How the time flies! It seems like it was just two days ago that Josh Rogin, perhaps the Washington Post’s most two-fistedest “Global Opinions” opinionator, was coming down hard on the Trump Administration for not providing Ukraine with, you know, “Javelin antitank missiles, anti-battery radar that can see into Russian territory, and state-of-the-art intelligence capabilities…
Search Results for: north korea
The Cold War: A Tale of Two Joes
I’ve been reading Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s vastly ambitious and very largely successful The Cold War A World History.1 One of the great advantages of reading a European’s take is that he has a much more nuanced understanding of what was happening in Europe during the Cold War than an American historian would. He’s…
What’s worse than suffering through the faux double entendres in those insufferable Duluth Trading Co. ads? Suffering through the insufferable whining of New York Times “conservatives”
Yes, NYT-approved conservatives Ross Douthat, who has, on occasion, received a hearty thumb’s up from me, and Trump-hatin’ Bret Stephens, whom I’ve basically ignored, have both been actin’ conservative and actin’ out in recent days. First up, and the more dispensable, is Ross, who’s actin’ all Catholic and accusatory, heading off a recent column on…
Ramesh Ponnuru, defending Trump’s UN speech, lays an inverted curate’s egg
What is a curate’s egg? Webster’s Third International defines it thusly: “something with both good and bad parts or qualities [so called from a cartoon in the weekly Punch depicting a curate who was given a stale egg by his bishop and declared that parts of it were excellent]”. So what is an inverted curate’s…
Jay Nordlinger at the end of his tether
Back in the day, like the Eighties day, and even later, I used to check out the National Review, either at the newsstand or the library, because I don’t remember ever being dedicated enough to buy a copy, just to keep up with what the enemy was thinking. There were a few writers whom I…
The New York Times, furiously beating the drums of war
Did you see video of that big military parade in North Korea last week? Those huge missile carriers, designed to hold an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S.? Did it ever occur to you that those carriers might be empty, that the parade was a huge bluff, that the North Koreans have never tested an…
2017 – 2011 = 6
Back in January 2011, I unleashed a rude outburst directed at then SecDef Robert Gates, “Robert M. Gates, totally full of it. Totally”, prompted by Bob’s statement that, in five years’ time, North Korea would be able to “target” the U.S. with a nuclear-tipped ICBM. Well, it’s six years and counting, so how’s that “direct…
The enemy within—within the White House
Paul Krugman nailed it: “When the Fire Comes”. So did the Washington Post: “Trump paints a picture of a dystopian America that doesn’t exist”. President Trump is cranking up the volume in the anticipation of the next terrorist attack, or the next police shooting1, in order to announce that chaos reigns, that the gloves are…
Pathetic Congress
Back in the day, Dwight Eisenhower, provoked beyond endurance by the right-wing posturing of forgotten California Republican mossback Sen. William Knowland, remarked that “With him there is no final answer to the question ‘How stupid can you get?’” With today’s Congress, there is no final answer to the question “How petty can you get?” Politico…
The Washington Post demands combat!
It’s time to get tough with Cuba! It’s time to get tough with Russia! It’s time to get tough with China! It’s time to get tough with North Korea! It’s time! It’s high time! That’s the rap over at the Washington Post editorial page, which is definitely cruisin’ for a bruisin’, and I mean a…