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Politics

The Long View 2008-04-09: Entry Rights; WWZ film; Favorite Books; Quellos

John J. Reilly starts this entry off by looking at entry rights for migrants. Exit, with a capital E, the ability to leave whatever system you find yourself in, is an idea that is often contrasted with Voice, the attempt to change that system. In this case, the authors of

The Long View: The Making of the President 1960

Sixty years later, this is still fascinating. The Making of the President 1960 By Theodore H. White Atheneum Publishers, 1961 400 Pages, Various Prices ASIN B000BPDQ28 Historians have long since written the second and third drafts about the contest between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon for the presidency

The Long View 2008-02-18: The Menace of the Yutes; Obama's Ontological Deficit; That Republican '70s Show

I rather enjoyed this paragraph of John J. Reilly’s from 2008 which uses the idea “socialize the risk, privatize the profits” without using that phrase. Turning from Senator Obama's ontological deficit to the implosion of the Reagan Coalition, we find the key to the latter in Steyn&

The Long View 2008-02-11: Rand & the New Atheism; Anne Rice Vindicated; The Softening of Steyn; Sharia at the Ernstfall

For someone as interested in political ideas and movements as John J. Reilly was, I appreciate this take on politics: All politics is opera. The semantic content is rarely the important part. As politics comes to be personal in the waning days of the Republic, we should keep this in

The Long View 2008-02-06: Ash Wednesday

Something I hadn’t remembered about John J. Reilly’s musings on politics was that he saw in the policies of the George W. Bush administration a failed attempt to move the Republican Party in a populist direction. Much of the received wisdom of political commentators in the intervening decade

The Long View 2008-01-24: Ice Age; Democratic Fissure; Nominating Petraeus

There is an article quoted here by John J. Reilly the most effective way to to prevent the Republicans from nominating an attractive candidate for President like David Petraeus in 2012 was for the expected Democrat President to give him a job offer he couldn’t refuse. This is what

The Long View 2008-01-22: Don't Panic; Panic in 2016; Victory with Demobilization; Mahdi Watch

The James Fallows Atlantic piece “Countdown to a Meltdown” from 2005 is an absolutely fascinating bit of political prediction, let’s look at it in more detail, as it combines some of John’s obsessions with some of my own. Fallows wrote the article as advice to the incoming President