Confessions of a Bitter Old Reactionary

Okay, okay, I admit it: I, too, am bitter. What else would one expect an Obama-con to be? I know we’re not supposed to be negative, at least according to Hillary, who “seems to have switched her narrative around,” as one wag put it. In the Brave New World Hillary/McCain are ...

Morning Links, Again

Well, it’s morning—in San Francisco, at any rate—so let’s wipe the sand from our eyes and take a look at today’s links: Hey, remember the anthrax attacks? It’s funny, but practically no one does. That’s because the media—having tried, framed, and ...

Ron Paul, the Birchers, and the Delicate Sensibilities of David Weigel

Not content with having lost hundreds of subscribers due to their priggish and intemperate attacks on Ron Paul for not measuring up to the Beltway’s strict standards of political correctness, the staff of Reason magazine is busy inspiring thousands more defections with their latest: David ...

Who Is Matt Welch?

How did Matt Welch, who knows nothing about libertarianism, ever get in the position of becoming editor of Reason, the emblematic libertarian magazine? It is a position, after all, that has a bit of history to it, one that covers the life span of the modern libertarian movement from its very ...

Morning Links

I see Andrew Sullivan is taking—yet another—vacation. I, for one, am all for it—anything to give us a break from crap like this. I mean, who cares if the latest casualty in Iraq was gay, or not? I sure the hell don’t. Sully does, of course: “It was Len Downie who ...

Morning Links

Okay, so it isn’t morning—however, if you’re a Taki-con, like me—defined as someone who parties ‘til dawn, and then goes to morning confession—there is no morning. In any case, there’s plenty of news and views flying about like detritus in a strong ...

One Million, One Hundred and Ninety-Three Thousand, Four Hundred and Eighty

1,193,480—that’s the number of Iraqis murdered by the neocons to date. From Just Foreign Policy: ”[A] study, published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, estimated that over 600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. Iraqis have continued ...

Whatever Happened to David Horowitz?

Whatever happened to David Horowitz—the ex-leftist -turned-neocon whose hysterical maunderings are practically emblematic of the species and who used to make quite a bit of noise as a kind of right-wing Bizarro World version of the campus lefties of the 1960s? We don’t hear much from ...

A Peaceful Palm Sunday

On Sunday, I spoke at an event organized by a coalition of peace groups marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It’s the kind of event I like doing: no fuss, no muss, all I had to do was walk a few blocks to the Unitarian Universalist church over on Franklin Street. It was a ...

The Day I Met Ayn

When Ayn Rand appeared at the blue-green podium, peering intently at us through reading glasses that seemed too big for her face, I thought, for a moment, that there must be some mistake. The woman who stood before us was short, with her dark hair swept impatiently back from her forehead in a ...