News
A President’s Proud Legacy
On NPR's weekly comedy ---at least they claim it's comedy--- news-based quiz show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the final segment is a round robin of the panelists making humorous predictions about the future. Today's edition featured WaPo's Roxanne Roberts making this...
Lessons From Lyndon’s Successful Failure
When Lyndon Johnson was a boy growing up near the Pedernales River in the Texas hill country his parents would regularly play a record on their Victrola. But it wasn’t music. It was William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, who was known for his charismatic oratory...
Watchmen: Five Checkers
Although I haven't yet seen Watchmen (and almost certainly won't until it's on DVD and works its way up my Netflix queue), I unhesitatingly confer the ultimate accolade of 5 Checkers on the film simply on the basis of its basic premise: The events unfold in 1985 when,...
3.4.09
Seventy-six years ago today:
Obama, Nixon, And Rush
As I've written before, one of my favorite quotations from RN is: “Politics is battle, and the best way to fire up your troops is to rally them against a visible opponent on the other side of the field. If a loyal supporter will fight hard for you, he will fight...
A Look At The Magazines
The new issue of The American Spectator has a column by Jonathan Aitken (former British cabinet minister and author of the one biography of President Nixon published in the post-presidential years that enjoyed RN's full cooperation) discussing Frost/Nixon. It turns...
Presidential Apocrypha
If, like me, you find the following funny, then you'll probably enjoy the several other "More Apocryphal Stories of the Presidents" by Yoni Brenner in last week's New Yorker: On a rainy night in 1793, the Van Buren family ox slipped in the mud, fracturing its foreleg....
The Dog Beneath The Skin
Clive Crook, whose column from and about America in the Financial Times usually has something interesting to say, yesterday tendered an apology to his Republican readers. As you recall, in the debate over the fiscal stimulus, Republicans accused the president of...
Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus
Once again, a Happy St. David's Day to TNN readers. (In case you're wondering: Wales 23 England 15.)
Watchmen, What Of The Opening Weekend?
Somehow, I should have known that a movie with a nuanced and more or less sensitive portrayal of the 37th President, Frost/Nixon, would soon be counterbalanced by one trading on the Evil Nixon archetype favored by so many of popular culture's tastemakers. Such a film...