John Rentoul, who blogs for the London Independent has a long-running series of media critiques (though he doesn’t call them that) under the rubric: “Questions to Which the Answer is No.” In today’s Independent on Sunday his colleague, Rupert Cornwell, poses a classic of the kind with the headline: “Has America gone mad?” Of course, there…
One of those rare movies that manages to improve on an already fine fictional original
Often before — here and here for example — I have written of the importance of military obituaries and the shame it is to us that American newspapers are so bad about running them in anything like the numbers they deserve. The British papers are a lot better, rightly surmising (I think) that there are a lot…
The headline in today’s Guardian sounds like a joke — “Fish: the forgotten victims on our plate” — but, because it’s The Guardian, it isn’t. Good old Guardian! Good old Peter Singer, the philosopher, animal rights campaigner and misanthropist who is the author of the article to which the headline is attached! They must be…
All this week, Robert Fisk of The Independent has been publishing a multi-part series on honor (or honour) killing that began with this piece headed: “The crimewave that shames the world: It’s one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of ‘honour’. Nor is the problem…
Sunday’s New York Times op ed page provided (at least) three good example of the kind of rhetorical sink that that once-respected newspaper’s opinion pages have become. First, Maureen Dowd in a piece on Tony Blair’s newly-published memoir headed “The Poodle Speaks” wrote that It is criminally na ve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that…
Once again, as he did with the Ground Zero Mosque (or non-Ground Zero non-Mosque, as its apologists are all now careful to put it), President Obama continues to show what a political tin ear he has. Glenn Beck comes to town with hundreds of thousands of supporters in the name of “Restoring Honor” and the…
In the U.K. Independent, Guy Adams asks himself how it can be that Jennifer Aniston keeps making flopperoo movies like The Switch even while being one of the most highly paid actresses in Hollywood? And he answers himself with reference to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film of San…
Pity poor Pat Tillman, fated to be a posthumous propaganda tool for one side or the other in our increasingly graceless public dialogue on matters of war and peace
One of the principal memes of the left in the renewed culture war currently being fought on the op ed pages of America over the Ground Zero mosque as well as gay marriage and other matters has to do with the stupidity of the right. This must be why, as Maureen Dowd believes, “the country…
Honestly, now, enough about the mosque, you might be thinking. I know I am. How can this relatively trivial matter have become such a media feeding frenzy? That it has done so is all the more astonishing because the battle lines have been drawn virtually since the first shot was fired. The opposers of the…
He’s at it again. As The New York Times reports, at every stop on his recent campaign swing, President Obama was “road-testing” his mid-term stump speech, and every time he made use of the same metaphor, the one about how the Republicans have driven the country into a ditch and the Democrats are stuck with…
