Editor’s note: This essay appears in the June 2018 issue of the The New Criterion. It is reprinted by their kind permission. The passing of Tom Wolfe last month at eighty-eight was met, as was appropriate, by an outpouring of affectionate commemoration. True, the praise, the enthusiasm, the fondness was here and there punctuated by some sniffy (though
Remember the Duck Rabbit? That’s the famous image that, seen one way, looks like a duck but, seen from another angle, looks like a rabbit. The image has provided fodder for children’s books and also philosophers, its inherent ambiguity being catnip to both light fancy and epistemological lucubration. I thought of that teasing
I miss Carter Page. It seems like years since I have heard anything about the American businessman who briefly volunteered at Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. You remember Carter Page. He was, along with the micturating prostitutes, one of the stars of The Dossier™, the as-told-to novella by Christopher Steele, the leakin’-lyin’ former British spook
Where to start? The phrase “unfettered power,” to which I will return, may put you in mind of Lord Acton’s famous observation that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the context of Acton’s mot was grand politics. “Great men,” he went on to say, “are almost always bad men.” What we
Watching the disgusting (and decidedly unfunny) performance of the comedienne Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night, I thought of two things. One was, “What would her mother think of this shockingly vulgar and carelessly cruel exhibition?” I’d say the same thing about Ms. Wolf’s children, if she had any, which I
What a delicious hors d’oeuvre Michael Horowitz gave the world on Friday! The inspector general for Department of Justice finally issued his eagerly awaited (eagerly awaited by some of us, anyway) report on Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former deputy director of the FBI. Note that this is only an appetizer. In the coming
Any rational person’s list of the most intelligent and pungent columnists now writing will perforce include the name Kevin Williamson, late of National Review and, as of Thursday, late of The Atlantic as well. And anyone with a working internet connection knows that Williamson, hired to a chorus of drooling leftoid obloquy by
What took them so long? That was our first question when we heard the latest news about the distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Last summer, Professor Wax created a minor disturbance in the force of politically correct groupthink when she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price
Thinking about the $1.3 trillion—that’s “trillion” with a “t” for “terrifying”—omnibus spending bill that President Trump signed on Friday, I wonder who is most unhappy about that incontinent, 2,232-page monument to congressional irresponsibility. (A small token of its irresponsibility—and its contempt for the public—was that the bill had to be signed a mere
Some portion of the reading public is eagerly awaiting A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, the aptly titled exercise in self-serving historical revisionism by James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director who was fired last May by President Trump. The reading material in which I am most interested at the moment is
