. There is so much messy farting going on, the political arena smells like an outhouse. Of course, why should it not? It is an outhouse. Between the craven opportunists and the reflexive ideologues, even a dash past the entrance with cotton plugs in your nose will not spare you the stench. The Muslim world has […]
The American Socialist Century
. The Manchester Union-Leader, long an emblematic journalistic voice of the Republican Party, New England strain – before the advent of Tea Parties and general no-nothingism – isn’t quite that anymore. Do not say it is not trying to adapt, however. President Obama and Mitt Romney, and the courses they propose for this […]
Niall Ferguson, (C)Rock Star
. Niall Ferguson’s cover story for Newsweek was a journalistic and intellectual fiasco, for him and for Newsweek and Daily Beast editor Tina Brown. It was a journalistic fiasco for read-the-multitude-of-responses-online-and-on-paper. Ferguson now has no credibility as an opining voice in the public square. His intellectual credibility, established as an academic historian and teacher, is […]
I Apologize
. Jonah Lehrer has apologized to his readers for manufacturing quotations in his latest book, to Michael Moynihan for lying about it, and to himself for self-plagiarizing his blog posts for The New Yorker. Fareed Zakaria has apologized to Time and CNN for plagiarizing a paragraph of an article from Jill Lepore at the New […]
The Most Fundamentally (© N. Gingrich) Dishonest Candidate Since Richard Nixon
. Let’s not speak of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. The Mormon Church isn’t one of the longer running cults in the world, but that wouldn’t matter so much if it were the source of a person’s principled goodness in the world. But when various public figures began months back to dance gingerly around the subject of […]