Trump and the Big Stick
Last night I did something I don’t often do – I watched a few minutes of television news coverage. In this case it involved what was going on in Iraq at the hands of the Iranians. I had planned on … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Historical figures
Leninthink
Another great article by Gary Saul Morson has been published in New Criterion. He’s the author who wrote a piece about Solzhenitsyn that I discussed previously here. This time Morson is writing about Lenin – or rather, about the thought … Continue reading →
Offspring and politics: go figure
It struck me today, for no reason at all, that the only two presidents we’ve ever had who’ve been divorced are two of the most conservative presidents politically. And then I started thinking about Ronald Reagan’s children. He had two … Continue reading →
Martin Luther King’s feet of clay
It came to general public notice quite some time ago that the revered civil rights leader of the mid-20th Century, Martin Luther King, had many flaws as a person. He was a womanizer who was serially unfaithful to his wife. … Continue reading →
Understanding evil
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a post first published in 2007. I came across it yesterday when responding to a comment, and I though it might bear repeating.] We may not be able to define evil, but most … Continue reading →
Kavanaugh wasn’t merely borked
I’ve seen a lot of pundits referring to what happened to Kavanaugh as his having been borked. But that’s not entirely correct. In the earlier part of the hearings, he was indeed borked. In other words, his judicial record was … Continue reading →
The first act was different: Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
If Kavanaugh and Ford is the second act, Thomas and Hill was the first. Please don’t quibble with me. I know that Bork preceded that. But I’m talking about sexual allegations mounted against a SCOTUS nominee after the initial hearings, … Continue reading →
Ruminations on the NY Times’ resistance member in the Trump administration
This anonymous NY Times op-ed by a supposed higher-up in the Trump administration has gotten a great deal of attention. As it was meant to do. It amounts to an anonymous, uncheckable, unverifiable accusation about the Trump administration—an accusation that … Continue reading →
Kavanaugh’s Obamacare ruling: Part II
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.] In evaluating judicial nominations and predicting the drift of a judge’s future decisions, one caveat I would offer is that nearly any judge with a long history is going to have decided some … Continue reading →
“Darkest Hour”
I haven’t seen the new Churchill movie, although I plan to. Maybe I’ll wait till it’s released on video, but it sounds like a good one (with a few reservations). We’ve got two reviews to guide you on your way. … Continue reading →
Hey, let’s get rid of the Star-Spangled Banner!
Not for the reason you might think we should get rid of it—that it’s nearly unsingable. No, the reason is because the third verse—the one virtually no one had ever heard of before, much less sung—is supposedly racist. Maybe or … Continue reading →
Trump and Tocqueville
Toqueville almost certainly would have looked down his nose at Trump—much as he did Andrew Jackson, who was president during the Frenchman’s 1831 visit to the US. But as Jean Yarbrough (Bowdoin professor of political philosophy and American political thought, … Continue reading →