American Assassin tells how superagent Mitch Rapp, scourge of the jihadis got to be superagent Mitch Rapp. Surprisingly, Vince Fynn’s prequel to the Mitch Rapp series is more like a Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal) book with its detailed description of agent training, international networks and tradecraft. Of course, in the end Rapp still [...]

Before he started chanting, “Bush lied and people died,” or “Scooter told the truth so people, uh, … knew the truth?” or pursued Dick “Cheee-ney” like he is the Great White Whale, Chris Matthews had another target. Hot off the Lewinsky scandal making his TV program, “Hardball,” brief appointment viewing in the late 90s, Mathews [...]

Jon Stewart’s setting himself up as the new standard of reasonable may be a bit of a stretch; but you’ve got to admire how he rattles Keith Olbermann. However, the fact that this worries Keith makes the case that Stewart is primarily on the left side of the spectrum– even if he is an honest liberal. [...]

MSNBC’S angry everyman Ed Schultz likes to call Sarah Palin dumb.  That’s big talk coming from a one-note fat man who has Houston congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee as a regular guest. Lee is best known for not knowing we didn’t land on Mars, a speech in which she thought North and South Vietnam were still [...]

“Casablanca” is perhaps the most beloved, easily the most quoted, and probably the closest the American cinema has come to Shakespeare other than the first two “Godfather” films. (It ranks 3rd on the AFI’s top 100 list, and depending on my mood, it’s somewhere between 1 and 3 for me, rotating places with”Godfather” 1 and [...]

The television season’s best surprise is easily Blue Bloods starring Tom Selleck as the New York City Police Commissioner, and the head of a multi-generational family of cops.   What looked in trailers to be a clunky cop drama is both a surprisingly original take on the genre  and a provocative look at some hot-button issues. [...]

TV’s coolest veterans, Michael Westen (former Army Ranger and unjustly disgraced covert operative) and Sam Axe (retired Navy SEAL) return this Veterans Day to the USA Network, just when their country needs them to rescue a bland Fall season. I’ve always had a problem with spy stories where the U.S. government is trying to kill [...]

So, upon his return from a 2 episode “indefinite suspension” from MSNBC—which mainly served to give him a “four-day weekend,”and a “universal hug,” Keith Olbermann made himself the apex of the “Countdown,” saving his apology for the spot reserved for the “Number 1 Story.” If that wasn’t a clue… Keith’s “apologies” went like this: Brag [...]

The CBS lawyer drama The Good Wife, is so smart and politically incorrect, that it’s hard to believe it is on one of the dinosaur broadcast networks.  In fact, the only television series I have seen be this smart and brutally honest about big-city politics is The Wire—a comparison I don’t make lightly. This is [...]

Years before Michael Shaara wrote his Civil War classic, The Killer Angels, about the friends who faced each other at Gettysburg, Thomas Fleming launched his stellar career with this terrific– and similarly themed and gripping– narrative about the first battle of our first civil war, the American Revolution. In Now We Are Enemies: The Story [...]