A Cartoonist Who's Quick On the Draw

In the current Reason, the one with his hideous self-portrait on the cover, Bagge travels to a gun show, interviews people on both sides of the gun control issue and ultimately concludes that, yes, an American should be able to own a bazooka: "If I don't hurt, threaten or disturb anyone with it, then why can't I own one?"

His reasoning failed to convince me, but I enjoyed the piece anyway. Arguing with Bagge is part of the fun of reading Bagge. As libertarian polemicists go, he's a lot more fun than, say, Ayn Rand.

Bagge says he's coming to Washington in September to cover Congress. Perfect! For a man of his gifts, caricaturing our elected representatives will be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel with that bazooka.

Halberstam's Last Stand

Before he died too soon in a car accident in April, David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and prolific popular historian, wrote one last magazine piece for Vanity Fair. Titled "The History Boys," and appearing in the magazine's August issue, it is a scathing attack on the Bush administration.

Halberstam was primarily a storyteller, not a polemicist, but this piece is an angry rant, albeit an erudite one. Obviously, Halberstam was spitting mad when he wrote it. He was angry about the war: "Going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world." But he was even angrier that George Bush and his cronies have dared to compare our current president to Harry Truman. Halberstam has written extensively about Truman and he knows that Bush is no Truman.

"If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era," he wrote, "it is not Truman but the Republican far right."

Like many rants, this one jumps from topic to topic without fully fleshing out its arguments. Perhaps Halberstam would have fixed that flaw if he'd lived. Still, Halberstam's fans, and I'm one of them, will enjoy the nostalgic pleasure of reading some classic Halberstamian sentences that rumble on like rolling thunder. Here, for instance, is his lead:

"We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over -- indeed before it really began -- and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history."

Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore, do they?