Seriously! Yeah, I know I’ve said a lot of mean things about Ramesh in the past—because, well, not to toot my own horn or anything, but they don’t call me “Mr. Truth” for nothing—but recently he wrote a column, Not even the Supreme Court can make Congress do its job, which, I’m pretty sure, is…
Tag: conservatism
Yo, “conservatives”! Haven’t you heard? You’re totally f*cked!
Yes, it’s schadenfreude time around the Literature ‘R Us corral once more, and, yes, it is morally lazy in the extreme to snicker at the other side’s weaknesses without considering one’s own, but life is short, after all, and we’ll soon be in the clay, so before we submit to the clammy embrace of viscous…
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…
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…
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…
Shorter Kevin Drum: The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage? Fox News!
Okay, I just saved you about 4,000 words, the approximate length of El Kevbo’s recent meganalysis of the American mood, appearing in Mother Jones, The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage, which has been getting some semi-approving nods around the internet. “I’ve been spending considerable time digging into the source of our collective rage,” Kevie…
Will Geography Damn Us? Probably.
Al Gore won the presidency in 2000 by almost half a million votes. Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by almost three million. Joe Biden would have won the presidency in 2020 sans COVID-19 by, probably, about six million votes. Yet, in fact, Gore lost to Bush, Hillary lost to Trump, and sans COVID Joe very…
Andrew McCarthy is shocked, shocked to discover that Donald Trump hath no bottom
Writing more in sorrow than in anger, “The Risky Wager of Betting on Trump”, the National Review’s Andy McCarthy has had it up to here—okay, maybe not all the way up to “here”, but almost all the way—with Donald Trump: Since the election, we’ve had two months of a president publicly insisting the election was…
Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel
I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American…
Twilight of Democracy: Anne Applebaum’s front-row seat to disaster
I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different…