Latest musings, analyses, and general madness
What a bore Bill Kristol has become. For years, he was the leading popular spokesman for the Leo Strauss-inspired political advocacy alliance dubbed “neoconservatives,” a bipartisan clan with dreams of reforming a corrupted constitutional republic into a paternalist intellectual’s petri dish — equal parts cherry-picked Platonic moralism, progressive-Hegelian nanny-statism, military adventurism as domestic social engineering project, and (largely feigned) American-grassroots social conservatism. The...
On Tuesday, February 4th, President Donald Trump will enter the United States Congress to deliver the completely superfluous tribal posturing ritual known as a “state of the union address.” Upon his entry, he will slowly wend his way down the aisle toward the altar, like a bride about to marry his own ego, during which parade — or perp walk, depending on your...
Regular readers will be aware that I often return, perhaps somewhat obsessively, to the theme of not wasting time. I can never emphasize enough, however, that when I speak of wasting time, or invoke the personal motto of sorts that I use to exhort my serious students to improve their lives — “I don’t waste time” — I am not even remotely concerned...
Apart. — Parliamentarianism — that is, public permission to choose between five basic political opinions — flatters and wins the favor of all those who would like to seem independent and individual, as if they fought for their opinions. Ultimately, however, it is indifferent whether the herd is commanded to have one opinion or permitted to have five. Whoever deviates from the five...
There will be no witnesses at the U.S. Senate’s impeachment trial, because the Republican majority voted almost unanimously against the proposition. Mitt Romney, who is widely accomplished, famous, rich, Mormon, and unlikely to care much about running for re-election in 2025, when he will be seventy-seven years old, defied his party’s sycophancy and craven political calculation and voted for witnesses. He will be...
I cannot call this post “The Two Weakest Defenses of Trump,” because the president’s cult has amply proved that there is no depth to which they will not go, and from which point they will not dig even lower, in defending Mitch McConnell’s wayward puppet against the impeachment charges. Today, therefore, rather than waste time debating against those who believe Trump is God’s...
Ted Cruz saw his wife and father publicly attacked and ridiculed by Donald Trump and his surrogates, and his own reputation and character smeared in the National Enquirer on Trump’s behalf, in the most repulsive case of “winning ugly” in the history of presidential politics. He watched the Tea Party constitutionalist movement he claimed to represent being thwarted and annihilated by Trump in...
One year ago today, I was sitting in a hospital bed awaiting surgery for a broken foot, trying to distract myself from the thought of losing my lifelong pastime and natural condition — walking — for an indefinite period of time. That evening, my chosen method of meditative self-discipline was to write about my experience for Limbo. Thus began a series of four...
Donald Trump, the twelve-year-old mean girl, routinely mocks his opponents’ appearance, insults their spouses, shouts “Nyah-nyah, nobody likes you!” at them, and takes great pains to declare — the moment all of his top appointees decide they have no more soul left to sell and run away from him with the scraps of their dignity — that those “best people” he keeps hiring...
Yet again, socialists are out to prove beyond any doubt that their ideology is entirely rooted in, and fueled by, one overriding passion: envy. There is no subject more revealing of the Marxist mind than “the rich.” The moment a Marxist (or socialist or progressive) is asked to explain why it is problematic that some people are enormously wealthy, while others are not,...
