Sick of the woke folk? Well, I sure am, but I’m sick of the unwoke too. This is a bit of an unbalanced rant, going off in several different directions at once, occasioned by three pieces by three ill-assorted unconventional (I guess) conservatives, Ross Douthat’s Where Liberal Power Lies, Rod Dreher’s commentary on Ross’s piece,…
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Stout Stories: “A Social Call” and “Truffles To Die For”
A Social Call “I’m afraid that would be impossible.” “I agree entirely. And it’s been my experience that when things are impossible, they don’t happen. Which means that we should just forget about this.” She laughed. “But that would be impossible as well.” “I assure you it wouldn’t, Ms. Harris—nor, in fact, is it. If…
Paul Krugman: A limousine liberal takes a walk
In his latest newsletter, which, as I keep repeating, is in itself a refutation of Friedmanite “No Free Lunch” gospel, Paul Krugman takes us on a walking tour of the Big Apple, beginning with this paragraph: Full disclosure: I’m one of those privileged New Yorkers who decamped to the suburbs during the worst of the…
Political Science: It isn’t rocket science
Over at New York magazine, pretty smart guy Eric Levitz (unless I’m confusing him with someone else, and I don’t think I am) interviews pretty smart guy David Shor, recently defenestrated from his position at Civis Analytics for, you know, analyzing stuff—i.e., posting a link to a study suggesting that violent demonstrations are, shockingly enough,…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?
We’re in such a mess these days, one can either bemoan that mess, or wonder how we got here. I feel a little helpless to be just bemoaning, and, as the situation changes from day to day, one is compelled to constantly update one’s bemoans, which in retrospect can begin to sound both repetitive and…
I was going to make fun of General Milley for being fat. But now I can’t.
Yeah, I was all ready to go with a rather belated piece, to be called “The Cowards of Lafayette Park”, sniggering at Gen. Mark Milley—“General Sphere”, I was going to call him—but now I’m going to have to scratch that joke, because the general has said the following, in a prerecorded speech to students at…
Nancy Pelosi, not afraid to look stupid
Well, she isn’t. Back in the Obama administration, in an incident that few but I remember, Nancy insisted that the federal budget was a lean, mean spendin’ machine with literally no fat at all: “The cupboard is bare,” quoth Nancy, back in 2013. “There’s no more cuts to make.” You have to give credit to…
Cutting Ike’s pages, and cutting Ike’s prose
I recently read a new book by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (if a webpub can be said to possess a man)—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War—which is an interesting read, though I wouldn’t call it “definitive”, unless perhaps when Fred says he’s giving us the “secret history” he implies that he’s…
Is Bret Stephens too smart for his own good?
Poor Bret Stephens. He went into town, just tryin’ to do right, and look what happened to him! Well, don’t let no one tell you them dogs won’t bite, n’est-ce pas?1 A couple of days ago—well, in dog time—Bret wrote a column “The Secrets of Jewish Genius”, that, in its original form cited a “study”…
Carriage House Days
Just off the corner of Connecticut and N Streets in Washington, DC is a reasonably imposing red-brick urban mini-mansion, which, a small plaque informs you, once belonged to General Henry Robert, who, you probably don’t know, wrote Robert’s Rules of Order. But back in 1975 when I worked there as a file clerk, we called…