“Decline is a choice!” bellowed the late Charles Krauthammer back in the day, livid (to say the least) that that pantywaist in the White House hadn’t yet bombed the hell out of whomever Charles felt needed such treatment. And his spiritual children, the Trump-battered nextgen neocons at the Dispatch and the Bulwark are continuing to…
Search Results for: military spending
A Cheer for Elizabeth Warren
Damn straight! My gal Lizzie, whom I confess has received more thumbs down than thumbs up from me in the past, holds the sad distinction of being the only Democrat—and thus of course the only member—of the Senate Armed Services Committee not to vote to boost the Biden administration’s already massively bloated defense budget from…
Terrible Dan Drezner. Terrible Dan Drezner!
Hey, I promised, and a blogger always keeps his word—well, within the limits of reason, of course. And, anyway, Dan is at his terrible worst in this one—his terribleist, one might say—in an abysmal missive abysmally titled The progressive case against NATO is weird. When a pundit, particularly a scholarly one such as Dan, uses…
Shorter Joe Biden: I cans so be as stupid as Donald Trump! Even stupider!
Politico has the bad news: “Biden goes ‘full steam ahead’ on Trump’s nuclear expansion despite campaign rhetoric”. An article by Lara Seligman, Bryan Bender, and Connor O’Brien quotes Biden as telling the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a speech given just before the close of the Obama administration in January 2017, the following: If…
Roy Jenkins was part of the solution, and part of the problem. Was that part of the problem?
Roy Jenkins had a fascinating life. Born in 1920 in Abersychan, a mining community in Wales, he came from a strongly “Labour” family—his father, Arthur Jenkins, was a leading official in the Union of Mineworkers, eventually becoming a member of Parliament. Jenkins himself was elected to Parliament at the age of 28, working his way…
Daniel Drezner, you shall not escape my wrath!
Well, you won’t, Dan. Just because I’m painfully slow and stumbling off the mark, and not much better down the stretch, you thought you could slip a few fast ones by me, but nuh-uh. I’m onto your game, and you’ll pay the price. The first of Dan’s “curve balls” (to vary the metaphor) came a…
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 should grow the hell up, Daniel Drezner? I think maybe YOU should grow the hell up!
Yeah, I got Daniel Drezner—“Obfuscatin’ Dan”, I like to call him—on my mind, on my mind. I got Daniel Drezner on my mind. Again! I just got finished praising ole Obfuscatin’ Dan to the skies in a recent post for his recent post at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, calling it “absolute gold”. As…
Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end
When I went to first grade, I learned to print my name and hide under my desk in case of a nuclear blast. When I went to the movies, I saw news reels of U.S. above-ground atomic weapons tests in Nevada. (Nobody worried about fallout then.) In 1968, my parents could stand on their front…
Does the libertarian movement need a kick in the pants? Or is it just Nick Gillespie?
Sorry, Nick, but if you give Literature R Us an opening for a cheap shot, we’re going to take it. Nick incautiously let his guard down last month with a post in Reason, “The Libertarian Movement Needs a Kick in the Pants”, in itself a riposte, as it were, to Tyler Cowen’s thought-, if not…