Over at his substack blog, Notes from the Middleground, Damon Linker has a disturbing—though not in the way he imagines—post up, titled Dialectical Contributions to Democratic Breakdown, commenting on varieties of “bad news for democracies” from around the world—including South Korea, Romania, and, unfortunately, the U.S., which is, unsurprisingly enough, the only one I’m going…
Tag: George H W Bush
Joe Biden, a bitter old man booted from history, makes us all pay for his son’s sins
Thanks, Joe, for saving the worst for last. Uncle Joe’s utter failure to deal with his pathetic son’s abysmal self-promotion and exploitation of his family name was always “unattractive”, but this miserable pardon is infinitely worse, giving anti-anti-Trumpers and pro-Trumpers alike an infinite amount of wind both beneath their wings and in their mouths to…
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…
I should grow the hell up, Daniel Drezner? I think maybe YOU should grow the hell up!
Yeah, I got Daniel Drezner—“Obfuscatin’ Dan”, I like to call him—on my mind, on my mind. I got Daniel Drezner on my mind. Again! I just got finished praising ole Obfuscatin’ Dan to the skies in a recent post for his recent post at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, calling it “absolute gold”. As…
H.W.–the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Speak nothing but good of the dead? Well, I leave that to the fancy outfits. If you want to read about what a wonderful guy Il Giorgio, aka “Aitch Dubya,” was, well, read the Post or the Times, or whomever. Here at Literature R Us, we mix the good with…
Jon Meacham’s biography of George H W Bush? I think it kind of sucks
I say I think so, because I haven’t read it yet, which is often considered a prerequisite for saying something intelligent about a book. However, I have read an extract that appeared in Politico Magazine, claiming that Bush 41 launched the first invasion of Iraq in 1991 out of moral revulsion, not realpolitik. Around Christmas…