And so now, after months of tedious, tendentious argument, after riotous town meetings and the hysteria over non-existent death squads, after the Palin moment and the Lieberman moment, passage of historic legislation a hair’s breadth away, and here comes Howard Dean to say that the whole thing isn’t worth a damn thing. Bag it, says …
Being from Chicago, but by way of Honolulu and Jakarta and many other points west and east, President Obama may not be fully steeped in the doctrines of the Chicago School of Management, as expounded by the eminent Professor Al Capone. Employing phraseology composed by wordsmith David Mamet, Mr. Capone discoursed on the fundamentals of …
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With no good option on Afghanistan available, it’s clear President Obama last night took the one he considered least bad–and by least bad, we mean the most likely to avoid the Worst Case Scenario. In the president’s case, that would be the “I told you so” scenario, the one that would become possible if America …
Time was you watched a TV drama, the whole thing got wrapped up in a hour. Perry Mason would meet a client, Dr. Kildare would get a case, Charlie would call the Angels, and sixty minutes later, everyone could go to bed. But in the eighties, things changed. In Wiseguy and Hill Street Blues and …
At “Sunday with the Magazine,’’ a program of interviews and panel discussions presented by The New York Times, five journalists who cover the Obama administration for the paper offered some reasonably sharp observations on the president’s first 103 days. HOW’S IT GOING? “This has been a pretty tremendous period,’’ said Matt Bai, who regularly writes …
There was a moment on D-Day, related in Cornelius Ryan’s great history The Longest Day, when American troops landing on Utah beach discovered they had disembarked their landing craft in the wrong place, at a point significantly removed from the planned point of attack. Surrounded by confused and anxious captains, Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the …
Writing on TrueSlant.com last week, I observed that the Number 2 book on amazon.com was Eduardo Galeano‘s Open Veins of Latin America, a book about America’s involvement in Latin America first published in 1997. To what did Galeano owe his sudden surge into best-sellerdom? Why, simply, to a genius act of product placement on the …
In June we will welcome a new comic book, Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli. Barack the Barbarian? Did you see him at the White House Easter Egg Hunt yesterday? Here are two images that have been released. Is that supposed to be Hank Paulson behind Obama? Is that Michelle or, like, …
The question of the day is: is Barack Obama as cool and as shrewd as Jurgen Prochnow? Or, to be more precise, as Capt.-Lt. Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the character Prochnow played in the 1982 German submarine classic Das Boot. Escaping from Allied destroyers, the captain took his submarine lower and lower into the sea. As they …
So here’s E.J. Dionne Jr.—a good guy, a reliable liberal—writing in this morning’s Washington Post: “The Obama administration keeps having to learn that bland centrism is not pragmatic, that it’s not helpful in resolving a big crisis and that it certainly doesn’t buy you any love.’’ And here’s David Ignatius, as smart a columnist as …