"Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he's a nigger."

Lyndon Johnson knew how to lead and in choosing Thurgood Marshall choose someone like himself in that sense at least. But Marshall was chosen for all the reasons that would have limited him as a politician. Obama is less of a leader than either of them; and Joe Biden is LBJ as farce.
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Adam Kirsch is the thinking man's Jonah Goldberg.
Follow the links, to NYM, then Language Log.


It's a nice picture of Eliot, in his late years when he was happy.

A repeat, from 2009

Arabist

Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft. I highly recommend the essay on him by the French reactionary writer (and one of my favorites, to be honest – I don't care about his views on Islam) Michel Houellebecq.

The comment made me smile (I don't care about Lovecraft).  It makes a nice counter-example to the American liberal political class and their arguments from predetermined ideas and assumption.

It's good to take the opinions of the opinionated with a grain of salt, but it's better when they find ways to help you do it.  That's El Amrani's understanding of Houellebecq.  It's also there in the self-counsciously haute bourgeois leftism of AbuKhalil. It comes down to an awareness of your own contradictions, even if you'd never admit that awareness in public.

It's impossible for a self-aware adult and anti-Zionist not to know the reality of Jewish suffering, even if he can't defend the choices of the survivors and their descendants. The knowledge that victimizers were once victims can only reinforce the moral opposition to their actions. So it makes sense that AbuKhalil's bluster would never be as shallow as Duncan Black's contempt, nor his contradictions a match to Josh Marshall's hypocrisy.

I wrote that before I found the quote from Milosz.