URLs du Jour

2007-11-06

  • According to Anne Applebaum, all the useful idiots are traipsing off to Venezuela, following the pattern established last century when their equivalents went off to Moscow to kowtow to Lenin and Stalin.

  • Unfortunately too late for this year, Scott Johnson at Power Line nominates Thomas Sowell for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jay Nordlinger agrees. Here is today's column about …
    Among the many mindless mantras of our time, "making a difference" and "giving back" irritate me like chalk screeching across a blackboard.
    Dr. Sowell gets Pun Salad's Medal of Agreement.

  • Dean Barnett has a very good article on Barack Obama, wherein he uses his old Harvard contacts to find out the low level dirt.
    The results surprised me. Regardless of his classmates' politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate.

    Even more interesting was what wasn't said. In dozens of conversations, not a single person said anything negative about him, and some were hardly the senator's political fellow travelers. Also noteworthy is that virtually everyone seemed to know Obama. Usually people who have such a high profile on law school campuses have their detractors. Obama apparently didn't.

    Dean is impressed, and … so is Pun Salad.

  • And, lastly, in our occasional "Ah. That explains a lot" department: Yesterday, David Frum debunked the latest historical blather from Andrew Sullivan, and added as an afterthought:
    I thought the Internet was supposed to make us all smarter.
    Today he posts the reply from one of his readers:
    No.

    The Internet is supposed to make it easy for us to copy each other's work. As in school, however, there's no guarantee that the person from whom you are copying has the right answer.

    All together now: "Ah. That explains a lot."