(Editor’s note. Sometimes I write ‘em short, and sometimes I can’t shut up. This is one of the latter occasions.) Several hundred news cycles ago, Samantha Power’s autobiography/memoir The Education of an Idealist was in the news. Well, I am nothing if not slow, so I am just getting caught up with Samantha, who really…
Tag: Barack Obama
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)…
Donald Trump: Even when he’s (kind of) right, he’s awful
What is one to make of El Supremo’s sweaty, long-running mancrush on stunning Slavic muscleboy Vladimir Putin,1 aka (in Donnie’s dreams) Vlad the Impaler? Is it just a thuggish admiration society, the way Hitler had it in for Mussolini? Secret investments in a polar pipeline? Or maybe the whole golden shower thing? Well, who knows,…
Regarding Michael Brendan Dougherty, who can, on occasion, strongly resemble a three-armed gorilla
What can you say about a man who can both beat his own chest and pat himself on the back at the same time? Michael Brendan Dougherty, or Mickey B, as I sometimes call him, manages this display of anthropoid dexterity in a recent column warning us never-Trumpers that “We’re Becoming Like Him”, taking the…
Two or three, or four, or more things I hate about Harvard
The hits just keep coming, don’t they? This piece is a bit of a recapitulation—aka I’ve been lying down on the job—but Harvard, fair Harvard, whom I’ve booted around before in the past two weeks with no mean gusto—is back in the news, and not in a good way. First, and most ghastly, is the…
I cannot keep silent! Part Deux
This not talking shit is hard! Yesterday, I couldn’t/wouldn’t keep silent about some year-old bullshit from David Ignatius. Well, today it’s the National Review’s Rich Lowry, opining about General Trump’s plans to reignite the war in Afghanistan: “At the end of the day, this is Trump concluding that he doesn’t want to lose a war…
Of course, when that happened during the Obama Administration, he threw them in jail
“Some brave patriots in intelligence and law enforcement and elsewhere in the federal government have taken risks to get the facts out.” Thus quoth WashPost columnist Dana Milbank, celebrating the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor for l’affaire Russe. As Dana sums things up, a little too generously, “With the stroke of a pen,…
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…
One for Bob
I lambasted, pretty much, Robert Samuelson last week for a dumb-ass column he wrote claiming that we don’t spend enough on defense. Well, this week, Bob gets it right, in a column praising President Obama’s handling of the Great Recession, which was in fact his greatest achievement, though not quite great enough to allow Hillary…
Finger-Pointing in the Dark: The Rout of Neo-Liberalism
It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear. Brexit was a stunner. Compared to Donald Trump, it was a popgun. It’s become overwhelmingly clear that the real cost of the Great Recession was not the cost of fighting our way…