Category: Politics
-
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Victor Davis Hanson: Politically Correct Hatred Ilhan Omar presents a most exasperating case because on the one hand she poses as an avatar of the successful immigrant, while on the other she neurotically whines that America has failed utterly to meet her expectations when she fled a Kenyan refugee camp to enter the United States.…
-
The Trump Steamroller
Conrad Black on Trump's enemies: They are failing to make the distinction between Trump’s policies and his mannerisms. No serious person can dispute the president’s economic successes (especially the virtual elimination of unemployment and energy imports), his revival of a viable policy of nuclear nonproliferation, taking serious measures to stop mass illegal immigration, moving decisively…
-
It’s Guerilla Warfare
This excellent article explains why so many intelligent and decent people support Donald J. Trump. It starts like this: When my liberal friends and colleagues begin to explain to me why they imagine President Trump is appallingly vulgar and incompetent and venal, there is always a point in which their faces go blank. It happens…
-
Of Progressive Carnivores and Cannibals
Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpt: But revolutionary carnivores are rarely sated. Once they run out of easy hostile targets—and they have with the collapse of the Mueller hoax and all the other impeachment melodramas—they get hungry and as cannibals start to eye their own. We have already seen that autophagy in the initial primary debates in…
-
The Main Thing is to be Polite: Or So Rod Dreher Seems to Think
As you may have gathered, I have a high opinion of Rod Dreher. A friend and I are currently working through his The Benedict Option. But the scent of Never-Trumpery is large about him. His Trump Summons Demons begins as follows: Tonight at a rally in North Carolina, the President of the United States criticized…
-
The Political Burden of Proof: Polite Version
As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.
-
Of ‘Pussy’ and ‘Pusillanimous’ and Politics
A friend of mine recently maintained with a straight face that 'pusillanimous' derives from 'pussy.' As an etymological claim that is of course preposterous. But there are two questions here that we ought to distinguish. The first is whether 'pusillanimous' has roughly the same meaning as 'pussy' when the latter is used as it is…
-
‘Expressive Individualism’ is Becoming a Buzz Word
Or rather a buzz phrase. What does it mean, and where is it from? Where [Alasdair] MacIntyre used the term emotivism to name our moral predicament, in their classic 1985 study of American society, Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-writers identified two powerful strands of American thought that in some…
-
Flip-Floppin’ Joe
The inner compass of the professional politician is a weather vane. The political winds having shifted, no one should be shocked that Joe Biden is now against what he was for, the Hyde Amendment.
-
Asymmetrical Polarization: Which Side Is Mainly Responsible?
Political polarization is said to be asymmetrical when one of the political poles bears more responsibility than the other for exacerbating the polarization. But given the fact of polarization, it comes as no surprise that the Left blames the Right and the Right the Left. We all seem to agree that polarization is not good,…
-
Religious Liberty and David Brooks
A re-run from 29 October 2016. I lay into the insipid David Brooks. ………….. The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading. But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right: The very essence…
-
Are You a Right-Wing Extremist? Take this Test!
The following is from a Salon article. The enumeration is mine; I did, however, preserve the order of the bulleted list in the Salon piece. After each item you will find brief and not-so-brief commentary by your humble correspondent. The XRW chart contains 20 examples of behavior which could indicate right-wing extremist values and suggest…
-
Why are So Many Jews Democrats?
Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation: Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and…
-
Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant. . .
. . . but not for the obstructionist crapweasel Democrats who will say and do literally anything to destroy a duly elected president. They understandably do not want their skulduggery to come to light. One of the signal services of Mr. Trump is that he has forced the Democrats to show their true hard-Left colors.…
-
The Facebook Offload
I have offloaded a good deal of my political linkage, 'rantage,' and commentary onto my FB page. But given the state of the Republic, it is important to punch back against the destructive Left in every venue and from every platform. So I will continue to post political material here. You may try to avoid…