended, South Korea “struggled.” But sixty…
Why Can’t Prominence Equal Competence?
David Aaron Miller has a weekly column in Foreign Affairs, which may be half the problem. He is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. But this week’s “Reality Check,” with the omniscient title “Why Obama Failed in the Middle East,” reads like it was…
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”…
Those Crazy Muslims
Mark Lynch has a column up at Foreign Affairs reviewing Atomic Kingdom, a report by Colin Kahl, Melissa Dalton, and Matt Irvine at the Center for a New American Security, which I guess should be called Non-Atomic Kingdom, even though it’s definitely less catchy, because the report argues that Saudi Arabia is not, repeat not,…