To watch the contortions over that New Yorker cover cartoon of the Obamas is to understand whom it is impermissible to offend in the America of 2008. The cartoon is a caricature of Michelle as an urban terrorist in an ...
Perhaps the greatest compensation for trading cramped digs in Rome for a spacious house in the U.S. is that I have my beagles back. Susie and Franz-Josef are out back now, sniffing the trails of long-scampered squirrels, ...
The frightfully prosaic rash of sexual indiscretions among Republicans has cast an unflattering light on the Party of traditional marriage, and returns us to Mitt Romney and his fledgling presidential campaign. Alone among ...
AFRICOM, the new Dept. of Defense initiative for that continent, represents a God-sent opportunity for both our major political parties to find new worlds to conquer. The GOP, being a subsidiary of Big Oil, is fairly ...
PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall. And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all ...
The classic interpretation of Ian Fleming's James Bond character is that he stands as a kind of fantasy of Britishness the British people, and especially the elite, could indulge in during the rather grim 1950s"when the ...
GSTAAD—If someone bet that The Spectator issue of 10 January outsold or was read by more people than any other weekly — and that includes best selling popular crap like Hello! and OK! — they’d be collecting ...
Throughout reporting on the crime and the trials, political correctness protocols were strictly ...
Not only did Clarence Thomas take the full brunt of cultural mire and withstand it, he did so by sheer dint of an almost Leonidas-like manhood. When Thomas rose to confront the assault, few had much memory of the virtue, ...
Yesterday, in Columbia, South Carolina, Rudy Mussolini attacked the only honest person in Congress, Rep. Ron ...
Despite the televangelist being increasingly marginalized and ridiculed, Robertson's endorsement of Giuliani did make a splash. The media played up Robertson's well known opposition to homosexuality and abortion and how he ...
Kudos to Richard for nailing the hack agenda proposed by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in Grand New Party, and saving me $23.95 on something I would have hurled across the room. The authors’ ideas for reviving a ...
Some of you nice folk out there may remember that three weeks ago I wrote about a giant corporation screwing old ladies and retired people who have worked all their lives just to see their life savings go up in smoke. I ...
In case anyone out there is wondering what the Avatar—that scary sculpture headlining this blog—is suppose to signify, I can tell you. It is a photo which I took of a plaque affixed to a wall on the second floor ...
As I read the news about this Pakistani jackal who admits to planning a cowardly assault on hundreds of innocent people in New York’s Times Square, a thought that occurs to me is, how endlessly interesting history is. ...
No regime, no matter how theoretically hostile, can afford to drink its oil. One cannot emphasize too many times the hypocrisy of the "protecting-the-flow-of-oil" cant coming from the mouths of theoretical conservatives. On ...
The New York Times, which raised its price by 25 percent in July, from one dollar to $1.25, narrowed its perspective by 12 percent on August 6, when it cut the width of the paper by an inch and a half to 12 inches, ...
Southerners, like the European Celts who are their primary cultural progenitors, tell stories. Of course, all peoples tell stories, but Southerners tell stories not merely to entertain, certainly not to flatter their ...
This weekend I attended an engrossing production of The Seagull on Broadway"and I was lucky enough to be accompanied by the intelligent and beautiful great granddaughter of Manfred von Richthofen, the German ace of the ...
It has happened at last. The oh-so-clever marketers of Absolut have managed to create a political incident with one of their ads for their undistinguished liquor, giving me a pretext to blog about the history of vodka. Many ...
Since the Truman administration, Democrats have called for the nationalization of the health-care industry. The Democratic Party's position, stressed more strongly at some times than at others, has been that the average Joe ...
On any website or blog, those who leave comments make up a minute fraction of the readership. Those who spend hours a day composing sundry and bizarre screeds are even more rare, though their presence is more pronounced. ...
I spent today traveling and meeting with colleagues. A few of us who support Ron Paul had dispirited discussions of the good doctor’s performance in New Hampshire; one fellow remarked, ruefully, that while Dr. Paul ...
On Wednesday, November 28, Derrick Shareef pled guilty in U.S. District Court in Chicago on federal charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. I’ve discussed the Shareef case before on this ...
