Another reminder that certainty is an iffy proposition
Vincent Van Gogh on his relationship to posterity: As a painter, I will never amount to anything important. I am absolutely sure of it.
Continue reading →Category Archives: Historical figures
Speculation about the Aurora perp
So far, the information we’ve gotten about James Holmes doesn’t really fit the portrait of the usual perpetrator of mass murder. That doesn’t mean that, as more facts emerge, he won’t seem to have been unstable and isolated, and to … Continue reading →
Literary leftists: Will Durant
[NOTE: This is another installment in my series on literary leftists.] You may know Will and Ariel Durant as the authors of a series of books on world history called The Story of Civilization, which I read one long-ago summer … Continue reading →
Juliet Poynz, changer?
About a week ago marked the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of Juliet Poyntz. She’s hardly a household word, but her story is not atypical of those highly-placed Communists who turned on their former colleagues. Poyntz was a Barnard history … Continue reading →
Obama: it seemed hot to me
Obama’s speech on economics yesterday was remarkable in that it failed to impress even the sycophants at MSNBC: And Dana Milbank of the WaPo was not the least bit happy with Obama, either: I had high hopes for President Obama’s … Continue reading →
Kevin Drum asks…
…should Obama be more like LBJ? Perhaps he should have asked, “could Obama be more like LBJ?” But either way the answer is (drum roll please): NO, because the question is absurd. This is like asking should (or could) a … Continue reading →
You really think this was a gaffe?
President Obama commits the gaffe of calling Romney by Mitt’s father’s name, George: During a speech at the New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square, the president mixed up his Republican opponent with former Michigan Governor George Romney while contrasting their … Continue reading →
Those Polish death camps
By now you probably know that Obama has committed another huge boo-boo: he has managed to outrage the Poles by referring to a Nazi death camp in Poland as a “Polish death camp.” The occasion was some scripted remarks during … Continue reading →
Dmitri Volkogonov, changer
[NOTE: Like yesterday’s post, this rumination was sparked by Martin Amis’ book Koba the Dread.] Here’s a tragic quote about political change, from Dmitri Volkogonov, a man who wrote biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky: “Perhaps the only thing I … Continue reading →
Revolutions betrayed
I’ve been wading through Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a book about Soviet Russia and its crimes and betrayals. The reason I’m reading that particular book is that one of Amis’s goals in writing it … Continue reading →
Richard Cohen tells Obama to be like LBJ
Richard Cohen advises Obama to read Robert Caro’s latest biography of LBJ and learn how to make friends and influence people like Johnson did. Dream on. In an alternate universe, maybe. In this one, a person can learn a few … Continue reading →
It’s come to this: vote for Obama, he’s cool
Obama’s big campaign talking point is that he’s the cool one. And the MSM seems to agree. Ah, but you heard it first at neo-neocon. Back in early June of 2008, in a post entitled, “Wanting a cool and sexy … Continue reading →