Author: Ed Driscoll

Video Interview with Glenn Reynolds on The Higher Education Bubble

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Since my blog was one of many inspired by Instapundit.com in the immediate wake of 9/11, and since it’s celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, I had wanted to do a video interview with Glenn Reynolds to discuss the history and state of the Blogosphere. Given that he has a new “Broadside” (much longer than […]

 

New Silicon Graffiti Video: Where Krugman Has Gone Before

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Rather than shoot the new video in the newsroom set we typically use as home base, I decided to borrow a used Apollo capsule and Saturn rocket to make my way to Space Station V. What better place to discuss the alien invasion that’s about to strike planet earth? Or at least the one that […]

 

New Silicon Graffiti Video: March Madness

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Hey, is this mic working? Is the camera on? At last — we’re back with our first Silicon Graffiti after a long hiatus, with a whirlwind look at some of the lowlights President Obama and the left suffered in March: Seven Days in March: The brutal week for Obama, the worst of his presidency. ObamaCare […]

 

Interview: Mark Steyn on After America

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Armageddon, now in handy, portable, YouTube form. As Mark Steyn writes in the introduction to his new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, just out today from Regnery Publishing: Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores […]

 

‘Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past’

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

That was a headline that ran in England’s Independent newspaper in 2000; this year, snow has been so heavy in England that it’s closed their major airports for long stretches. In early 2010, Time magazine, responding to resurgent snow in America’s capital would take the exact opposite stance: “DC Snowstorm: How Global Warming Makes Blizzards Worse.”

Is there nothing that global warming can’t do

 

They Don’t Know Their History at All–This is Elitism Straight Up

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

To understand the frustration of legacy media journalists such as New York Timeso racialist Kate Zernike over the strength of the Tea Parties and the resurgence of Friedrich Hayek and other past voices from the right, let’s paraphrase Janene Garofalo’s infamous rant last year on MSNBC. It’s not about bashing Republicans, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating conservatives in America. This is elitism straight up

 

‘Something Weird Happens When Presidencies Go Wrong’

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

As John Podhoretz wrote last week, “Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit.”

And that was before President Obama’s was dogged by unforced errors on this holiday weekend

 

New Silicon Graffiti Video: The Quotable Harry Reid

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Over the past two centuries, the Democratic Party has had many powerful orators. Needless to say, Harry Reid, the Democrats’ Senate Majority Leader since November of 2006, has failed to live up to this proud heritage on a titanic scale. Which is why, from The Home Office in Carson City, Nevada, we’re proud to present, The Top Ten Harry Reid gaffes!

 

Narrative and the Memory of War

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

“It is a measure of the power of narrative that we publicly grieve more for the deaths of our enemies than those of our allies in a war that is now fading quickly from human memory,” the blogger Tigerhawk writes. On both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II, Hollywood and the rest of the left have certainly been doing their part in recent years.

 

Through a Gimlet Eye: Studying the Washington Post Kremlinologist-Style

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Let’s employ a little Cold War-style Kremlinology to try and ascertain the health of the Washington Post. Or even a little Nixonology — a modern-day equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein (or at least how they were presented to the public in the form of Redford and Hoffman) would have lots of fun tying together all of the strange stories that have circulated recently from the former home of Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham:

 

New Silicon Graffiti Video: ‘The Cold Civil War’

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

In 2007, author William Gibson wrote the phrase the “Cold Civil War” for one of his science fiction novels. That led blogger April Gavaza, also known as the “Hyacinth Girl,” as well as Mark Steyn to pick up on the concept a year later. But of course, as General McChrystal’s disastrous interview with Rolling Stone and his subsequent dismissal illustrates, the media isn’t just where wars are fought domestically, as we discuss in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog

 

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) Dead at 92

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Get ready for the mother of all narrative struggles: the left will be eager to whitewash Byrd’s horrific legacy, which includes a stint in the KKK, filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and opposing both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas

 

Welcome to East Germany on the Potomac

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post, famously screamed on a cover story early last year that “We Are All Socialists Now.” In contrast, the conservative Hot Air blog recently noted the correlation between the leviathan socialist state virtually all Beltway journalists begged for when they endorsed Obama in 2008, and the state of journalism itself. You wanted East Germany on the Potomac, MSM? The paranoia over who leaked faux-conservative Dave Weigel’s incendiary emails on the Journolist goes hand in that hand with that big of a government

 

Fox40 Covers Sarah Palin at Cal State, Forgets ‘All Mics are Hot’ Rule

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

If there’s a theme that ties this week’s events together, it’s to assume that all mics are hot, all emails risk becoming public, and all information captured by journalists no matter how off the record will eventually escape, whether your last name is McChrystal or Weigel, or you’re covering a Sarah Palin speech for a local Fox affiliate

 

Video: 1969–The Death of Modernism

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

The 1960s began with a presidential election between conservative cold warrior Richard Nixon…and the surprisingly conservative cold warrior John F. Kennedy. In terms of the similarity between the two candidates, and the public they represented, this was a high point in national unity. The assassination of JFK began a process that ultimately shattered that unity. During the course of the 1960s, Americans witnessed the split between the liberalism of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ, and the rise of the punitive New Left that emerged in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination. As we explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog, the alpha and the omega of those two forms of American liberalism came less than a month apart, in the summer of 1969…

 

Video: The News They Kept To Themselves

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Recently the Washington Post announced that they were putting their weekly liberal opinion magazine Newsweek up for sale after recording horrific losses. And about the same time, CNN and CBS announced that they were in talks to consolidate news operations. What ties these two stories together? All three outfits fell victim to The News They Kept To Themselves

 

The Last Days of Tehran

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Some Hollywood films are built on the idea of suspense on a grand scale — “The Last Days of Pompeii”, and the story of the Titanic are both perennials for filmmakers, because the audience knows the characters are doomed, and thus watching their otherwise everyday quotidian details takes on a whole new dimension, as we await the tragic denouement. Photos of the Middle East in the 1970s take on a similar look these days.

 

Liberal Fascism: The Font

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

In a way, Helvetica is the font of liberal fascism; it’s certainly the font of corporatism. To borrow from one of the concluding memes of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, it’s the softer authoritarian nanny state of Brave New World, not the oppressiveness militarism of 1984.

 

Camelot and its Discontents: Mad Men on DVD

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

I have a lengthy (and spoiler-packed, for better or worse) review of the third season of Mad Men (now out on DVD) over on the Pajamas’ main page. Topics discussed include the show’s slightly skewed politics and history of the Kennedy-era 1960s, amongst other things.

 

Partying Like It’s 1994–Or 1946?

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Restoring the economic growth of 1994 through 2006 and ending “The Great Recession” — an economy being dragged to a sclerotic halt by “the New New Deal” and its myriad of wasteful spending and top-down government controls, can and should be one of the goals of the next Congress, if indeed, the map is painted red in November.

 

In The Future, Everyone Will Be A Klansman For 15 Minutes

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

In 2008, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) was smeared as a Klansman by his opponent. That didn’t stop Cohen for dusting off the smear this past week — along with namedropping Kristallnacht — against the Tea Partiers.

 

Deutschland Deja Vu: The Baader Meinhof Complex

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

Watching The Baader Meinhof Complex’s titular Teutonic terrorist gang in action on the small screen, I was struck by déjà vu of it all. A small but growing band of radicals with a penchant for street theater, wishing to smash capitalism and destroy the system from within, led by a fanatical, brawling leader, with at least one articulate well-bred intellectual within the inner circle. Starting off by blowing up small, bourgeois shops. Eventually hooking up with sympathetic allies in the Middle East. Then killing American soldiers. And when finally cornered, going out in a Gotterdammerung of mass suicide rather than face punishment from their captors. That’s never happened in Germany before

 

The Moral Equivalent Of The War On The Na’vi

Posted on by Ed Driscoll

At a recent pre-Oscar fundraiser, James Cameron goes back to the future, and regurgitates a meme that’s about as old as the original Titanic herself. As John Nolte of Big Hollywood writes, “James Cameron Declares Thoroughly Debunked Global Warming as Severe a Threat as WWII”