Truthfully, Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (by Jim Geraghty and Cam Edwards) is also an In The Mail book, seeing as I got it this afternoon, but I cracked the book open at random and found it a good read, so it’s probably safe to sign off on this one. I’ll probably end up interviewing Jim about the book, at some point in the near future. So keep watching the skies…
And so, adieu to 1635: A Parcel of Rogues (The Ring of Fire)
…so stop scooping my post ideas, OK?
.@Choostas We don’t need to belittle, humiliate, and delegitimize President Obama. He’s handling that job all by himself.
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) November 14, 2014
As you can see, this was in response to some dude or dudette on the Internet’s getting all bent out of shape because Jim noted that when Rep. Joe Wilson (SC) shouted “YOU LIE!” at Barack Obama’s claim that Obamacare would be extended to illegal immigrants, Joe Wilson turned out to be… correct; they’re talking about doing that. Which I was on the verge of looking up, except that Jim beat it to me. While on vacation, the so-and-so.
Ach, well. At least I got the Frank J Fleming interview in before he did.
The book being The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits
The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits is Jim Geraghty’s… comic tale of federal bureaucracy without limits, actually. The subtitle is a pretty accurate description, all things considered. You may remember that I interviewed Jim about the book; it’s formally out today, so go buy it.
Moe Lane
PS: Nah, Jim isn’t paying me to shill the book, more’s the pity. But if you buy it via the link I get a little bit of Amazon money, so there you go: that’s where I’m selling out, for a given value of ‘selling out.’
I had the opportunity to read a review copy of NRO writer Jim Geraghty’s The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits. My quick review: it’s a funny, fast read that labors under the problem that the most outlandish parts in it – the stuff that sounds most over-the-top – are all things that actually have happened. It’s not quite a book where you laugh because the alternative is to cry, but you can see that from there. At any rate: Jim was kind enough to do a phone interview with me on the book.
The Weed Agency comes out on June 3rd: by all means, check it out.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
Jim Geraghty’s first novel (I believe). Halfway through it now, and it’s depressing reading*, because: it’s all true. Worse, the true stuff includes all the horrible things that you’d think that Jim was making up about government bureaucracies. If anything, I think that he’s sugar-coated it in places, simply because you need to ease people into the Awful Truth of how bad it’s gotten.
Book’s out in a couple of weeks; I’ll almost certainly have interviewed Jim about the book before then. By all means, pre-order the book.
Moe Lane
*The tone is chipper, mind you. And yes, chipper AND depressing is an interesting combo.
From Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt, on Bill de Blasio:
Nice call, New Yorkers; you’ve elected a mayor who’s declared war on charter schools and horse-drawn carriages. What’s he going to go after next, the Statue of Liberty?
DO NOT GIVE THE MAN IDEAS, JIM.
And very likely sooner than we would hope, think, and/or certainly want. Jim Geraghty:
We want the world to solve its own problems for a while. The problem is that all this — invasions, wholesale slaughter, ethnic cleansing, missile tests, naval provocations, and raw brutality — is how the world beyond our borders solves its own problems.
‘This’ being, among other things, this (content warning after the fold): Continue reading Quote of the Day, This WILL Become Our Problem Again edition.
There’s some anecdotal evidence that a significant chunk of the Left’s rank-and-file started tuning out shortly after Obama’s second term began, and they’re not re-engaging.
[snip of a clip of Lefty blogger digby doing the digital equivalent of grimly looking at the steadily-decreasing level on the vodka bottle]
A lot of possible reasons for this — scandal disillusionment, the crash after the high of Hope-ium, a public starting to feel like they’ve heard of all of Obama’s rhetorical tropes before, overall exhaustion and boredom with politics as a whole — but this is not a development that the Washington conventional wisdom has even noticed, much less even begin to analyze or explain.
Continue reading QotD, What Do They Have To Engage Them? edition
Alt title: Jim channels ME – God help him – on CNN.
Which is to say: he said pretty much what I would have, assuming of course that anybody was ever insane enough to put me on CNN.
The short version: Jim did some vigorous pushback on the excuse of Oh, well, we’d cover this story except that there’s some random person on the Right pounding the table so we can’t look like loons that far too many people in the media like to use. As Jim put it in his Morning Jolt:
Continue reading Jim Geraghty makes a VERY good point on #benghazi.
