By Michael Kinsley -             May 24, 2012 China Daily, the largest English-language newspaper in China, carried a front-page headline last week: “Village Gratitude Shows Integrity of Task.” Not clear what that’s about, and the opening sentence isn’t much help: “On a hot afternoon, Zhou Yi picked up a bag of freshly boiled eggs that [...]

            By Michael Kinsley -             May 11, 2012 How well I remember the day many years ago that I was walking through the quad at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Suddenly I heard a voice shouting, “There he is, the bastard!” It was Mitt Romney, who went on: “He’s the guy who favors health [...]

The people at the New York Times Magazine must think that nobody has ever read Ayn Rand, or maybe even Adam Smith. Their cover story on Sunday — misleadingly titled, “Are the Rich Worth a Damn?” — reports breathlessly that there is this fellow named Edward Conard who believes in free-market capitalism and is willing [...]

By Michael Kinsley – May 3, 2012 Mitt Romney didn’t exactly fire Ric Grenell, who is gay, as his foreign policy spokesman. But when the religious right got wind of Grenell’s hiring, his job started to shrink. Grenell was told to sit in on conference calls with reporters and not say anything, which is tantamount [...]

By Michael Kinsley - Apr 19, 2012 “I am being sunk by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure,” says the ruined theater impresario Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’s “The Producers.” Mitt Romney sees things differently: He is offering success to a society that seems to actually prefer failure. “If people think there’s something wrong with [...]

            By Michael Kinsley -             Apr 12, 2012 Everyone says there’s a class war going on in the U.S. If so, it is, at least so far, a war of words. It’s also a war in which a principal tactic is to accuse the other side of fighting a class war, while denying that you’re [...]

A friend of mine had his name in the paper the other day. It was an article speculating about who might inherit a prestigious post in the literary world when the current grandee retires. The article said that my friend would have led the list 10 years ago. Ouch! The obvious though unstated implication is [...]

            By Michel Kinsley -             Mar 5, 2012 The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a“slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers. [...]

            By Michael Kinsley -             Mar 1, 2012 Every year around late February, the government puts out the Economic Report of the President, which includes a whole bunch of historical charts on the state of the economy that you can download as Excel spreadsheets. Most years I combine them all into one big spreadsheet and [...]

Maybe anyone who voluntarily runs the gantlet we call our presidential election process must be mentally imbalanced in some respect, but this year’s crop of Republican candidates has been especially odd. Of the four who remain viable, only Mitt Romney can even pass as normal — and he has that eerie, Stepford-wife quality of being [...]