Frequent breast beater and all-around intellectual marshmallow David Brooks has touched off a real foofaraw, if not an outright hullabaloo, around the internet with his recent post for the New York Times, What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?, arguing that the rule of “us”, that horde of Ivy League educated sissy britches who hold…
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Noah Smith is an idiot! But not all the time!
No, Noah, the “Noahopinion” guy, is not always an idiot. Take, for example, this recent post, If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look like, expressing a bit of amazement at how well things have worked out under Uncle Joe’s genially geriatric hand. In fact, Noah says he…
Shorter Paul Krugman: Herbert Hoover was right. Businessmen are too goddamn greedy!
Goddamn right they are. Uncle Paul tells it like it is, unlike the many times I’ve bitched or sneered at him (though mixed in, to be sure, with occasional gestures of praise). As Paul points out, all the supposedly “responsible” businessfolk, in favor of “sound” principles, have no problem with a single house of Congress,…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2: Matthew Continetti and The Right
A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
Shorter India: “The United States of ‘America’? Isn’t that one of those little western countries?”
That’s the perspective from New Delhi, Varanasi and Chennai, as reported by NYT guy Roger Cohen in his long post, Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World, suggesting that the Biden administration’s moralizing attempt to turn the current world situation into Cold War II isn’t playing too well beyond the Atlantic community of nations, almost…
Another $2 trillion down the rathole
“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion! Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25…
Yo, Francis Fukuyama! Righteous rage may be hazardous to your health! And mine too!
Francis Fukuyama, who is probably my most favorite living neo-Hegelian, has sadly gone off the rails more than a little with this ecstatic, triumphalist treatise, Why Ukraine Will Win, which sounds to me a lot like the late Charlie Krauthammer on steroids and scotch circa 2004, rejoicing over the new American empire, on which, he…
“Don’t worry about the Iranians,” says Shay Khatiri. “They’re a bunch of sissies!”
Why should we bomb the Iranians? Hell, why shouldn’t we? That’s what Shay Khatiri says, over at the Bulwark . Sure, “the state of Iran’s nuclear program is unclear.” (Translation: we don’t even know if they’re thinking about building a bomb.) But, hey, you can’t be too careful. There’s sure to be something we can…
Memo to Peter Beinart: Physician, heal thyself!
AV fave rave Daniel Larison has a post up1 quoting Peter Beinart from an interview Pete did with John Glaser of the Cato Institute as follows: We also don’t have…we don’t really have a learning process that I think then shapes the public debate. So one of the things that’s really frustrating to me, and…
CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…