Last week I took a poke at National Review dude Jonah Goldberg, suggesting that erstwhile Trump-hater Jonah was learning to stop worrying and embrace the Borg the Donald. I mean, resistance is useless, so why lose your crease over nothing? Well, I was wrong, slightly. Jonah still finds Donald Trump repulsive, and his followers more…
Matt King—“Bemsha Swing”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juCD6NxcRTw Matt King (piano, Fender Rhodes), Chico Pinheiro (guitar), Itaiguara Brandao (bass), Mauricio Zottarelli (drums). Posted by Matt King From the album “Monk In Brazil”
I suppose if Trump is really, really guilty he should shoot him?
The National Review’s Rich “Ice Pick” Lowry “explains” that Trump shouldn’t fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller unless he (Trump, that is) is guilty. “If he’s not guilty, firing Mueller out of pique or political calculation would simply be a catastrophic misjudgment, one that would put his presidency at risk.”
Republicans find rich people they can hate—rich black people!
You think Republicans never want to do anything except give rich people a tax cut? You are so wrong! Says Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA), “I don’t think there’s anybody out there that is talking about NFL players needing a tax cut.” NFL players who, coincidentally enough, happen to be almost 70% black! Sure, let’s tax…
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…
Watch Jonah Goldberg morph into Donald Trump
Yes, it’s taken awhile. National Review conservatives like Jonah Goldberg were repelled by Donald Trump’s vicious nativism, his embrace of those good people who shout “Jews, you will not replace us”, plus all his wild talk about how we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan and that he always thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad…
Yo, Megan McArdle! It should be “Be Careful WHOM You Call a ‘White Supremacist’”!
Well, it should be, and you should be too. You should be very careful, very very careful, as Megan explains, at great length, and with great vagueness, over at Bloomberg Review. Sure, you should be. It was highly stupid, not to mention highly condescending—and even borderline racist—for Vice President Biden to warn blacks that Republicans…
Tempest in a Teaspoon—The Exterminating Angel. You’ve seen the movie, now hear the opera!
Fewer sheep, more tunes! That’s the short take on composer Thomas Adès fascinating new opera, The Exterminating Angel, enjoying its Metropolitan Opera premiere on October 26. The Exterminating Angel, with a libretto by Tom Cairns, is based on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 classic exercise in Iberian surrealism, directed by Buñuel using a screenplay he wrote in…
Apple doesn’t do Jazz
It’s a well known, and thoroughly lamentable, fact that kids rule the world. Nowhere is this dominance more visible, and more vicious, than in the world of music. Almost 12 years ago, I started loading my collection of some 800 CDs—about 9/10th jazz and 1/10th classical—onto my Windows computer, creating a folder for each artist/composer…
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…