The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

This Is The Part Where I Point And Laugh At Alan Schroeder

by Smitty At the risible SOL/PuffHo, Alan Schroeder has published “Why Republicans Should Not Sponsor Republican Debates“. Two ‘graphs in, I realized this would have to be a long-form fisk. Emphasis mine throughout. Schroeder Smitty According to an internal e-mail intercepted by Politico, the Republican National Committee is hoping to sponsor its own series of […]

New York Times Sends an 11-Year-Old Girl to Interview the Jonas Brothers

Or the equivalent thereof: Shridar Pappu’s profile feature on “Washington’s New Brat Pack” pulses with so much fanzine breathlessness you might think it was February 1964 and the Beatles had just landed in New York: In only a few years, these young men and others like them have become part of the journalistic establishment in […]

Wolcottism

Someone wrote a brief Onion-style satire in which residents of New Orleans expressed dismay that “Japanese were missing a golden opportunity” for looting in the wake of the tsunami there. Little Miss Attila linked that without comment. This compelled James Wolcott to cite Attila as an example of conservatives “transmitting in their usual racial code.” Really. You have […]

‘Arab Savages’ and Other Things No One Can Write About in 21st-Century England

No matter how savage any Arabs may be: A Melanie Phillips blogpost on the [U.K.] Spectator website which referred to the “moral depravity” of Arab “savages” is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission. The online comment piece, headlined “Armchair barbarism”, focused on media coverage of the murder of five members of a Jewish family […]

Revolving Doors: Freire Exits Examiner, Joins NMS; Klein Exits Spectator, Joins Examiner; Hot Air Is Hiring (Not Me)

One of the things that has always amazed me about D.C. is how frequently young people change jobs here. You go to a cocktail reception and run into a think-tank guy you met at a reception six weeks ago: “Hey, how are things at [name of think tank]?” And he says, “Oh, I’m at [name […]

James Wolcott: ‘Those Sort of People’

When you turn over a rock, you expect to find creepy-crawly things, but still sometimes … “I don’t think Felker had any way of knowing what was going to happen. Christgau, Goldstein … it was those sort of people who really formed the core of politicizing the Voice and really pushing its cultural coverage to […]

Predictably, Japan Disaster to Be Scene of Next ‘Battle of the Network News Stars’

So predictable, you can set your watch by it: A catastrophe or crisis makes headlines, and TV news operations compete to see who can get their celebrity on-air talent to the scene first: Cooper, Amanpour among TV journalists to Japan U.S. broadcast and cable networks, some of which were short-staffed Friday morning in Japan, are […]

I Don’t Hate Trains

“What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what?” — David Weigel, Slate Few things — not even the threat of a coffee shortage — bother me quite so much as what I call the Existential Theory of Liberalism: Everything that exists must be subsidized by the federal government; ergo, to argue […]

« go back — keep looking »