It seems like it was only yesterday that I was devoting a withering (so I hoped) footnote to some recent balderdash emitted by Glenn “Stay Off My Lawn, Negro” Reynolds, who’s now topped his previous balderdash by a very wide margin, a margin that, in fact, tends towards infinity. The gist of Glenn’s latest outburst…
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What Hath Trump Wrought?
Which is more decadent, Donald Trump or the Annual Gala of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Okay, trick question, because there is no wrong answer. But putting the Donald in perspective does take some work. Yet the sources of the Donald aren’t hard to find: the stumblings and…
Neoliberalism and its discontents
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a contemptuous take down of Thomas Piketty’s then notorious book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. If anyone has been citing Piketty’s arguments in the current presidential primary season, I’ve yet to hear it, but that hardly matters, because global capitalism is taking a pounding from all quarters, a…
John Podhoretz, half right on Trump—okay, make that a quarter
Over at Commentary, definitely not one of my fave rave’s, Editor John Podhoretz has “A New Theory of Trump”, taking another crack at explaining the Donald. Podhoretz’s argument is stated rather elliptically—or perhaps obliquely—but what he’s getting at, basically, is that George W. Bush got a lot of things wrong, but Republicans were so obsessed…
Tea-leaf reading from a distance! Anyone can do it!
Well, anyone can, including me, so why not? Why not, indeed? The major topic of Inside the Beltway Baseball these days is whether Rep. Paul Ryan will accept the job of Speaker of the House of Representatives. Ryan is under enormous pressure from the Establishment wing of the Republican Party to do so, but one…
Chaos in the House? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along
How can you tell when conservatives (or anyone else, really) are really frightened? Whey they pretend that something that is a very big deal is not a very big deal. Ramesh Ponnuru illustrates this point beautifully when he “explains” that there are two things to keep in mind now that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy…
James Pethokoukis is shocked, shocked to discover that Republicans aren’t really interested in entitlement reform
James Pethokoukis is that rarity of rarities, a sensible conservative who is actually sensible. Even harder to believe, Jim actually hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute, aka “Fruitcake Central.” But his most recent post, titled, with supreme intellectual dishonesty, “Is the GOP changing its stance on entitlement reform?”, Jim demonstrates he can lie…
Manhattan Institute dude gets War on Poverty half right, most of the time
Scott Winship, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, home of the cop-loving, Sarah Palin-hating Heather MacDonald* and various other assorted right-leaning, tea-sipping double-domes, has a piece in the current Politico magazine that, shockingly concludes, “despite the alarm of the current debate about America’s poor, the country has actually reduced poverty more than we often appreciate—and…
Government Spending, the Climate Change of the Tea Party Right
To function properly in Washington, everyone needs a bogyman. One of the first things a newcomer learns in the nation’s capital is that the Chinese ideogram for “danger” also means “opportunity.” Whether this ubiquitous device exists anywhere outside the text for Motivational Speaking 101 is a moot point. What is not a moot point—what is…
Barack Obama: Not without guile
Yes, Barack Obama does throw a nice curve, and it’s fun watching the Republicans sputter and fume at the thought of having to hit the damn thing, at the thought of having to actually take, you know, a meaningful position on the president’s poison-pen letter, “let’s attack Syria and any other country I feel like…