Three days away from the blog means so little in the scheme of things that I’m betting you didn’t notice. Anyway, Paul Krugman’s column caught my attention this morning. Headlined Bullshitter-in-Chief‘s] administration isn’t trustworthy.” But, it adds, we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says […]

Nelson Algren’s Lou Reed’s lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly. When “Walk” first appeared, in 1956, the literary critics pretty much told Algren to take a hike, and for the many years since, they’ve pretty much ignored him and it. writing in The Telegraph, notes that the novel “made a mockery of the American dream. […]

The Muslim cartoon furor just won’t go away. “About 50,000 people, many chanting ‘Hang those who insulted the prophet,’ rallied Sunday in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi,” AP reports. Another 20,000 in the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum chanted anti-Danish slogans and shouted “Allah is Great.” We’ve all heard about the Al Qaeda video […]

The fine art of the meaningless gesture and the empty symbol was honed to perfection with a combined “symbolic gesture” when the A front-page story in The New York Times on Saturday reported that he “flew directly to Islamabad aboard Air Force One,” as “a symbolic gesture that he considered the country safe enough for […]

Refighting the Vietnam War is not an option. Rethinking it is. That’s what they’ll be doing in a star-studded, two-day conference to rival Sunday’s Oscars. (Well, almost.) It’s called Who are “they”? Oh, just a few policymakers of the Vietnam era (like Kissinger and Haig), along with journalists (like Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald), and historians […]

Grim and getting grimmer — that’s my “take away” from this afternoon’s roundtable discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations about the situation in Iraq three years after the invasion (per yesterday’s Stephen Biddle (senior fellow for defense policy at the council) replied: “It’s an acceleration of what we’ve seen before rather than a fundamental […]

Not too long ago the idea of comparing the American misadventure in Iraq with the Vietnam War was strictly limited to anti-war activists. To mention Iraq and Vietnam in the same breath made neocons roll their eyes, and even pro-war establishment liberals wouldn’t hear of it. How things have changed. Stephen Biddle in the March/April […]

A friend writes, The ones who don’t enjoy themselves, even when they laugh. Oh yeah. The ones who worship the corporate image, not knowing that they work for someone else. Oh yeah. The ones who should have been shot in the cradle… Pow! Oh yeah. The ones who say “Follow me to success, but kill […]

Iraqi death squads doing America’s dirty work? Sunni genocide, hasn’t it? In public, “Police Tied to Death Squads” shows, possibly without meaning to, how contradictory and difficult the distancing is: Leading Sunni figures have blamed the reprisals on Jabr. … In a recent interview, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who is leading the multibillion-dollar effort […]

The subject of torture is latest Abu Ghraib photos obtained by Salon, but in “The Memo,” Jane Mayer’s latest exposé, which pins the blame on a gang of war criminals running the U.S. government. So before it disappears into the past, here’s a must-see: “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to […]

It was Some anxious-looking patriot paddles up, identifying himself as the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker bringing tidings of comfort and joy: namely, that if the Little Calumet were the Volga I’d be up to my ears. And paddles away as contentedly as if he’d really done something for me. He hasn’t done a […]

Cheney Boy’s 78-year-old reported by the Associated Press, “His voice was a bit raspy, but strong, and he had what appeared to be a line of scarring on his upper right eyelid and scrapes on his neck.” This is what he said: “I regret that I couldn’t have been here earlier so you could see […]

Before the week is out I want to clarify an issue of burning interest to film hogs, critics, scholars and other lower forms of life. There seems to be a sudden interest in “deep focus” and its original Hollywood practitioners. It’s a simple cinematic technique, and yet its history and meaning are somewhat misunderstood even […]

From his Mother Goose: This is the rat, That ate the malt That lay in the house that Jack built. Postscript: And now for the topper:

The stuff coming out of the White House is too funny to stop. Coupla hunnerd proof at least. Can’t help it. Here’s more: he loves the smell of gunpowder. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

I dunno who Don Krupp is, but I say give him an op-ed column. His letter to the editor in this morning’s New York Times works for me: To the Editor: Re “No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident” (front page, Feb. 14): The debacle of Vice President Dick Cheney’s misfire while quail hunting […]