A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won't it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off?
Year: 2011
Post
Who Lost the Middle East?
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, especially today in the Maghreb and Middle East. For the ouster of Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has sent shock waves from Rabat to Riyadh. Autocrats, emirs and kings have to be asking themselves: If rioters can bring down Ben Ali with ...
Post
Globalism Ascendant
Last week, President Obama named William Daley as White House Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser. Last fall, he named Austan Goolsbee as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments are significant in part because all three men share a strong commitment to free...
Post
Globalism Ascendant
Last week, President Obama named William Daley as White House Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser. Last fall, he named Austan Goolsbee as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments are significant in part because all three men share a strong commitment to free trade:...
Post
Aeneid 7-12, Part I
The second half of the Aeneid has rarely delighted readers to the same extent as the first half, but the poet tells us explicitly that in bringing Aeneas to Italy he has embarked upon a greater theme. It would be a mistake, then, to underrate books 7-12, though it is probably a good idea to read...
Post
Requiem for a Patriot
“Conservative Tycoon … Dies at 95,” said the New York Times headline on New Year’s Eve about the death of Roger Milliken. Clearly, the headline writer did not know the man. For Roger Milliken exemplified the finest in American free enterprise. He cared about his workers. He cared about his industry. He cared about his community....
Post
Bloodshed in Egypt
The murder of 21 Christians in a New Year’s Day bomb attack in Alexandria will accelerate the ongoing exodus of the Coptic community from Egypt. Its members know that they are second-class citizens. After some three-dozen attacks over the past three decades, resulting in three hundred Christian deaths, they know that the government is both unable and unwilling...
Post
A Role Model for Boehner
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away, and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in speakership annals standing beside the honored likes of...
Post
Requiem for a Patriot
“Conservative Tycoon … Dies at 95,” said the New York Times headline on New Year’s Eve about the death of Roger Milliken. Clearly, the headline writer did not know the man. For Roger Milliken exemplified the finest in American free enterprise. He cared about his workers. He cared about his industry. He cared about his...
Post
A Role Model for Boehner
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away, and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in speakership annals standing beside ...
Post
Bloodshed in Egypt
The murder of 21 Christians in a New Year’s Day bomb attack in Alexandria will accelerate the ongoing exodus of the Coptic community from Egypt. Its members know that they are second-class citizens. After some three-dozen attacks over the past three decades, resulting in three hundred ...
Post
Proudhon, Beauty and Lego
When I first read in a Soviet history book of Proudhon’s famous dictum that property is theft, I thought there had been a mistake in the typesetting. Obviously, the author had meant to say that property was not theft, but the proofreader goofed, making an interesting and valid observation into a gross and vulgar absurdity. ...
Post
At Sea Again
A perfect 360-degree horizon, occluded in the nearer distance by cloud shadow and smears and smudges of squall, is something sensed, not seen. All around lies a mottled expanse of turquoise, wine-blue, cobalt, and purple patches streaked with brilliant sunshine alternating with gray shadow and scuffed into variously textured sheets ruffled and smoothed by the...
Post
In Defense of Private Property
For centuries, the propensity to personal ownership has been considered one of the most elementary and natural features of human nature. Criticism of private property is nothing recent, either, but has turned out to be extremely commonplace in modern times: Communism haunts European consciences as the famous specter haunted Hamlet. But it is only the...
Post
The Arrhythmic Heart of England
The city of Leicester is about as far from the sea as one can get in England. But one sweltering August day, when everyone else was heading down to the beaches, we were driving in the opposite direction so that I could fill in a long-troubling gap on my mental map of England. I had...
Post
The TSA and Security
Many Americans today are baffled by the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the one in which the quartering of troops in private homes is prohibited in times of peace, except by the consent of the owner. Quartering troops in time of war was allowed, but only as regulated by law. Some of the amendments in...
Post
Neocon Follies
Doug Liman has performed half a public service with his new film, Fair Game. By retelling the story of the neoconservative attack on Amb. Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, he has once more exposed how eager these ideologues are to destroy anyone who gets in their way. Unfortunately, he stops short of reaching...
Post
People’s Republic, MI
Saginaw, Michigan, in popular culture, is identified with the late county singer Lefty Frizzell, who sang in his 1964 hit song of fishing on the nearby bay that feeds into Lake Huron. But the mid-Michigan city, 100 miles north of Detroit, is best understood as a 20th-century manufacturing behemoth whose physical assets and intangible knowledge...
Post
The Coming North American Order
Most of what we see and read from the government and its media organs are variations on a tired but persistent theme of irreversible progress toward utopia. (William Pfaff has a new book arguing that secular utopianism, even more than war profiteering or career advancement, is what drives U.S. foreign policy, making it impervious to...
Post
A Self-Contained World
Pascal Bruckner is a French version of the Cold War liberal, updated for the age of jihad. In general, his views would be at home in blue-state America. He is pro-E.U. and pro-affirmative action, takes a more positive view of the free market than is common in France, is generally pro-Israel and pro-American, and favors...
Post
A Holy Craft
The opportunity for a reconsideration, indeed a reconstruction, of literary history is, in the case of William Gilmore Simms’ poetry, both enticing and rewarding. In Matthew Brennan’s analytical volume, we find the basis, fully elaborated, for reengaging with a body of work, the worth of which has only recently been reevaluated. William Gilmore Simms (1806-70)...
Post
Mortgages From Hell
A mortgage crisis still haunts the country like a credit collector calling you daily about your unpaid Visa bill. It’s harder to get a mortgage than it has been in the memory of anyone living. The banks “only accept the best credit now for a loan,” a mortgage broker told me. She enjoyed the business...
Post
California Exodus
California’s November 2010 election results were seen by national pundits as a “firewall” that stemmed the tide of Republican victories sweeping across the country. Actually, this was a Republican disaster long in the making. The main cause of the GOP’s defeat was the large increase in the immigrant population in the last 30 years. Voting...
Post
Are You Smarter Than a Terrorist?
The idea that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can stop terrorist attacks by means of its now-infamous “porno scanner,” or by forcing Americans to undergo intrusive body pat-downs as if they were inmates in a correctional facility, is utter nonsense, and everybody knows it—including our government officials. The scanners cannot detect explosives that are secured...
Post
Europe’s Dark Roots
In April 1945, a world of avengers was closing in rapidly on Berlin. Trapped in the bunker complex, Hitler’s dwindling band of followers faced mounting despair, until the news broke that Franklin Roosevelt had died. The glorious word of relief ran through the surviving Nazi leadership: “The Empress Elizabeth is dead!” However baffling that reference...
Post
Christophobia, Communist and Otherwise
Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev has recently warned Europeans of the dangers of building a completely atheist and secularized society. That was the situation in Eastern Europe under communism. Some of the methods may have been different, but the outcome is the same: the notion of God is expelled from society, religion is confined to the...
Post
The Fighting Marine: Gene Tunney
Though he beat Jack Dempsey decisively the two times they met in the ring, was undefeated as a heavyweight, and retired as heavyweight champion, Gene Tunney is often forgotten when today’s era of fight fans or others discuss the greatest heavyweights. Political correctness doesn’t allow us to forget black champions such as Jack Johnson, although...
Post
A Tale of Two Cities
Of all the cities of which I have some personal experience, but to which I have no personal connection, Charleston, South Carolina, is the only one in which I’ve seriously thought I could live. The attraction is not the climate (my Polish and German genes and my Upper Midwest upbringing make me long for a...
Post
Another New NATO
NATO’s new “Strategic Concept” (SC), adopted at the summit in Lisbon on November 20, is neither new, nor strategic, nor much of a concept. The 11-page document avoids issues of high strategy and refrains from conceptual daring. It is worth pondering mainly for what it does not say. Its six enumerated goals are largely conventional. ...
Post
WikiLeaks
The diversity and overall quality of U.S. diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks on November 28 is breathtaking. A quarter-million confidential communications between 274 missions and the State Department will eventually be released—16,000 of them marked “Secret”; 100,000, “Confidential.” The trove’s 261 million words exceed the entire Foreign Relations series, packed with almost two centuries of...
Post
The Swiss Solution
Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change. During the last week of November, in Portland, Oregon, the FBI arrested a Somali-born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in a public square full of mothers and children. The...
Post
The Five Good Reasons
Atheists have no god to worship. This is by no means a tautology. Belief in god is ingrained in our nature, and Anselm’s proof is the nearest thing to an effective rebuttal of atheism. Put in simple terms, Anselm’s argument is that we know that god exists because we have the category god in our...
Post
A Linguistic Dilemma
I taught college English for 24 years, and I still search newspapers and blogs for signs of the Beast, which, these days, attacks us mostly through language—errors of agreement, misplaced modifiers, and non sequiturs. That’s how you tear down a civilization. While I was never a linguistics scholar, I have nonetheless followed its meandering course...
Post
Sharia Scores
On November 2, Oklahomans amended their constitution to prohibit their state courts from “look[ing] to the precepts of other nations or cultures” when adjudicating a case. The amendment specifically prohibits consideration of “international law or Sharia Law.” State Question 755, as the amendment is known, garnered the support of 70 percent of the citizenry. A...
Post
Which Way for Rand Paul?
Of all the Republican successes in the midterm elections, perhaps none has the potential to be as consequential as the elevation of Rand Paul to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. Paul was the biggest and most genuine Tea Party triumph in November. As the son and ideological heir of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), he...
Post
Who’s To Blame?
I thoroughly dispute Mark G. Brennan’s thesis in “The Borrowers’ Crisis” (Vital Signs, November) that it was the borrowers who were mostly to blame for “the crisis.” How did the party-of-the-first-part—those lending and mortgage-financing institutions—get away with making loans to uninvestigated potential borrowers, uncollateralized borrowers? Where were the state and local regulators? Where were the...
Post
The End of Property—January 2011
beyond the revolution The Five Good Reasons by Thomas Fleming views In Defense of Private Property by Claude Polin Proudhon, Beauty, and Lego by Andrei Navrozov news A Linguistic Dilemma by Tom Landess reviews A Self-Contained World by James Kalb Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism The Coming North American Order by H.A. Scott Trask Charles Bowden, Murder ...