I watched the entire series, “The Kennedys.” As someone who has a sound understanding of human nature (that is to say, a Christian understanding) I was never particularly attracted to what historian Thomas Reeves calls “The Camelot School” of Kennedy historiography, nor particularly repelled by it. Anybody who is surprised by occasional flashes of virtue [...]
Live a little. Unbuckle your seat belt. It’s the only state left where you can “un-click it and not ticket.” The other 49 have either primary or secondary seat belt laws. “Secondary” means that the gendarmes cannot pull you over only for failure to buckle; they can cite you for not wearing the device, but only if [...]
John Willson’s most recent post makes me want to revive the Whig Party. Well, at least the part of the Whig Party that knew that executive power could be readily abused. Our earlier Whig allies once called Andrew Jackson, “King Andrew.” Somehow, this always rubbed me the wrong way, as I often think of figures [...]
Forrest MacDonald First of all, let’s agree on one important point: We are at war in Libya. All the niceties and all the casuistry aside, we are spending $100 million a day bombing and equipping and sending ground troops (yes, we are, folks–2500 Marines so far); enough to have already wiped out the [...]
“Men of Kalidu, the centuries look down upon you!” So cried His Excellency, Manfred Arcane, Minister Without Portfolio to his Mightiness Achmet XI, Hereditary President of Hamnegri and Sultan in Kalidu. This day the wise and virtuous Minister, confidential servant to the heroic Monarch, exhorted the captains of hundreds and of fifties and of tens, [...]
Education by poetry is education by metaphor.—Robert Frost Robert Frost The older I get the more I am convinced that a young teacher can learn almost everything he needs to know about teaching by reading Robert Frost. He once said that “the three strands of my life” were “writing, teaching, and farming.” He [...]
Dr. Bernard Nathanson On Palm Sunday in 1972 a Michigan Congress for the Unborn met on the Detroit waterfront. Russell Kirk, who had argued for several years that “a people who demand the inalienable right to destroy their own young are far gone in decadence,” gave an address that was quite ignored by [...]
Most of you will be glad to know that the title of these remarks does not imply that I am about to rehearse an old debate between Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa about whether America is “unfounded” or “founded.” That debate is interesting and to a degree even important. But I want to give instead [...]
The future ain’t what it used to be.—Yogi Berra It almost makes one want to go Green just to contemplate the trees that have been sacrificed for the writings of economists. They, like weathermen, claim to be custodians of a predictive science. Both get paid to be wrong much of the time, but at least [...]
“I appreciate the energy of this essay,” my professor wrote at the end of a longish paper I had written on Faulkner’s Light in August, “but there is no reason to go outside the covers of the novel to explain what he had to say.” He was a New Critic, and for reasons I never [...]
A long-time colleague of mine used to say, rather often, “John, you are so hopeful.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Another colleague once told me that he had just seen the ultimate conservative bumper-sticker: “LOSING SLOWLY.” The wickedly funny Ambrose Bierce (in The Devil’s Dictionary) defines “pessimism” as “The philosophy forced upon the convictions [...]
Former Senator Joe Lieberman As I write this, the DOJ is trying to find a way to prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, calling to mind earlier uses of that catch-all and very ambiguous legislation. Senator Joe Lieberman says to Fox News (this is only a slight paraphrase), “If we can’t shut [...]
Back when this man was President of the USA the term “creeping socialism” was known (and, one suspects, understood) by most Americans who were capable of waking up in the morning. Ike didn’t invent the term—that honor goes to F.A. Hayek in his what was then recent book, The Road to Serfdom; but Ike used it, knowing in [...]
Eugene Lyons One of the early war horses of of the American Right, Eugene Lyons has not yet gotten his due. He would never have called himself a conservative, nor be called a conservative by most of us who haggle over such things. But having been a commie–”I thought myself a ‘socialist almost [...]