Foolscap
1. Vice-presidential debates have little impact on elections. This one was no exception. 2. Joe Biden may not be “wise enough to play the fool” in the Obama court, but he is a sort of lesser buffoon,...
View ArticleRomney in the Arena
1. Romney was Teddy Roosevelt’s “man who is actually in the arena” last night. If his face was not “marred by dust and sweat and blood,” he was mocked by the off-camera vulgus mobile in the spectators’...
View ArticleObama Unnerved — by Ohio?
Talk about the sullen presage of a campaign’s decay. Something was wrong with President Obama last night, to judge by his performance. Was Ohio on his mind? An AP story says that the Obama campaign is...
View ArticleThe Wilderness
At a low point in the fortunes of the Tory Party, Disraeli said, “The pendulum swings.” It does indeed, but it is not going to swing back to limited-government Republicanism any time soon: in fact...
View ArticleThe Wilderness
At a low point in the fortunes of the Tory party, Disraeli said, “The pendulum swings.” It does indeed, but it is not going to swing back to limited-government republicanism any time soon; in fact such...
View ArticleThe Mandate Myth
“Yes, Obama won a mandate,” says The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn. Joan Walsh at Salon writes that the president’s “reelection represents a victory for the idea of activist government and a mandate for...
View ArticleRevenge of the Mediterranean Man
In antiquity the Mediterranean peoples despised the yokels of northern Europe. The “masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe,” Gibbon says, “turned with contempt from gloomy hills...
View ArticleOn the Brighter Side . . .
TBM over at HistoryofEngland.com puts the present discontents in useful perspective: No ordinary misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a nation wretched, as the constant...
View ArticleStanding Martin Luther King on His Head
State of the Union addresses were becoming nauseating circuses before President Obama, full of cheap applause lines and degrading demagoguery. But the unique circumstances of the Obama presidency have...
View ArticleThe Brothers Tsarnaev
In the flood of commentary, four points, so far as I know, have not yet been made. 1. There were erroneous reports, last week, that one of the brothers was educated at Boston Latin, the nursery of...
View Article'When that the poor have cried . . .'
The tax hikes have been averted, but will spending cuts follow? It seems to me unlikely that government spending will decline in any meaningful way as long as a culture of public pity prevails, one...
View ArticleChavez to Rule by Decree
Hugo Chavez has for the fourth time been invested with essentially dictatorial powers by the Venezuelan National Assembly, this time for 18 months, yet more evidence of the truth of Spengler’s...
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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleFifty 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...
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