We are truly living in a Bizarro World: I’m watching MSNBC, where Pat Buchanan is defending Larry Craig, while obvious dyke Rachel Maddow is calling for his head. Craig, says Rachel, should be thrown out of the Senate—not, she hastens to add, for soliciting an undercover police officer for sex in a public bathroom, but for “hypocrisy.” So, if, say, Barney … [Read More]

Something interesting happened as I was waiting on Sunday for a train at Penn Station in Manhattan. The experience was so amusing and so utterly revealing that I still can’t dislodge it from my mind. A lady was sitting across from me in the waiting room reading what turned out to be a copy of Norman Podhoretz’s latest ravings on … [Read More]

Since it was being put to work as such wonderful agitprop for the Ziocons, aka the “neocons”, I had assumed that “the clash of civilizations” mania springing from Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book of the same name, was a “neocon” concept. My conclusion was admittedly a jump, but it seemed self-evident. After all, the phrase was first used by Princeton … [Read More]

New York - Mayor Michael Bloomberg is as gruesome a fellow as they come. Mind you, he’s not as bad as Governor Eliot Spitzer, but then not every public official is a habitual body waxer. These men share, alas, an affinity for foul play, hypocrisy and cowardice, among other virtues. No sooner did Spitzer win the governorship, than he stuck the … [Read More]

Robert Novak might not be able to distinguish Thomas Fleming from Thomas Fleming (as the howler in his latest book shows), and he might benefit from a remedial course in journalistic ethics (as the Valerie Plame outing, among other incidents, indicates), but he’s generally pretty savvy when it comes to electoral politics.  So I’m discussing his latest column today not simply … [Read More]

There is no one better than Orwell, especially in his masterwork, 1984. He saw our future well in advance. It appears that once-great Britain will soon start jailing people for making “homophobic” comments. This proposal confirms my suspicion that the whole art of politics today consists of pandering to the weakness, fears, and greed of the people. And, of course, to … [Read More]

On almost any political topic we can expect these days to find talk of ‘rights’. We hear of human rights, women’s rights, fathers’ rights, civil rights, gay rights, polygamy rights, immigrants’ rights, religious rights, animal rights, the right to choose, the right to life, etc. And if a particular right does not now exist, be patient; it is probably only a … [Read More]

Poor David Horowitz. The long slide downward has been traumatic for him. Once an author of middlebrow biographies that sold fairly well, today he has become a neoconservative nutball whose descent into megalomania has taken on increasingly bizarre forms: e.g., he recently rebaptized his longstanding vehicle, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, with the new moniker being the “David … [Read More]

Every day we read about some new Israeli accusation directed at its enemies emanating from the Amen Corner: Iran has “weapons of mass destruction,” Syria is plotting (with North Korea, no less) to build nukes, and, the latest is that Iran is plotting to kill President Vladimir Putin on his visit to Tehran. None of this can be checked, of course: … [Read More]

Patrick Foy is certainly entitled to dissent from my views about the current European scene, but it might help to point out the obvious, which his rejoinder partly obfuscates. It is naïve to distinguish the growing Muslim presence in Europe as a religious community from the same presence as a non-Western and, moreover, anti-Western culture. The majority of Muslim immigrants in … [Read More]