The American Spectator

Until there is a strong progressive message and a renewed drive for solidarity that speaks to that disaffected group of voters, they will continue to be seduced by a clever rightwing campaign that urges them to vote for tax breaks for the wealthy and the dismantling of the public sphere.

(August 2012)

New York Review of Books

In the event that you might have been wondering about the sudden disappearance of the Public Bowel Movement Brigade, the Masturbators for Peace, the Degenerates Now, and the other assorted mental defectives who comprised the Occupy movement, Michael Greenberg, an unemployed writer, avers a hardheaded analysis:

In the space of seven months a galvanizing national protest movement had dwindled to the status of a policing problem before disappearing almost entirely from the public view. Part of the blame can be attributed to Occupy itself; its inviolable purity of principle (“We don’t talk to people with power, because to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of their power”) eventually became its own form of corruption.

(October 11, 2012)

New York Times

Miss Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, where you can eat chocolate- covered bugs, divulges to fellow left-wing insomniacs the soporific tome at her bedside quietly awaiting the eyes of an aspiring Pol Pot or V.I. Lenin:

On my bedside table at the moment is Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit. She talks about how one movement can inspire another. If you want to make change, you have the impression you have to do it on your own. But you don’t understand that demonstrations have already been launched and they are feeding into what you’re doing. You feel so supported by history reading this book and so encouraged.

(September 2, 2012)

Time

The decrepitude into which Time magazine columnist Joe Klein has fallen, still apparently suffering from delusions that it is 1964 and Barry Goldwater is the Republican presidential candidate. Mr. Klein’s column appears in the magazine’s Antique Section, and he writes with a fountain pen: