Roger Kimball is a US columnist for The Spectator, the publisher of Encounter Books and the editor and publisher of the New Criterion.
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Freddy speaks to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and columnist for The Spectator's US edition. After Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House this week, they discuss why the Republican party is such a mess.
What’s worse than chaos? How about a power vacuum? All the beautiful people are bewailing the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House yesterday because it is supposedly “thrusting the House into chaos.” Right on cue we have the New York Times skirling that “Far-Right GOP Faction Throws House Into Chaos.” Cant watchers: notice the deployment of the term “far-right” as an intensifier. Not only chaos but chaos from a source the Times can get away with castigating as far right. (Extra credit: would the Times describe a dramatic action by the Squad as “far left”? If not, why not?) On November 2, 1963, a CIA-instigated coup sparked the assassination of Vietnam president Ngô Đình Diệm. The trouble was, they had no one with whom to replace Diem.
Merrick Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was a spectacular, if depressing, confirmation of something any sentient observer had noticed long ago: that the Department of Justice, and its head, Attorney General Garland, are horribly, egregiously compromised. The outcome or upshot? That Garland should be impeached and removed from office and the DOJ itself should be put into the political equivalent of Chapter 11 so that its management can be replaced and its activities reorganized. As I say, this has long been obvious to any sentient observer. But Wednesday’s testimony put meat on the bones of this impending repudiation. Several Republicans put hard questions to the attorney general.
I have been meaning to weigh in on [cue scary music] Special Counsel David Weiss’s sham indictment of Hunter Biden on felony gun charges for a few days. I am glad I waited. It’s not that I have changed my mind about the indictments, or company man Weiss. Everyone knows he is on the job as an interior decorator, whose primary task is to produce window dressing for the Department of Injustice so that its two-tier deployment of police power is not too obvious to the casual onlooker. Weiss has supposedly been investigating Hunter Biden for the last five years. Wouldn’t you know it, the statute of limitation on many of the tax charges is passing by like that herd of cows outside your train window even as I write.
It is my sense that the popularity of sweet wines like Sauternes, Port, Tokaji and all the German Auslese wines is on the upswing. I am here to tell you about the Next Big Thing: dry Sauternes. Yes, that’s right: dry Sauternes. The supersnazzy, superexpensive Château d’Yquem is the only Sauternes to boast the designation “Premier Cru Supérieur” from the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. That exclusive label — along with the probably apocryphal but oft-repeated story that Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem, had something to do with the property — helps account for its astronomical price. But Yquem has been making a blanc sec since 1959.
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What time is it? A bit like the emperor Domitian, Joe Biden seems confused about the time. Warned by an omen that his death would come at midday, Domitian daily pestered people around him with that question, relaxing only after the dreaded hour had passed. Alas, his caution availed him not. One day in September 96 AD, a treacherous servant lied to Domitian about the time, inducing him to let down his guard. A knife-wielding steward did the rest. I am not sure that President Biden is still possessed of a guard he can drop. But if his recent performance in Hanoi is any indication, he does seem to be confused about the time of day. ‘Good evening, everyone. It is evening, isn’t it? This around the world in five days is interesting.
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One of the reasons that Donald Trump is so despised by the beautiful people of America – the people that the New York Times columnist David Brooks memorably evoked when he began a tweet 'We in the educated class…' – is that he consorts with so many unbeautiful people: not just working stiffs but B-list entertainers, Nascar enthusiasts and prize fighters. It is from the world of the last-named agonistic endeavor that I learned a word that perfectly describes last night’s festivities. The word is 'undercard'. It means that list of 'minor or supporting contests printed on the same bill as the main event (primarily fighting or racing).
Although I write at high summer, by the time you read this another school year will be upon us. I wonder: do students still read T.S. Eliot? They should. A lot of what he wrote continues to reverberate with significance. Consider, to take just one example, these lines from his poem “Gerontion.” History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving.Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Gives too soonInto weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed withTill the refusal propagates a fear.
It is very hot here in New England at the end of July. It was hot a week or two ago in old England, too. I arrived in London via the Eurostar after a week clambering over rotting German gun emplacements and gazing out at the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Sobering. In London, I had taken a small house in a quiet mews in Kensington. After a quick shower, my first act was to nip down to the local Oddbins and collar a couple of bottles of the 2022 Maison Dousset Chablis. It is about £20 (you can get it in the States for around $20-$25), and it was the perfect entry wine. Chilled, it was tartish, citrusy, refreshing: a confident but undemanding tipple.
It’s August 6, which means that it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Every year at this time there are a spate of articles about that horrific event. Some of the articles are condemnatory; some hand-wringing; some are defiantly supportive. This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency. Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L.
I wonder if Ron DeSantis’s favorite mot these days is from Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Maybe so. But let’s face it, the reports are many and deafening. They are also damaging. Consider, to take one recent example, the report, conveyed by Semafor, on the DeSantis Meme Team that works under the rubric of “War Room Creative Ideas” on the encrypted message app Signal. Among the “creative ideas” were videos, insinuated anonymously onto Twitter (as it then was), that smeared Donald Trump by including a fascist symbol — get it? Another attacked Trump for pro-LGBT rights comments. Both were instantly attacked by the Trump base.
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Peachy Keenan’s report that Hunter Biden, having caused such trouble for the Deep State, has been invited to go paddle-boarding at the Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. That’s probably just one of those mean things that right-wing, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals like, well, like me would say. But literally true or not, it is, as Algernon Moncrieff observed in other context, perfectly phrased and “quite as true as any observation in civilized life should be” — especially, I might add, any observation that touches upon the Bidens. The chief thing to keep in mind as you savor the soap opera of Hunter Biden’s faux prosecution is that Hunter’s story is inseparable from the story of dear old dad, “the Big Guy,” Mr.
A famous clip from recent history: “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” That was Joe Biden in 2016. He was relaxing among friends at a chummy event at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ha, ha, ha, tittered the appreciative audience. What a lark! Here was a former vice president of the United States bragging about how he (naughty word) blackmailed an official from a foreign government who was investigating the company on whose board Joe Biden’s son sat. This is old news, of course.
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Freddy is joined this week by Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion to talk about the diminishing power of Ron DeSantis. It wasn't so long ago he looked like a serious challenger that could beat Donald Trump to the Republican nomination. Where did it all go wrong?
Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot.
Every good vintner deserves a good origin story. David Bruce, the founder of the eponymous winery in the Santa Cruz hills, has one of the best. When he was at medical school at Stanford in the 1950s, he chanced upon Alexis Lichine’s classic book The Wines of France. Lichine said some fancy and evocative things about the great wines of Richebourg in Burgundy. Bruce padded down to a wine shop in San Francisco and collared a bottle of 1954 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg. “The minute I opened this bottle of wine,” he recalled, “the whole room was pervaded by this floral, spicy aroma.” Here’s the kicker: “I remember thinking, I guess you get what you pay for.” Oh yeah? He paid $7.50 for the bottle.
I was just leaving France when I got the news that that the Czech novelist Milan Kundera had died, aged ninety-four. He had emigrated to Paris in 1975, when he was forty-six, a refugee from the crackdown in Prague following the Russian obliteration of the Prague Spring in 1968. He died in his adopted city on July 11, full of honors but also, or so it seems to me, largely forgotten. I had not been following Kundera’s work for many years. But there was a moment, in the 1980s, when he was the talk of the posh, intellectual literary town. I wrote a longish essay about him for the New Criterion in 1986. I draw on that work here. Kundera was in his late thirties when he published his first novel, The Joke, in Prague in 1967.
From our UK edition
I think it was the once-renowned critic Clement Greenberg who gratefully acknowledged that his job as a cultural commentator allowed him to conduct his education in public. I suppose we all do it, more or less furtively, though what prompts me to mention it now is the realization that I do not know the answer to any of the questions that have motivated this column. I write in the immediate aftermath of Ron DeSantis’s official announcement that, yes, he is running for the presidency of the United States in 2024. The announcement itself was no surprise — everyone has known DeSantis was running for months.
I think it was the once-renowned critic Clement Greenberg who gratefully acknowledged that his job as a cultural commentator allowed him to conduct his education in public. I suppose we all do it, more or less furtively, though what prompts me to mention it now is the realization that I do not know the answer to any of the questions that have motivated this column. I write in the immediate aftermath of Ron DeSantis’s official announcement that, yes, he is running for the presidency of the United States in 2024. The announcement itself was no surprise — everyone has known DeSantis was running for months.
It is a crisp, beautiful spring day as I write. The air is light and clear. The skies are a color I have always thought of as Virgin Mary blue, punctuated here and there by attractively arranged puffs of clouds at their whitest and least threatening. The greens of the verdure are at their most flashing and emerald-like. That freshness will be enveloped by summer fullness by the time you read this, a contingency that makes me conclude that something like an abbreviated wine-diary — some of what Kimball drank during the month of May — might appeal to the connoisseurs and aficionados of the column. Let’s start at the tip-top.