The Other McCain

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

Sports, Politics and War: Morale Matters

The benefits of having a readership full of nerds is that sometimes they can teach you things, as in this comment on yesterday’s post: Obscure wargaming reference here. In the old Avalon Hill Game called Kingmaker — a simulation of the Wars of the Roses — one of the most annoying random event cards is […]

Notes on Partisanship: ‘At Some Point You Have to Join the Team That You’re On’

Professor Reynolds quotes me as having once said the above quote, and I’m sure I did, but I couldn’t find it via Google search, and that’s OK. As I recall, it was during Barack Obama’s first term in the White House, when some Republicans were reluctant to embrace the Tea Party movement while, at the […]

‘TNFlyGirl’ as a Metaphor

Tragedies can be instructive, if you pay attention, and the death of Jenny Blalock, a/k/a “TNFlyGirl,” could be a useful lesson in many ways. Blalock was a 44-year-old University of Tennessee graduate and successful businesswoman, founder of Luxe Homes and Design. A couple of years ago, Blalock bought a Beechcraft Debonair airplane, which costs about […]

Politics Is a Team Sport

Saturday evening on The Other Podcast, I found myself ranting furiously about the idiots who decided that what the conservative movement needed was for eight House Republicans to join the Democrats and vote the GOP Speaker out of office. It prompted me to invoke Casey Stengel who, frustrated by the ineptitude of the 1962 Mets, […]

White House ‘Targeted Me by Name,’ Says Feminist Vaccine Skeptic Naomi Wolf

When COVID-19 policy critic Alex Berenson got banned from Twitter last year, he sued them, and his account was reinstated after it was revealed that White House officials singled him out by name at an April 2021 White House meeting with representatives of social-media companies. In June 2021, two months before Berenson was banned from […]

Politics and Friendship

If you squint very hard at this 1973 photo of the low-brass section of the Douglas County (Ga.) High School Marching Tiger Band, you can see a 14-year-old trombonist, squatting down in the center, who is now a professional journalist of some minor notoriety. Among his good friends in this photo, kneeling to the left, […]

Never Take Military Advice From (Or Give Money to) #NeverTrump Grifters

What’s weird about Rick Wilson is that most people never heard of him until Twitter came along, but the consulting game is so lucrative that lots of people you never heard of collect fat paychecks. Wilson first came onto my radar as a Twitter personality associated with the Tea Party circa 2009, but he had […]

July 4: Why I Am a Populist

One evening in the fall of 1997, we finished loading up the U-Haul truck in our driveway in Rome, Georgia. Friends from our church had come to help us with this task, as my wife and I prepared to move our family to Gaithersburg, Maryland. Four days later, I was to begin my new job […]

keep looking »