My old buddy/bête noir Dan Drezner brings me this message, Are "Wikipedia-Surfing Kissinger Wannabes" Killing the Political Risk Field?, jumping off a fulminatin’ post by one Tina Fordham, a serious, totally non-amateur political risk chick who now runs her own company, Fordham Global Foresight. Writing in the Financial Times, Tina ripped a new one for…
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Yo, New York Times! Want to know who started the War in Iraq? Look in the goddamn mirror!
20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?, rumbles “Interpreter” (that’s what they call him) Max Fisher, subjecting us to a shitload of obscurantist chin-stroking before reaching an all too convenient non-answer/confession of ignorance, topping off this banal exercise in disingenuosity with this laughable quote as a closer: “I will…
Notice to a Random White Dude: Next time, try NOT acting like a complete *sshole.
I was recently in, well, a liquor store. The tall, fit young man ahead of me (white, obviously) looked like he might have played lacrosse for Georgetown, though for all I know he could have been a high school dropout. He was speaking to a thirty-something black guy behind the counter. Further on down the…
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…
Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!
At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
Is Ross Douthat smarter than Joe Biden? Probably.
I have, in the past, beat on poor Ross Douthat so lustily that the poor man recently moved to have me declared a public nuisance. But now I feel compelled to admit that, despite the appalling mendacity of his pseudo “Never Trumper” posturing/apologetics, Ross can still serve an occasional winner, and he did so with…
Political Notes from All Over
“Anyone but Joe,” anyone? Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? Spending the last few weeks laughing at the Republicans over their self-inflicted imbroglio/embroilment trying to elect a speaker for the House of Representatives was a treat. Well, now it’s our turn to suffer, as Uncle Joe’s Corvette winter plus the upcoming Hunter Biden follies, which…
King Joe? Dictator Joe? Well, maybe. Sort of. We’ll just have to see how this plays out.
Regardless of how the current hullabaloo/Mexican standoff in the House is resolved, whether Kevin McCarthy gets the job, or some other poor emasculated schmuck takes over—a schmuckless schmuck, as it were—the odds are approximately a million to one that the House of Representatives will be all but ungovernable in 2023. Specifically, I think the Republicans…
Yo, Adam Smith! That whole “invisible hand” thing is looking kinda shaky these days!
Oh, yeah, a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, and what’s shakin’ from the tree looks pretty goddamn gamy these days, starting with Elon Musk, who’s been giving an excellent impression of the world’s richest 13-year-old for some time now, but recently upped the ante by about a 1000 percent, half destroying the company he just…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 1: Tim Miller’s Why We Did It
A couple of years back, when, it seems, I was feeling particularly down in the mouth, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, a couple of actual Republicans have written books asking themselves the same question, viz. Matthew Continetti (The Right The Hundred Year War for…