Was there ever a crisis so tedious and unnecessary as the current debt crisis—a monument to the hypocrisy of the American people, who want the world, but don’t want to have to pay for it? I’ve written before of the “tear it down, tear it all down” fervor of the Tea Party crew, but what…
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Houston, I have a migraine
What is it with these Republican presidential candidates? Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels decides not to run because of an embarrassing family secret: he and his wife divorced, she ran off to California and married her high school sweetheart, discovered that she was no longer in high school and divorced him, moved back to Indiana and…
Day of the Jacobins
OK, my chronology is a bit off, because the Jacobins really hadn’t made the scene yet at the time of the Tennis Court Oath, but the point is, today’s Tea Party crew is a lot like the Jacobins. Why? Because, despite all their talk of fiscal responsibility, what they really want to do is repudiate…
Thoughts on the current discontents
What’s happening in the Middle East? Damfino. Robert Darnton thinks it’s 1789. Ann Applebaum thinks it’s 1848. If Ann’s right, things ought to be pretty tight all around the Mediterranean around the year 2150 or so. Take that, Caesar Augustus!1 But what about the home front? Well, I had hoped to comment on Obama’s State…
Dave Weigel, perchance too hip for the room, but still should not set himself on fire
Dave Weigel, recently bounced from the Wash Post for talking trash about conservatives, more recently covered a Richmond, Va. Tea Party convention and described one of the attendees, long-shot congressional candidate Floyd Bayne, thusly: Bayne is bald, goateed, and built like the bouncer at a club with a $10 cover. I give up, Dave. What…
C. Stewart Verdery, Jr. Is TERMINALLY Naïve!
Yeah, C. Stewart, Jr. is quite a dude. He served as assistant secretary for Homeland Security back in the George, Jr. years and before that general counsel to the Senate Republican Whip. He is the CEO of “Monument Advocacy”, a “cutting edge” (I guess) DC shop handling “government relations, public affairs, strategic and crisis communications,…
Shorter Jamie Dimon: You’re calling me a “whore”? I prefer the term “businessman”.
Sorry, Jamie, but even by “businessman” standards—if they still exist—you’re a whore, and a pretty goddamn big one too. Here’s Jamie talking to CNBC about the state of the world, after meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Ukrainian spelling as per Wikipedia): But, you know, my heart goes out to the guy. I mean, people…
Is Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” the best vanity project I’ve seen all week? I think so! But I do have questions!
Fuck yeah, I do! So many questions! Like, why the fuck did producer/director/star Bradley Cooper even make this movie? Did he wake up one morning and think to himself “You know what America needs to hear? It needs to hear how legendary composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, having lost his way in life, ultimately found spiritual redemption…
Siskel & Ebert, together again
The no-doubt-aging fans of the once legendary film criticism tag-team duo of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have been done a solid by Matt Singer’s excellent study of their partnership, Opposable Thumbs, though I must say that the very best thing about Matt’s book is that inspired me to read Roger Ebert’s remarkable memoir, Life…
Louis Menand thinks you can’t handle the truth—about Charlie Chaplin
If you have not read Louis Menand’s massive, 857-page study of the arts in America from 1945 to 1965, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, you are missing, not an intellectual treat but an intellectual feast of the highest order. A more accurate title might be New York in the Fifties,…