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…
Tag: Ronald Reagan
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…
Nice essay, George F. Will! But not, you know, perfect!
Hey, Georgie boy’s snappy retrospective of how a slightly pushy young lad from the sticks became the biggest goddamn Bow Tie the Beltway had ever seen—The pursuit of happiness is happiness—is not at all a bad read, informative and even touching at times, words I haven’t always used when discussing Mr. Will. I was particularly…
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…
What would Ronald Reagan do?
Daniel Drezner, who seems to be my favorite straw man/straight man, and maybe even tin man, has a long post up at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, which is absolutely gold. As Dan points out, in a thoroughly researched and most convincing manner, the very many sins and crimes of the Chinese government doesn’t…
Shorter Dick: Do as I say, not as I did
Or, maybe, do as I did, not as I say. Or even, do as I say, not as Reagan did. You may have heard that our former veep, Ragin’ Dick Cheney, ripped our current veep, Mild Mike Pence, a new one over the Trump Administration’s less than rumbustious foreign policy. Money quote (or money shot)…
Cass Sunstein, talking truth to no one in particular
Cass Sunstein doesn’t always get it wrong, so I’ve been told, but over at Bloomberg he can be observed lecturing Donald Trump on his manners—“A Graceless President, a National Betrayal”—which is rather like faulting a vulture on its breath.1 In the course of his peroration, Cass contrasts Trump unfavorably—as how could he not?—with Ronald Reagan….
Poor, Pitiful Paulie Ryan, from policy wonk to policy wank in six weeks
If you’ve been hatin’ on House Speaker Paulie Ryan as long as I have, seeing Paulie finally take the beatdown he so richly deserves is schadenfreude beyond a Paulie hater’s wildest dreams. Perhaps the best of the many, many drubbings Paulie has received is administered by the hitherto unknown (to me) Philip Klein, who hangs…
Who are you calling a war criminal?
At yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State to be (or not) Rex Tillerson, Fla. Sen. Marco Rubio puffed out his young chest and demanded of Rex whether he considered Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” on the basis of recent bombing of civilians in Syria. Well, if you’re going to be secretary…
Two or three things I know about Nancy Reagan
I know I’m a bit late with this, but it took a while to find the right picture. This is Nancy Reagan circa 1946, “Broadway Nancy”, three years before she got to Hollywood, for a career that lasted all of seven years. Nancy Reagan really didn’t belong on the stage, or the screen. That chin,…