INTRODUCTION This is the 31st and final episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail.. Ultimately, I’ll be publishing the whole thing as an ebook. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 31 discusses…
Search Results for: Washington Post
President Obama: Bush Lite or Bush Heavy?
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…
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…
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Move along.
In a near-parody of a non-denial denial, Brookings Scholar Dan Drezner explains that the New York Times blockbuster story “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks” gets it all wrong because, well, first of all, DC think tanks (like Brookings, for example) have to get their money from somewhere don’t they? And, and, anyway, the…
Alan Vanneman, not a reliable guide to Eastern Europe
OK, I’m not. In my last foray east of the Elbe, I hoped/opined that Vladimir Putin’s muscle-flexing re “break-away” Ukraine was just that. Little did I know that Vlad would pull a Bush (or an Obama) and decide that war is fun. Like them both, he’s discovered that the ultima ratio regnum1 is chockfull of…
George F. Will, finding that elusive middle ground for right-wing hypocrisy
In a column largely, and justly, devoted to pointing out that President Obama’s excellent Libyan adventure, like his predecessor’s Iraqi incursion, was based on false pretences and has resulted more in chaos than democracy, Georgie F then launches as remarkable a series of non sequitur, false assumption, and disingenuous innuendo as I’ve seen since, well,…
The grand bargain that nobody wanted
Alec MacGillis has a nice piece in the New Republic about one of the most fatuous of the grand confabs that float about the French cuffs and poached salmon universe, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s “Fiscal Summit,” at which a variety of rich people moan about the fact that the gutless politicians in Washington won’t…
Can’t stop the Ennui! And it’s all Obama’s fault!
Fareed “Everyone else has said this so I have to say it too” Zakaria writes a column accusing President Obama of running a foreign policy that has failed, over and over again, to be, well, fabulous! Remember Ronald Reagan? He gave speeches that had some swagger, some class! “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Why…
Mr. Will writes the Constitution. Again.
When I was in college, I had an idea that was so profound that, even now, I find it hard to believe that I actually had it, but I did. The situation was this: back in the day, Oberlin College had a graduate school of theology, with a wonderful old library, of some 50,000 volumes….
Republicans are not the stupid party; Republicans are the evil party.
Give the Fraternal Order of Police a whopping dollop of credit, for pursuing the notion that convicted cop-killers have no rights, and give another whopping dollop to seven—count ‘em, seven—Democrats who bowed to the FOP’s demagoguery and voted against Debo Adegbile, President Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights, but give…