Christmas/New Year’s is the time for lists. You can’t blame journalists for wanting to have a life, can you? So they make lists, aka “phoning it in”. There are only two list-makers I like, so my list will not be long: Dan Drezner: “Your nonfiction book picks for the end of 2018 Actually, Dan makes…
Author: Alan Vanneman
The Marx Brothers Revisited: You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me
A week or so back, I snickered (rather loudly) at the expense of Ann Coulter, to the extent of complimenting her, with rather heavy-handed irony, on her looong memory (‘cause she’s, you know, old) for pop cultural trivia, to wit: Her awareness of the fourth Marx brother, “Zeppo”.1 In the course of doing so, I…
Catherine Rampell is confused. I enlighten her.
WashPost columnist Catherine Rampell—Princeton Phi Bet and winner of the Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism—is struggling with the evidence: The real question is why congressional leaders, including [now former House Speaker Paul] Ryan,1 repeatedly cave to Trump’s latest tweets and fleeting fancies instead of writing him off as the flake that he is. Why…
Shorter Ross: We’re almost as bad as the Jews
Alas, poor Douthat! Ross Douthat, I mean, who bravely assumes the task of explaining why he will celebrate another Christmas as a Catholic, despite the, um, unending revelations of unending horrors of sexual abuse and hierarchical coverup that have plagued the Church for the last, I don’t know, twenty or thirty years. To explain his…
Go Donald! Go Donald! (Some of the time)
Yes, it has come to this: the American “Establishment” is so blind, benighted, and beggared that it takes the installation of a complete mountebank1 in the White House to save that Establishment, and the United States as well, from that Establishment’s ever-compounding follies. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of a relative…
Bring Back the Horse, and End the Madness
For centuries, Americans—real Americans—great Americans!—rode horses. But that has changed, and that has changed everything. I refer, of course, of the constant tendency of today’s “writers” to use the word “reign” when the correct word is “rein”, the error popping up in sources as disparate as the first Iron Man—“Tony Takes the Reigns”1—and “What the…
Shorter Ann Coulter: Wah, wah, wah
UPDATE: Humiliated by Ann’s rap, detailed below, Donald Trump is now saying he will fight for like forever to build the wall that Ann so desires, and, yeah, I know Donald Trump always keeps his promises. But somehow I don’t think Ann will ever feel quite the same way about Donnie, aka Cap’n Disaster, ever…
The demise of the Weekly Standard: Only evil deeds go unpunished
Yes, the word is that Bill Kristol’s bawling, brawling neocon baby, the Weekly Standard is no more, mourned in predictably fatuous fashion by co-founder John Podhoretz, “The Murder of the Weekly Standard* and long-time contributor David Brooks, among others, for heroically refusing to swallow the Trumpian swill that is now de rigueur on the Right,1…
Donald Trump, president of peace?
Amusing, not to mention welcome, if true. My bête noire di tutti bêtes noires has set the Acela world on its collective ear if not its collective rear by his sudden decision to pull all American troops out of Syria, where they never should have been in the first place. You don’t get it, Donald!…
Shorter National Review: OUR CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO HELL!!!! (Also, that Trump guy should probably take it down a notch)
Yes, our favorite band of anti-anti-Trumpers, proud if unknowing heirs of the anti-anti-communists1—are at it again, with a brand-new message, to wit: Yeah, sure, Trump isn’t the greatest, just like your favorite pal Bill Clintion!—but the big picture is, WE’RE ALL GOING TO HELL! The December 11 online issue of NR took the occasion to…