Trying to be serious in the Land of Yak
Barack Obama is a thoughtful, serious, palliative sort of man who is being smeared into a corner by people addicted to the politics of anger and bitterness.
Read More...Barack Obama is a thoughtful, serious, palliative sort of man who is being smeared into a corner by people addicted to the politics of anger and bitterness.
Read More...The business of The New York Times, like that of any media company, is language, and as newspapers go The Times is the most literate. That is why I was disquieted to read this passage in a Times editorial yesterday:
“Mr. Bush’s father deftly managed the Soviet Union’s dissolution. President Bill Clinton did a poorer job [...]
It is perhaps a measure of the White House’s cockeyed hubris that Russia has seized a moment in history when our armed forces are overextended to bully our ally, neighboring Georgia. Given such hubris, it was inevitable the White House would forget it’s not the only bully on the block.
Read More...The news industry is worrying itself from its 19th Century decrepitude to the ether, but it needs to redefine the concept of news itself. What we read in our newspapers and watch on television is antiquarian. In some ways magazines, with their broader perspectives, are ahead of the curve.
What the news needs more than anything [...]
Are we becoming a land of belittlers and giggly sycophants?
I listened to John McCain, the man who promised us the high road, deriding Barack Obama’s innocuous admonition to pump more air into our car tires to get more mileage. McCain’s point was that Obama is silly, and there was giggly laughter from the audience. But [...]
The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis keeps ambushing us. As I scan the world wide web I see another rogue wave rolling in as homeowners ask themselves why they shouldn’t be given property tax relief in light of declining market values.
Read More...I don’t know what metrics social scientists use to measure a civilization’s progress and decline. But every time I hear the increasingly inane debate about flip-flopping, every time I hear a slogan or receive a swift-boat e-mail, I think of the progress bars on our computers.
We wait more or less patiently as software downloads or [...]
Permitting the fox to police the chicken coop has not resulted in a significant increase in the production of eggs, but it has scrambled the once vaunted American Dream, fried our impulse to help each other and poached our collective brain.
We’ve tried a quarter century of free-market, trickle-down sleight of hand. It has done more [...]
Remember the blonde with the gold circle pin who was the standard of everything you couldn’t live up to in high school? She reminds me of the handmaiden of globalist greed that masquerades as our foreign policy.
We assume everybody secretly wants to be like us. But we never ask ourselves: does this mean that everybody [...]
If you watch too much television you start dreaming about the scorned ex-lover of a victim’s fiancé and soon realize your life needs a continuity editor. Not that it matters because your advertising support is weak and your Nielsens are in the toilet. There’s no chemistry between you and the beautiful people whose misfortune is [...]
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