Fifty Years after Dallas
Whatever bargain Joe Kennedy struck with the devil, the expiation of it was cruel. The poor man was forced to watch his three gifted boys precede him to the grave, and left to die in the knowledge that...
View ArticleTime: You Can't Say No to Facebook
In its salute to Mark Zuckerberg, its “Person of the Year,” Time observes that the “bigger social networks get, the more pressure there is on everybody else to join them. . . . It’s going to get harder...
View ArticleWhy Romney’s Austerlitz Strategy Worked
In 1805, Napoleon, his forces outnumbered by those of the Russians and the Austrians, set a classic trap, feigning weakness and timidity, and lulling his opponents into complacency and overconfidence....
View ArticleDubious Oracles
Mitt Romney will probably lose the debate tonight. At least in pundit-world.Why? Because Republicans almost always lose by a large majority there, even when they win in more substantial forums.Everyone...
View ArticleHow Republics Fall
The weird ecstasy of the media-political complex at the convention in Charlotte last month was the first sign that its attachment to President Obama, always fawning, had become morbid.In spite of the...
View ArticleDecline and Fall: The Tragedy of Barack Obama
If thou beest he; but O how fall’n! how chang’d . . . - MiltonThe signs of the times are as foreboding as the chorus before the palace of Oedipus in Thebes. The jobless rate stands nominally at 8.3...
View ArticleWhy Roberts Was Right
However painful it was to read the headline “Obamacare Stands” on Drudge yesterday, Chief Justice Roberts made the right call.Roberts’s opinion, far from being an act of cowardice or betrayal, is true...
View ArticleHard Times and Liberalism’s Dream of a Painless World
During hard times, it is only natural that we should spend a good deal of time blaming the villains. For the Left, the authors of the present discontents are (a) President Bush, and (b) the free...
View ArticleBig Statism in Osawatomie
He’s been Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan; today, President Obama travels to Osawatomie, Kansas, to unveil his latest persona: Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” manifesto in the town’s John...
View ArticleLennon’s Legacy: Reagan, Obama, and the Magical Mystery Tour
Mitt Romney’s recent swipe at President Obama -- the former Massachusetts governor has dubbed the president’s heartland bus trip the “Magical Misery Tour” -- is grossly unfair . . . to the Beatles....
View ArticleThe Democratic Party and the Language of Bankruptcy
What does a political regime do when its philosophy doesn’t work and is leading to ruin? It can’t scrap the philosophy, which is its raison d’être and the basis of its power. Were it to chuck the...
View ArticleThe Dark Night of Islam
The last six months have proved a climacteric in the history of Islam. An astonished world has witnessed the deposition of rulers in Egypt and Tunisia, revolts in Syria and Libya, the intensification...
View ArticlePaths from Glory
T. S. Eliot, in his essay on Kipling, said that the outsider, if he happens to be “alarmingly intelligent,” has a “peculiar detachment and remoteness” that enables him to see the places through which...
View ArticleCorner of Presidents: Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson’s is a double legacy: one living, the other dead. The apostle of liberty lives: The words of the man who, Lincoln said, worked out “the definitions and axioms of free society” will last as...
View ArticleNow He's Reagan
President Obama has in the past reprised Lincoln and FDR. Now he’s apparently emulating Reagan. There is something odd in this continuous shedding and donning of masks. “Let Reagan be Reagan,” it used...
View ArticleKennedy’s Oratory -- and Obama’s
The rediscovery of John F. Kennedy’s oratory on the fiftieth anniversary of his inauguration will only deepen the consensus that President Obama’s rhetorical skills, wildly exaggerated in 2008, are a...
View ArticleShrink-Think after Tucson
In the aftermath of Tucson, many have pointed to the need for more state intervention in the treatment of those suffering from grave mental illness. Although there may be merit in having government do...
View ArticleThe Roots of Violence
Norman Podhoretz was once asked “whether they had special typewriters in the Partisan Review office with entire words like ‘alienation’ stamped on each key.” Presumably there are keys stamped...
View ArticleThe Psycho — and Us
If the past is any warrant for the future, the story of Jared Loughner will soon be transmuted into television crime drama, in a “ripped from the headlines” episode of one of those now numerous shows...
View ArticleBeware the Dangers of Scapegoating
Scapegoating is a very old, perhaps even an inherently human impulse; when the community is threatened, people will in many instances lay the blame on a “polluted” one who, though not in any rational...
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