Laws passed by men are funny: No matter how precisely they’re worded, they don’t enforce themselves. They need someone to do the job of enforcing them. And the scope and magnitude of the laws in question don’t alter this existential reality; even the Constitution requires someone to execute its provisions. Some may recall from civics...
Now, you know I am indulging myself when I think of the nominated topic and come up with examples that are all piano recordings! That’s a limitation within a limitation, and I admit it. And I am also aware that when we talk about sound, I am supposed to make noises like a hi-fi buff,...
Nelson County, Marion County, and Washington County are collectively referred to by their inhabitants as the Kentucky Holy Land, and I don’t think the expression is meant to be entirely whimsical. Settled in the late 18th century by English Catholics from Maryland, the rolling green country is to this day marked by cattle farms, distilleries,...
Almost two years ago my wife and I were driving home after having dinner in a Knoxville restaurant with former Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist and his wife. It was the Monday night before Thanksgiving, and I decided to call my then 90-year-old Uncle Joe, a retired judge, to see if he and my aunt wanted...
As the nation prepares to go to the polls to elect the 45th president of these United States, two flashpoints may determine the outcome. The first is Islamic terrorism. It was almost funny to listen to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio inform us that a bomb set off in the Chelsea district wasn’t...
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported, by several sources, to have asked in a meeting at the State Department in 2010. The “guy” in question was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and after the stunt he pulled in the early morning hours of October 4, Donald Trump and Hillary...
Reactions to the revelation that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, may have seriously considered launching a drone strike against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have predictably been divided along partisan lines. Supporters of Donald Trump have seen it as one more strike (no pun intended) against a presidential candidate whose entire career of “public service”...
Nolite confidere in principibus. The voice of the Psalmist speaks to us down through the ages: “Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.” We can be forgiven if we find those words more relevant than usual in this particular election year. But it would be...
There are two important lessons of history for an imperial strategist who wants to avoid the trap of overreach. The first is not to risk engagement in a new theater while an old crisis remains unresolved. Philip II of Spain sent the Armada to her doom while the rebellion in the Low Countries was still...
A bunch of charlatans and clowns met in Athens, Greece, at the end of September and, to use an old Greek expression, managed to make a hole in the water. In other words, they accomplished nada, but they stuffed themselves with feta and tasty Greek food, stayed at the best hotels, accepted honorariums, pumped up...
For some time now, Ted Gioia has been one of our leading jazz and music critics. He, along with Gary Giddins, Bob Porter, Marc Myers, Bill Milkowski, Will Friedwald, and several even younger critics and historians like Ricky Riccardi, has gradually taken over the important and tricky work of chronicling America’s music, a mission first...
The U.S. media establishment has been up to its usual occupation during a presidential season: harrumphing, growling, tut-tutting at the idea of putting a non-“mainstream candidate”—someone other than a liberal Democrat, that is—in charge of anything more consequential, in Washington terms, than an armchair at the Commerce Department (if that). However, this year, with Donald...
As both Drutman and Katz emphasize, before the 1970’s lobbying in America was a paltry enterprise. In the immediate postwar era, under the pro-business Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, few companies hired in-house lobbyists; instead, they worked through trade associations or independent lobbying firms. Under Lyndon Johnson regulatory legislation addressed a host of social and economic...
Who would have thought that, 20 years after Pat Buchanan’s failed presidential bid, a billionaire New York real-estate developer and reality-television star would win the Republican presidential nomination running on the same issues Buchanan campaigned on in 1996, and with the same unifying theme of putting America (and Americans) first? Yet it has happened. Not...
Snowden Produced by Endgame Entertainment Directed by Oliver Stone Screenplay by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone Distributed by Open Road Films Sully Produced by Malpaso Productions Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by Todd Komarnicki Distributed by Warner Brothers Anyone Hillary Clinton hates usually wins my admiration by default. Edward Snowden, then, should be at the...
The Supreme Court, tacitly acknowledging that the great Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead, refused on October 3 to reconsider United States v. Texas. The tie remained at 4-4, same as it was in June when the Court first polled itself, but a petulant Obama Department of Justice asked for the case to be reconsidered. ...
Twenty-five years is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation. And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and...
“For there is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither free man nor slave, neither man nor woman,” says Pseudo-Paul, the apostle to the Americans, “but all are equal in Christ Jesus.” He has been studying his Pseudo-John, wherein the risen Lord says to Peter, “I have been praying for you, Simon, that you might strengthen...
In a year of blatant political lies (and what presidential election year isn’t?) the calumny against Donald Trump that he is a fomenter of racial divisiveness may be the most unconscionable. The Republican candidate has never said that all Mexicans are rapists and criminals of various sorts, only that some illegal immigrants from Mexico are—a...
A quarter-century of American diplomatic arrogance toward Russia, and the exploitation and temporary ruination of the Russian economy by the combined forces of Washington, Wall Street, and the Harvard Economics Department, are currently reaping their just deserts. (See “Wreckers and Builders,” by Anne Williamson.) Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the possibility...
The historical controversy over who was “responsible” for the outbreak of war in 1914 will doubtless never be settled, so clearly did so many of the participants contribute to igniting the catastrophe. German rearmament and the kaiser’s determination to build a navy equal to Great Britain’s, as well as the country’s territorial ambitions on the...
Having re-rigged my fishing gear over the summer and purchased a new nine-and-a-half-foot No. 6 fly rod by Scott, and a Lamson reel to mount on it, I’ve finally got round to reading a book that’s lain neglected in my sporting library for far too many years. Ray Bergman’s Trout, first published in 1938, has...
Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe, by Willi Jasper, translated by Stewart Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 233 pp., $30.00). Readers wanting a detailed narrative history of the torpedoing and sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 on the order of Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember about the loss of the Titanic...
On September 22, a giant of Catholic journalism died—and genuine Catholic journalism might well have died with him. Paul Likoudis was a crack reporter for The Wanderer, America’s oldest national Catholic newspaper—founded in 1867, published in German until 1954, and banned by Hitler in the 1930’s. Likoudis joined the paper in 1986 and immediately began...
This was the first time I’d gone deer hunting alone. Granted, I had often engaged in the act of hunting by myself. Ever since I was old enough to hunt apart from someone else, my practice had been to split up from the others after a brief initial hike. Even though we might be separated...
“For heaven’s sake man, go!” roared David Cameron on June 29. He sounded like a bad actor in an historical drama—which, in a sense, he was. Cameron was shouting across the dispatch box in the House of Commons, imploring Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to resign. It was less than a week after Brexit, and Cameron...
