Uncategorized
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Michael Crichton slurs a critic
Try to believe this really happened. In retaliation for negative coverage, Michael Crichton, the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, depicts a thinly-veiled version of The New Republic’s Michael Crowley as a pedophile who rapes his two-year-old nephew in his new book. Crowley explains in a TNR column that runs under the apt header “Michael Crichton,
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The Economist’s 20/20 hindsight on Dole
Talk about post-hoc storytelling — The Economist’s Lexington column refers to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign as “obviously doomed” during the GOP primaries: And whereas the Democrats usually engage in mud-wrestling to see who will get their party’s nomination, the Republicans are generally disciplined. They like to rally around a top dog as early as
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Silly “neo-” foreign policies
Writing on Tapped, Robert Farley points out the problem with trying to make foreign policy based on vague analogies to the views of past and manages to work in an amusing reference to a “Neo-Polkish Foreign Policy” — the pundit equivalent of a triple axel: Like Atrios, I wish that people would stop naming foreign
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The price of Iraq in ’08?
Writing on Hotline on Call, Hotline editor Chuck Todd articulates the risk that GOP presidential candidates are facing in ’08 from what has become an extremely unpopular war: There are many GOP strategists who worry that if Iraq is still the major issue in ’08 and Iraq is still viewed as Bush’s war (translation: the
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Trent Lott’s “character”
Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon praised Trent Lott’s character in a speech before the whip election: Inside the Republican senators’ November 15 closed-door meeting to pick their leaders for the next Congress, minority whip candidate Lamar Alexander had reason to feel good. His nominators had given enthusiastic pitches, and he had been campaigning hard for
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The delusions of Unity ’08
More silly third party hype from Unity ’08 co-founder Jerry Rafshoon in an insider interview on National Journal (sub. required): Rafshoon: Our No. 1 goal is to elect [our ticket]. …Twenty percent of the vote is our minimum goal. It’s our minimum. We’ll take it, certainly, if that’s what we get. But think about this:
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Jon Chait on patronizing Bush
Jon Chait’s Los Angeles Times column, which is always worth reading, contains a particularly disturbing anecdote this week: Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child. Consider a story in the latest Time magazine, recounting
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Bloomberg third-party hype escalating
Writing in the New York Sun, Jim Geraghty is the latest figure to feed the hype around a third-party presidential run by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. The article begins with a remarkably credulous take: The 2004 presidential race lacked a feature present in every campaign since 1992: a significant showing by a third-party
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How mean are American high schools?
Check out this striking passage from an article in the current issue of The New Yorker (not online) — the social culture in suburban high schools is so brutal that Somali refugees think they’re awful places: Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt
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Rumsfeld’s false modesty?
Anyone else notice an interesting juxtaposition on the New York Times front page yesterday? It featured a picture of Donald Rumsfeld’s farewell speech in which he suggesting he was moved and a headline for an article about China directly below that included the phrase “false modesty.” Maybe just a coincidence, but I was amused…