Sep
3
2026

What Do They Have Against Groucho?

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James Freeman notes an embarrassing vote in the House of Representatives: Handful of House Democrats Vote to Denounce Murderous Marxism. (WSJ gifted link)

"Embarrassing" in the sense that the GOP designed it to embarrass Dems. But there's a local angle for Granite Staters:

Yes, the fact that just 12 out of 213 House Democrats were willing to stand up and condemn history’s most murderous ideology is still pathetic. Among the Democrats voting against the Crank resolution known as H.Res. 1490 was Rep. Chris Pappas (D., N.H.), who is perhaps not yet convinced that a late endorsement from former Vice President Kamala Harris can save him in a Senate primary against a democratic socialist. He’s among 192 Democrats who voted no. Eleven House Democrats didn’t vote and two, Reps. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, voted “present.”

Ms. Goodlander has her own primary challenge from a Sandernista. Yet recent polls still show the incumbent with a commanding lead, so this hardly seems like an excuse, even for those inclined to accept political expediency as a justification.

For those not plugged into New Hampshire politics, the democratic socialist running against Pappas in the primary next week is Karishma Manzur. Her latest allegation is described by Michael Graham in NHJournal: Manzur: I’m the ‘Real Democrat,’ Pappas Is the Sellout.

Karishma Manzur insists she’s not trying to drag the Democratic Party to the left. Instead, she’s trying to rescue it from “corporate Democrats” like U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas.

“I don’t even understand why we have to call ourselves progressives,” the U.S. Senate candidate said during an online town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America. “We should just call ourselves Democrats. It’s the corporate Democrats that need a new label because they have sold us out.”

And one of those corporate Democrats, according to Manzur, is Pappas.

“He has never co-sponsored Medicare for All,” she said. “He takes a lot of money from AIPAC. He has approved billions of dollars of weapons transfers to Israel to fuel a genocide. He voted to censure Rashida Tlaib.”

Pappas was one of 22 Democrats voting to censure Tlaib. This was back in 2023, before his spine gelatinized.

Tomorrow I plan to blog David Harsanyi's column, but here's a sneak preview link: The 'Gaza Genocide' Is a Hoax.

I'm torn about whether I want Manzur to beat Pappas in the primary. She'd be a weak candidate against her probable opponent in November, John E. Sununu. On the other hand, I'd like to think New Hampshire Democrat voters weren't buying the socialist shtick.

Also of note:

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    More from Slade. I promise that I will report on my reading of Stephanie Slade's great book, Fusionism, Real Soon Now. Just not today. But to further whet your appetite, here's an "adapted-from" article at the WSJ: Meet the ‘Bronze Age’ Young Men of the New American Right. (WSJ gifted link)

    When the Supreme Court this summer upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, the right-wing internet erupted with rage. Prime among its targets were the four female justices who had signed on to the majority opinion. In one representative post on X, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh declared that “the worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint.”

    The outburst was in keeping with a strain of rhetoric popular among a subset of very online young men. It holds that women are too emotional to occupy positions of influence in society; that female suffrage was a mistake; and that the fairer sex’s purpose in life is to look good, make babies, and serve a husband’s every need.

    To understand where all of this is bubbling up from, it helps to be acquainted with the “vitalists,” a certifiably weird subculture led by internet personalities with pseudonyms like “Bronze Age Pervert” (real name: Costin Alamariu) and “Raw Egg Nationalist” (real name: Charles Cornish-Dale), who look back longingly to a time when white men were in charge and other groups submitted humbly to rule by their betters.

    And of course, you can always use the Amazon link at your right.

    I'd like to think that Slade's just "nut-picking", and the "vitalist" influence is negligible compared to (say) the DSA's influence on the Democrats. But I dunno for sure.

  • And ego. Don't forget his ego. Jacob Sullum notes that we'll soon have a Trump Monument in DC. Specifically: Trump’s White House ballroom is a monument to his lawlessness.

    After President Theodore Roosevelt began building the East Wing of the White House in 1902, he thanked Congress for approving the project and appropriating the necessary funds. When President Donald Trump demolished the East Wing last fall, by contrast, he acted without permission from Congress, which the Constitution empowers to control federal property.

    That difference is unlikely to matter in practice, thanks to a stay the Supreme Court issued on Monday, which allows Trump to continue work on the huge ballroom he is building on the site of the East Wing. But Trump's insistence on acting unilaterally will make his vanity project a monument to his disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers.

    But that's not all…

  • Are there no limits to this guy's narcissism? On a related matter, Noah Rothman looks at yet another example of Trump's Petty Caesarism, as exhibited by…

    Donald Trump’s visage is already circulating on these gold-finished brass coins. Some have taken exception to the “controversial move” of putting a sitting president’s face on legal tender, but their objections are unreasonable.

    Sure, this hasn’t been done in 100 years, and the last person to do it was arguably the least imperial president in that century: Calvin Coolidge. Never mind that his face was partially eclipsed by George Washington’s. And like the 1926 coin, this one will cost a lot more than it’s worth.

    “The rolls of $1 coins (25 to a roll) go for $61. A bag of 100 coins goes for $154.50,” ABC News reported. Likewise, back in 1926, “few people cared to part with the required $1 to purchase a commemorative half dollar,” the historian David Bowers observed. “When all was said and done, the staggering quantity of 859,408 half dollars went back to the Mint to be melted!” Perhaps the same fate is in store for Trump’s coins.

    "Gold-finished brass"? Kinda cheesy, Don.

Recently on the book blog:

Waiting on the Moon

Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses

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I'm not proud of this, but I'll admit it: I've been inordinately attracted now and then to the "celebrity memoir" genre. Written by musicians and actors I like, mostly. I tell myself that they'll provide me with some insight into the wellsprings of their creative talents. And I am invariably disappointed; these guys (yes, mostly guys) don't seem to have any eye-opening revelations on the matter. Hard work, good luck, singular focus… that's about it.

But I was enticed into reading Peter Wolf's memoir by this review in the WSJ.

Wolf is no exception on the creativity score. But—holy cow!—he really makes up for it on another score: this book is full of stories about the people he's encountered over the course of his career, most famous, many surprising. And those stories are great: some hilarious, some poignant, some even tragic. But all of them well told. (If you're looking for hilarity, for example, skip ahead to his story about making this classic music video.)

In the unlikely event that a celebrity is reading this: If you're thinking about writing a memoir, read Peter Wolf first. Go and do thou likewise.

He starts out with a biggie: In 1956, his parents take ten-year-old Peter to a movie, an artsy-fartsy French flick. In comes another couple: an older guy and a mink-coated, sunglassed blonde. And the blonde sits next to Peter. Eventually (since it's an artsy-fartsy French flick) the blonde nods off, with her head falling on Pete's shoulder.

Punchline: the guy is Arthur Miller, and the blonde is Marilyn Monroe.

I wasn't a huge fan of the J. Geils Band, although I really liked their 1974 single, "Must of Got Lost" well enough to buy the album it was on ("Nightmares...and Other Tales from the Vinyl Jungle"). But our musical tastes diverged as time went on. I don't think that was Wolf's fault, though.

On the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" score: the drug of choice is alcohol, and prodigous amounts of it. I think Pete could drink you. me, and the entire defensive line of the New England Patriots under the table. And the sex is never prurient. Although (you might not know) he was married to Faye Dunaway, and he was a little miffed about her extramarital dalliances.


Last Modified 2026-09-03 8:10 AM EDT

I Have Some Questions for You

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I put this in my get-at-library list back in 2023, thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's best mysteries list for that year. As a bonus, it's set in New Hampshire! (A heavily fictionalized New Hampshire, but what are you gonna do?)

The first-person narrator is Bodie Kane In a stylistic twist, Bodie's narration is addressed to another character—the "you" in the title—as if Bodie's writing/speaking to them. That choice comes into focus as the book proceeds.

Bodie is returning to the boarding school whence she graduated a couple decades back. She's been invited to teach a couple of mini-courses in an interim few weeks between semesters. Bodie's time at the school was unhappy, and marred by the murder of her onetime roommate, Thalia. Omar, an African-American athletic manager, was arrested and convicted for the crime (after confessing, then quickly recanting). But…

One of Bodie's courses is about podcast production, and one of her students wants to craft her podcast to revisit the crime. The student believes a miscarriage of justice occurred, and someone else did Thalia in. Bodie gets drawn into the student's investigation, and down the rabbit hole they go. Eventually, troubling facts emerge.

It's billed as a "literary" mystery, which (as near as I can tell) means a lot of discursive, flowery language. And anything that could be described as "action" is minimal. Bodie's narration involves plenty of navel-gazing, deep reflections on her life. She's estranged from her husband, who, in a sideshow to the main plot, is being fingered for a sexual harassment incident. She has a sorta-lover down in Boston, but he seems strangely unenthusiastic about coming up to see her while she's in the area. And there are a lot of other characters introduced, a bunch in the present, and a bunch from the past, and everyone seems dysfunctional in their own special ways. And there's occasional commentary in the "believe all women" vein, which probably seemed less quaint back then.

And (caveat lector) you may find the ending unsatisfying. I thought it was OK, but…