Blue v. Red
Keith Stokes adds some welcome historical perspective to the manufactured controversy about the last word in the state’s official name — Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: The historic use of the word plantation does not simply refer to early farms or settlements. It was specifically crafted and applied by our founding settlers as a means…
David Kahane lets us in on a little secret: I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally…
I’ve yet to trace the history sufficiently to form a strong opinion about the Robert McNamara, although I do generally distasteful to snarl at the dead on the occasion of death. The remarkable chill, though, emanates from the comments to the post at that link, beginning with the following unobjectionable suggestion from Lee Rosten: I…
Sometimes, it seems as if the Left and Right agree on much more than their adherents perceive, the difference being mainly semantic… and concerning whether the sociological item on the table is positive or negative. Of course, in most contexts, that either/or judgment is the core determinant of whether we would characterize two parties as…
The first thing to note about Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s after-dinner speech at the Portsmouth Institute’s conference on William F. Buckley’s conservatism is his mention of something that struck me for the duration of the event: namely, that religious life does not preclude real life, much less intellectual life. Stream, download (52 sec). Experience…
Somehow the Washington Post, via the mouth of U.S. News and World Report‘s Alex Kingsbury manages to pull pro-lifers and free-marketers under the same umbrella as Islamic radicals as a means of retroactively absolving Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano of the need for embarrassment over her department’s politically motivated report warning of pending right-wing terrorism:…
Thomas Sowell puts his finger on something that many conservatives see as a frustrating and dangerous exercise in fantasy: We have, for example, been doing nothing to stop Iran from getting nuclear bombs, but it has been elaborate, multifaceted, and complexly nuanced nothing. Had there been no United Nations, it would have been obvious to…
It’s difficult not to see a deliberate stratagem behind the left’s reaction to the “S” word, as Jonah Goldberg describes in USA Today: Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to…
David Brooks’s recent column on judicial empathy is a wonderful example of the method by which moderates enable liberals. He begins with a strawman that in no way bears scrutiny: The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood. It’s based on the falsehood that this is a nation of laws, not men; that…
Former CIA official Herbert Meyer has an excellent article about the Left’s strategy and methods for radically transforming the United States of America, touching on some broad themes in current events: At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is…
