Ross Douthat

Jonah chides me for lending legitimacy to the comparison, which he suggests is implied by the term "stabbed in the back," between American conservatives today (or after Vietnam) and post-World War I German right-wingers. This was certainly not my intention: I didn't mean to "gamely go along" with any such comparison, but merely to acknowledge what I think is the self-evident reality that many conservatives blamed our defeat in Vietnam on liberals who undermined… More »

Two out of two Matts agree: If the U.S. pulls out of Iraq or fails to bomb Iran, the "stab in the back" narrative is going to become the centerpiece of a revived post-Bush conservatism, and progressives need to steel themselves to combat it. Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance.… More »

I know it's been a whole ten years since Eric Alterman unburdened himself of 5,000 words on the plutocratic excesses of the NR cruise for the Nation - only to have his own magazine start cruising itself shortly thereafter - but the bulk of Johann Hari's dispatch from the belly of the conservative beast feels stale to me even so. The concept is part Hunter S. Thompson, part David Foster Wallace, and part Tom Wolfe; the execution has a college journalism-ish, "find… More »

Me and Jon Chait, hating on David Broder together. More »

I just re-read my earlier post and I think I'd like to disassociate myself from my own snarkiness. Sure, Updike's essay wasn't very good at all, but neither was it bad enough to be described as "solipsistic flapdoodle," and I'm not sure why I was so obnoxious about Updike not being a professional historian. (Shlaes isn't one either, technically.) Particularly since with this piece and his earlier Aimee Semple McPherson review, Updike seems to be tackling books that… More »

You can find my contribution to the great Hitchens debate in the latest Claremont Review of Books. More »

As a non-historian who aspires to review works of history here and there - and perhaps even write one, who knows? - I don't want to begrudge a non-historian like John Updike the chance to review Amity Shlaes' revisionist history of the Great Depression. But if you're reviewing a book that makes specific historical arguments - helpfully summarized here by Shlaes herself - about whether the New Deal did or did not make the Great Depression worse, you need to do… More »

I saw two movies over the weekend, A Mighty Heart and The Bridge, a 2006 documentary about suicide and San Francisco's Golden Gate. Both were interesting misfires, and they misfired in similar ways - by misunderstanding where the central drama of their story was located, and heading off in another direction instead. In the case of A Mighty Heart (of which I'll have more to say, probably, in the next National Review), this meant turning the story of Daniel Pearl's… More »

Reading the first part of the Post's series on the vice-presidency of Dick Cheney - a man who “expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history’s” - I kept thinking of what Scooter Libby's defense team presented as a typical morning briefing for Cheney's chief of staff during the period when he claimed to have had a memory lapse. Here it is, via JPod: "Bomb defused . . . explosions . . . East African extremist network . . . Info on… More »

And Michael Bloomberg. Jonathan Chait says what needs to be said. (And speaking of Chait, this discussion promises to be entertaining.) Update: If only I read David Broder's column, I would have noticed this delicious irony. More »

Americans still don't trust government. The liberal spin on these numbers is summed up by Stanley Greenberg: In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans' confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America's problems ... The scale of damage done to people's belief in government is enormous. The results of a February study we conducted for Democracy Corps that assessed… More »

I've been meaning to work in some baseball blogging here and there on this site, in imitation of Matt's basketblogging, and a slow Friday seems like as good a time as any to link to this site, which isn't always executed quite as well as I'd like - though the Dewey entry hit me right in the "deep well of male emotion" spot - but which has the potential to become the online version of one of the great baseball books of all time. More »

Okay, it's no Veiled Conceit (where have you gone, Veiled Conceit?), but this site has a certain potential. More »

I like Alex Massie and Daniel Larison's contributions to the whole "does the South hold American politics hostage" debate that Paul Waldman and Kevin Drum kicked off, largely because - as you might expect - I didn't find the original complaint particularly persuasive. Drum's suggestion that "most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line" is a particularly self-defeating form of liberal condescension: It's the… More »

If there's any state where a semi-obscure social conservative ought to be able to make some noise, it's Iowa. And sure enough, if you add Sam Brownback's six percent to Mike Huckabee's seven percent in this Mason-Dixon poll, you have "Smike Brownbuckabee" nearly tying Rudy Giuliani for third place, and only four points behind Fred Thompson for second. As the various front-runners start to go after one another, you could imagine Brownbuckabee building some… More »

Just a little something to get you through the afternoon. More »

Since Andrew is on one of his periodic anti-circumcision crusades, I thought I'd say a few words in the procedure's defense. Since this is a family blog, I've placed them safely below the fold. More »

Matt writes: “Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” US President George W. Bush said yesterday “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.” That, of course, came during his address on the need to ban embryonic stem cell research. Except that it didn't. Rather, it came during his address on the need to veto a bill permitting the use of federal funds to undertake embryonic stem cell research. The… More »

It's Paul Starr's idea, and it makes an awful lot of sense to me. Bloomberg isn't going to be President - no way, no how - and at some point he has to be smart enough to figure that out. As a Vice-Presidential candidate, though, his moderate liberalism would help balance a more liberal nominee like Obama or Edwards, his executive experience would shore up a ticket that would otherwise lack any, and he might help secure the Northeast in the event that the Dems were… More »

As a frequent, albeit unwilling, viewer of The Girls Next Door, I found Daphne Merkin's meditation on the show for Elle at once maddening (since I found myself disagreeing with her about seventy percent of the time) and fascinating (since she's wicked smart). It makes an interesting companion piece to Jon Zobenica's great Atlantic essay on Playboy, which of course, being a subscriber and all, you've already read. More »