Category: American Proscenium

Is a lone wolf any less a wolf because he is alone?  An eight-year-old boy could answer that question correctly, but many adults apparently cannot. Here in Rockford, Illinois, on December 3, just as the “holiday shopping season” was in full swing, Derrick (a.k.a. “Talib Abu Salam Ibn”) Shareef was arrested by the FBI in...

If a man (person?) from Mars were to have landed in Washington in late November, he (or she?) would have had no choice but to conclude that the important decisions in the capital of the World’s Only Remaining Superpower are made by two mighty dudes.  Note to Mars: The real Masters of the Universe are...

Greetings: You are being sent this letter because you were recently registered to vote.  If you are a citizen of the United States, we ask that you participate in the democratic process of voting. You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal...

The Muslim rage at Benedict XVI’s citation of a late 14th-century Byzantine emperor who condemned Muhammad’s call to spread Islam through war has obscured the numerous cultural implications of the Pope’s learned speech.  One of them is the unique importance for Western civilization of classical thought, in general, and Greek thought, in particular—as preserved and...

A friend who has just returned from Lebanon told me that one of the jokes he heard before leaving Beirut was that the Bush administration decided to hire Hezbollah as one of the faith-based organizations that would help in the rebuilding of post-Katrina Louisiana.  After all, the Lebanese Shiite group has been assiduously reconstructing the...

Much of the Western commentary on the violence in Lebanon has not been about the events themselves but about the commentators’ feelings about the warring parties.  Israel’s staunch friends and apologists would not admit that the IDF has done anything wrong, or that it could do anything wrong, even if the whole of southern Lebanon...

When the U.S. government toppled Sad-dam Hussein in 2003, it thought regime change would help bring democracy to Iraq, and then to the rest of the region.  President Bush and his aides based their expectations on the premise that politics in the Middle East revolves around the relationship between individuals and the state, as it...

On April 14, the front-page headline of USA Today read, “More say U.S. focus should be home.”  The story cited a USA Today/Gallup poll that found that nearly half of Americans thought the United States “Should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” Similarly,...

In a sane world, the sight of more than a half-million immigrants—many of them illegal—flooding the streets of downtown Los Angeles and waving Mexican flags would have been something of a wake-up call for Southern Californians.  It wasn’t.  No matter how in-your-face the protesters have become, conventional wisdom argues that these nice folks are simply...

The schadenfreude in watching society collapse comes from knowing that leftist ideology, by way of the law of unintended consequences, ushered in the fall.  Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that real men who instinctively protected women and children would transmogrify into eunuchs who send women into combat and murder the unborn. Yet,...

Vice President Cheney’s mishap on the Armstrong Ranch in Texas last February is every hunter’s nightmare come true. The humiliation following that mishap is every politician’s worst dream realized. An easy metaphorical reach allows us some fun at the expense of the Vice President, the apparently careless shotgunner who once held the office of secretary...

My name and title (“global-political and economic-affairs analyst”) appears on a few rolodexes on the desks of the young ladies, a.k.a. “schedulers,” who are in search of pundits—that is, pompous think tankers and retired foreign-policy types who are willing “to do Iraq” or “to do Iran” (in Washington lingo) or some other international crisis. So...

Remember when Time’s man of the year, apart from the parade of presidential feebs and felons, was some hero or villain you had to respect, if not always admire?  Among the heroes was the first recipient, Charles Lindbergh, as well as Charles de Gaulle and Lech Walesa.  The villains included Hitler, Stalin, and Ayatollah Khomeini. ...

On November 1, 2005, the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform issued its final report and received a chilly response from the proponents of tax reform (too much tax, and too little reform).  However, its proposals constructively addressed key issues that could lead to a simplification of the tax code—to the extent that our...

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald called a press conference on October 28 to announce a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff and principal national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald indicted Libby on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of false statements, the charges...

For some, the drafting of the Iraqi constitution has called to mind America’s founding.   But whether any constitution will deliver liberty or democracy to Iraq’s people remains tragically uncertain. The failure of Washington to find WMDs in Iraq or to link Baghdad to anti-U.S. terrorism forced the Bush administration to find an alternate justification...

You’ve probably heard the one about the boy who murdered his parents and then asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan.  But what if, after being pardoned by the judge, who had taken into consideration his heartbreaking experience, the young kid also demanded that the state provide him with financial assistance to...

Karl Rove’s favorite president is Richard Nixon.  What a twist of fate it would be if Rove were driven from power as Nixon was over what both men would consider trivial matters—the leaking of a CIA employee’s name to reporters by Rove in 2004 and the Watergate break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the instigation...

Two years and three months after President Bush announced the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, the war is far from over.  Large areas of the country are affected by an open-ended guerrilla insurgency.  Periods of intense violence are followed by brief and temporary lulls.  Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on May 31 that...

The obvious moral of the Newsweek affair is that journalists, and leftist journalists (the common type) in particular, are habitual liars unworthy of respect.  To those of us interested in Balkan affairs, the whole Koran to-do elicits a wry smile.  Front-page stories from the 1990’s, including countless fact-free accounts of “Bosnian rape camps,” “Kosovo genocides,”...

According to an April 2 report published by Intelligence Online, for some months now, Washington has been putting out feelers to various Islamic activists who spearhead the opposition to the Syrian regime.  According to this source, American diplomats are also cultivating contacts in Qatar with TV preacher Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “with whom they frequently discuss...

According to his most fervent supporters, George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address has already taken its place among the great speeches of modern American politics.  Whether history confirms that verdict remains to be seen. For the present, it is not the quality of the oratory but the implications for U.S. policy that deserve attention.  On...

The Iraqis have voted.  Now, it is time to start bringing home America’s troops. More than 1,400 Americans had died, and nearly 11,000 had been wounded, by the end of January.  The war has already cost $200 billion, and the President is asking for another $80 billion. Yet President George W. Bush refuses to set...

Energized by his election as if it were a landslide, President George W. Bush proposes to spend his “political capital” on an ambitious economic agenda headed by reform of Social Security and the U.S. Tax Code.  The President’s candor in acknowledging that the deficits and tax cuts of his first term—the “Wall Street Relief and...

George W. Bush’s electoral victory stunned pundits and pollsters.  I was more surprised by the preelection polls than by the President’s margin of victory, which I had been correctly predicting for several months.  When the Zogby numbers were brought to me at the end of the day, predicting a Kerry victory by 100 electoral votes,...

The War Party has suffered significant defections since the proclamation of our great “victory” in Iraq last year, and that’s a good thing; but why would anyone take any of these people seriously?  Take Tucker Carlson, the neocon punk with the P.J. O’Rourke haircut on CNN’s Crossfire, a vehement supporter of the war in Iraq...

The “mainstream” media, we often hear, isn’t covering the real stories—it shies away from controversy and supinely bends under pressure from government officials, corporate sponsors, and warmongering demagogues.  All of this may be true, but what we don’t hear is what happens when the media does do a little investigative reporting, especially when the resulting...

After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace George W. Bush in the White House.  Amazingly, it was none other than the forgotten Robert...

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9-11 Commission) released its report to much media fanfare in late July.  Although the commissioners labored mightily, they have given birth to a mouse.  The report is safe, cautious, and eminently bipartisan.  In other words, it largely avoids discussing the most serious issues surrounding...

Before the surprise early transfer of power to a “sovereign” Iraqi government on June 28, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that the interim government was “prepared to step up to its responsibilities.”  He emphasized that the White House plan would shift the burden of rebuilding Iraq and fighting...

The nasty fight between Richard Clarke and manifold Bush officials quickly took on a “he said/she said” quality as greater violence enveloped Iraq.  National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice gave a strong performance before the September 11 Commission, but the celebrated August 2001 briefing memo warning of an Al Qaeda attack weakened her case. Neither side...

Earlier this year, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina defended her company’s decision to send American jobs to Asia by declaring, “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”  She probably did not mean to include CEO’s of Fortune 500 corporations in this statement—Hyderabad does not offer all the amenities she is used to, after...

While the antiwar rhetoric that fueled the early days of the Democratic presidential primaries has not gone away, attacks on President Bush’s dismal record of net job losses have now taken precedence. Unfortunately, Rep. Dick Gephardt, the first to drop out of the race, was the only Democratic candidate with a record of opposing the...

That the Bush administration went to war with Iraq based on a mistake—or, perhaps, a lie—has long been obvious.  Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill writes that, just ten days after Bush’s inauguration, the National Security Council met to discuss how to dispatch Saddam Hussein.  That was over seven months before September 11. The seizure of...

What is wrong with Howard Dean?  Not much, if you listen to many Republicans and some conservatives.  Republicans are salivating over the prospect of a Dean nomination because it seems to be the best way to ensure that President Bush stays where he is.  Some conservatives, however, are saying that they may vote for the...

“Bring ’em on,” President Bush announced a few months ago, and America’s opponents have since brought on ever more death and destruction.  Luckily for the President, he lives behind the White House fence, surrounded by a vigilant Secret Service detail.  Not so fortunate were the 16 Americans killed in the downing of the Chinook helicopter,...

The Bush administration and its heavyweights spent the latter portion of this past summer trying to explain to themselves, to one another, and to American voters why the policies it has inflicted on the nation have not really been the unmitigated disaster they have proved to be.  Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to defend the...

The lies and distortions surrounding the stated rationale for the war against Iraq now appear crude, clumsy, and embarrassing.  While it would have been unrealistic to expect Messrs. Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to display Bismarckian finesse in setting up Saddam Hussein, six months after the war was declared over, their actions should be judged by...

Nietzsche got it wrong.  God is not dead, but that other mainstay of popular sovereignty and constitutional government in this country, the rule of law, is either finished or on life support.  For decades the finest minds in the law schools and on the bench have argued that several hundred years of legal tradition, in...

In 1963, when I was a junior in high school, Saturday-night dances were held at an old beach club near the Santa Monica pier.  The club had once been exclusive and elegant but had long fallen on hard times, and its ballroom was rented for various functions.  At first, most of those going to the...

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas has created panic and confusion among conservatives.  They want to support the three conservative justices who dissented from the Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down Texas’ sodomy statute, but they don’t quite know why.  Justice Scalia, they say, must be wrong in thinking that a rational distinction...

The one surprising aspect of the controversy surrounding Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” is not the failure to find them: Those in the know had known all along that they did not exist.  It is, rather, the Bush administration’s inept handling of a situation that should have been anticipated months ago, when the “bureaucratic” decision...

Sen. Rick Santorum is the latest Republican political leader to walk down Trent Lott’s trail of tears.  Why do Republicans continue to make these gaffes?  Most politicians, after all, have spent their entire lives since elementary school telling people what they want to hear, and they ought to realize that the power they hold in...

How does a patriotic conservative behave when he believes his country has made a mistake by entering a war? “Politics ends at the water’s edge” has been the conventional wisdom since 1940’s.  The statement was made by Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Midwestern isolationist who signed on to FDR’s adventurism and the postwar crusade against the...

As soon as the long-anticipated war with Iraq has been brought to a temporary close, the United States will be able to get on with the post-September 11 agenda declared by President Bush: the eradication of evil.  Even a minimal definition of evil would include the acts of terrorism inflicted every day by Islamic extremists...

The University of Michigan is now the scene of the most important battle over affirmative action since the Bakke case at Stanford, settled so inconclusively some 25 years ago by the Supreme Court.  There is absolutely no question that Ann Arbor’s undergraduate and admissions policies are based on a principle of racial preference that, in...

“War is the health of the state,” said Randolph Bourne; it is also a bonanza for political intellectuals and for the marionettes who are put through their paces on FOX and CNN.  At the outbreak of World War I, Bourne saw the same phenomenon, though admittedly on a higher scale (Paul Begala and Chris Matthews...

“From the mountains of Afghanistan to the valleys of Bosnia to the plains of Africa to the forests of Asia and around the world we are on the ground working with our Muslim partners to expand the circle of peace, the circle of prosperity, the circle of freedom.” In delivering these ringing phrases, Secretary of...

The New Republic has published an anniversary issue (1914-1984) devoted to its own history. Professor John P. Diggins subtitles this epic as “seventy years of enlightened mistakes, princi­pled compromises, and unconvention­al wisdom”–an absolution by way of paradoxes. In fact, Prof. Diggins’s re­port reads as a tale of foolish wise men who may always claim the...