I'm late coming to it, but I think Andrew is wrong about this: I can still just about believe that Bush thought the WMD case was sound. I can't believe, given all that we now know, that Cheney did. He's too smart. The data he read, we now know, was far more equivocal than the data the public was provided with. He's not new at this. He probably never wanted to make the WMD argument anyway, put it in to appease the UN crowd, and certainly wasn't going to query its… More »
I should say at the outset of this post that I am not a particularly great admirer of Russell Kirk. The Conservative Mind was an important book because it was a useful and timely book: It made a plausible and accessible case that there existed, in Anglo-America, a conservative intellectual patrimony relevant to the politics of the contemporary United States, and did so at a moment when this was an unfashionable opinion (to say the least). For this achievement,… More »
Of Karl Rove's Aspen talk, I wrote: Some of it was flimflam: For instance, he simultaneously argued that a rising number of apprehensions on the border means that enforcement is working, and that a falling number of apprehensions of Brazilians means that a particular enforcement program, aimed at Other Than Mexicans (OTMs), is working as well. (Typically, as Rove no doubt knows, a rising number of apprehensions tends to mean that even more are slipping through, a… More »
Of Adam Minter's Atlantic profile of Shanghai's Bishop Jin Luxian and his tightrope walk between Rome and Beijing, Richard John Neuhaus writes: It is most regrettable that Minter thinks it necessary to take a slap at Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong, who is a man of enormous courage and a real hero in the cause of religious and other freedoms. Another China-watcher is concerned that Minter is uncritically admiring of Bishop Jin Luxian of Shanghai, who, while undoubtedly… More »
Here's Reihan's take, from the great Sum of All Fears controversy. More »
Of Joel Kotkin's vision (and mine) of our suburban future, Matt writes: The urbanist proposal isn't "hey, jerks, why don't you all move to dense downtowns." Rather, the proposal is something like "why don't we impose carbon taxes so that things like driving long distances and heating or cooling large detached structures are priced in accordance with their social cost? Why don't we stop having the federal government heavily subsidize driving cars as the preferred… More »
Everyone's been making fun of this overheated Michael Fumento post, in which he gripes about Hollywood anti-anti-terrorism. And with good reason. Nevertheless, isn't it a little strange that going on six years after 9/11, there hasn't been a single Hollywood offering that offers a consistently positive portrayal of any post-9/11 U.S. military action? Or that the only major motion pictures in which radical Islam is portrayed as straightforwardly villainous have been… More »
The Ideas Festival is over and I'm on my way back to D.C. (technically, I'm sitting in the Denver airport waiting for a delayed flight - along with Karl Rove, oddly, who's Blackberrying a few seats away from me), and on the off chance you weren't checking the Ideas Festival blog all the time last week, here are some highlights: James Bennet and Jim Fallows on Bill Clinton; why Tobias Wolff doesn't think much of James Frey; Corby Kummer on the iPhone and Rupert… More »
More frenzied Potter speculation, via the redoubtable Jonathan Last. More »
This isn't Aspen-specific, so I thought I'd cross-post it from the Ideas Festival blog: One last point on Colin Powell: He may be self-serving and strategically incoherent, but he remains an eloquent and attractive figure, and a popular one. Obviously he isn't going to run for President, but if he did - well, he's pretty much the only person I could imagine winning the '08 election as a third-party candidate. I've been pretty skeptical of the Michael Bloomberg… More »
Matt Frost, two days ago: I haven’t seen Ratatouille yet, but in service to The Scene, I’ll probably take my children and report back, per Reihan’s request. The gushing reviews, plus the fact that Dana Stevens couldn’t detect a crypto-Republican message, make me inclined to share David Brooks’ skepticism ... Dana Stevens, today: That planet was once home to two alien races: the upstanding Autobots and the sneaky Decepticons.… More »
The blog is up and running; serious posting will begin Monday night, when the Ideas Festival starts in earnest. I'll probably check back in here with an occasional non-Aspen post during the next week, but since I'll be running around like mad trying to get to as many panel discussions as possible, any content that shows up here will probably be links to things I'd like to blog about, but don't have the time to tackle just now - like, say, Freeman Dyson's essay on… More »
America is becoming more secular; Europe is becoming more religious. Both trends could mean trouble.
... for the light posting, which will continue through the weekend. On Monday, we kick off our second annual experiment in live-blogging the Aspen Ideas Festival (here's last year's foray), at which point I'll be coming to you live from deep in the Rockies, where I'll hopefully avoid coming down with altitude sickness this time around. More »
Draw your own conclusions. (And obviously, obviously, this is NSFW.) Knocked Up’s Thoughtful Abortion Debate More »
Tony Fabrizio polls; Marc Ambinder reports; Reihan analyzes. More »
Bill Kauffman makes the case for secession. More »
Alan Jacobs - an occasional contributor, I might note, to the new American Scene - gets his Potter on. More »
I finally got around to reading - okay, skimming - Tom Junod's Esquire profile of Angelina Jolie, which Ron Rosenbaum famously called "the worst celebrity profile ever written." Junod's campaign for Angelina's canonization provides plenty of ammunition for this judgment, in a certain way, but I would submit that Rosenbaum is missing the point: Given that it is self-evidently impossible to write a good celebrity profile, the only thing that a talented writer can… More »
They're still working out some kinks in the site, I believe, but if you don't go check out the kick-ass design and crack team of bloggers Reihan has put together over at what was once our shared home, well, you shouldn't be reading blogs to begin with. More »
