About two weeks ago Justin Raimondo mentioned on a blog that Ron Paul’s enemies had begun to smear him as an anti-Semite and racist. From the references I assumed that the sources of the attack were the neoconservatives, an assumption that made perfectly good sense given the diametrically opposed views of the two camps. While the neocons favor an extended welfare … [Read More]

The administration of POTUS 43 is imploding, rudderless, out of control, and beyond reach. Anything can happen now, and most of it will be bad. And yet, the overall situation is not primarily Bush’s fault. You cannot hold an irresponsible, ill-prepared person responsible for his actions. Bush Jr. was selected by the Republican Establishment, then programmed and utilized as a front … [Read More]

Will George W. Bush beat out Harry Truman and Richard Nixon as the President with the lowest poll ratings ever? 65 percent currently disapprove of Dubya’s job performance, whereas Truman reached 67 percent during the Korean War and Nixon hit 66 percent four days before resigning. Place your bets here ...  [Read More]

Why pick up the latest John LeCarre novel, when the Litvinenko murder mystery is making headlines? A rare radioactive substance poisons a self-styled Russian “dissident”—was it murder? A smuggling operation gone wrong? And why would someone kill with such an exotic isotope—which could be used as a nuclear trigger for a “dirty” bomb? The “mainstream” media is going for the “Putin-did-it” … [Read More]

On Board S/Y Bushido — My closest friend Yanni Zographos, who died eleven years ago, had a system for picking up women with young children in tow. As he would pass a mother pushing a pram he would announce to no one in particular, “Les jolie mamans font des jolies bebes!” Starting in the summer of 1956, my first free year … [Read More]

Three headlines from the month of July: ”45 Muslim doctors planned US terror raids” (from the Telegraph of London) ”Italy ‘terror school’ imam had bomb chemicals-police” (from Reuters) ”Former U.S sailor in terror case discussed attacking military personnel, prosecutor says” (from the International Herald Tribune) Why, I’m often asked (even in comments on this website), do I bother discussing the threat … [Read More]

I see Andrew Sullivan, inspired by Daniel Larison, has decided to issue his own list of “lessons I’ve learned from the Iraq debacle,” and being that he’s one of the chief culprits outside the administration in leading us down that particular primrose path, we read it with a somewhat critical eye: “1. I believed that the United States would never violate … [Read More]

Just as I was thinking that National Review couldn’t get any worse, I ran across new and even more tasteless verbiage on its pages. The comments by David Frum in the June 25 issue, on why it had taken him so long to change his mind about immigration, commits character assassination of a kind that left me gaping at the author’s … [Read More]

In July 1941, a political prisoner escaped from Auschwitz.  As a punishment, ten others were chosen by the Nazis to be killed in a starvation bunker.  One of these men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began lamenting what his death would mean for his wife and children.  Upon hearing these cries, another prisoner, a Franciscan friar named Maksymilian Kolbe—who had run afoul of the … [Read More]

Citing Rod Dreher’s list of abandoned certainties in the face of the Iraq disaster, Andrew Sullivan titillates us with a promise to work up a list of his own. Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath in Sullivan’s case: after having done more than his bit in whipping up war hysteria against Iraq, and witch-hunting opponents of the war as bi-coastal “fifth … [Read More]