The Mooch: White House Communications Mis-director

Jonah Goldberg

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (especially Sean Spicer, who must be the happiest man in the world right now),

I think it was President Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, who told White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, “I’m going to gouge out your eyeballs with my car keys and skull f*** you.”

No, no, that didn’t happen. Nor did the vastly cruder scene from the Millard Fillmore administration that I was going to go with instead. It involved the postmaster general, a goat, a White House steward, three farmer’s daughters, and an oak barrel full of axle grease.

I bring this up to illustrate that crude language does not offend me, in the appropriate context. If I’m playing poker, hanging out in my cigar shop (as I am right now), or sitting in a van pulling ...

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Europe Balks at Our Russia Sanctions

Noah Daponte-Smith

On Monday, the House of Representatives passed, by an overwhelming margin, a bill to sanction Russia, in part for its interference in the 2016 election. On Thursday, the Senate approved a...

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Joe Simonson

It’s Time to Retire the ‘Progressive’ Label

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Alexandra DeSanctis

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

When children misbehave with toys, you take the toys away and put them in time out. After this week, health-care reform needs to be taken away from Republicans. Let them work through their...

Earth to Senator Murphy: Politics Won’t Solve All of Our Problems

Elliot Kaufman

Senator Chris Murphy (D. Conn.) needs his head examined. Jubilant at the defeat of the already diluted Republican health-care bill, he sent out the following tweet this morning: Last night...

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Elliot Kaufman

On Friday, it became official: The New Atheists are no longer welcome on the left. Battered, condemned, and disinvited, these godless and once-favored “public intellectuals” are now homeless,...

Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present

Brendan Simms

'Covering the whole of the modern period, this book is more than an excellent introduction; it's a major interpretational achievement.' - Norman Davies, St. Antony's College, Oxford and Jagiellonian University, Krakow

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