All boys dream of acts of heroic violence. By the age of seven or eight they have saved their mothers from countless imaginary villains, and as they get older they save other even more interesting females. The trouble is that for those of us who do not make a living carrying a gun, opportunities for heroic violence don’t come very often, … [Read More]

Rest assured that the subject matter of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 will be revisited in the near future, with some further comparisons, parallels and speculation. For the moment, allow me to return to the immediate tragedy at hand, viz., the quagmire of Iraq and its purported justification, the “war on terror”. The American expatriate and Korean War veteran William Pfaff writes … [Read More]

If you like to read about a giant corporation screwing old ladies and retired people who have worked all their lives just to see their life savings go up in smoke, keep reading. But first a disclaimer. I am not an investor and have never had any dealings with the people involved. The scandal was brought to my attention by … [Read More]

Although Sid Cundiff in a recent blog praises me as someone who recognizes “shades of grey,” I may be losing that capacity when it comes to certain neoconservative journalists. In an article for the Canadian National Post, which was also published on NRO (November 11, 2007), David Frum bewails the fact that Canadians are not showing the appropriate enthusiasm over the … [Read More]

Norman Mailer died around four thirty Saturday morning New York time. Unlike his tumultuous life, his end was very peaceful. I spoke to his oldest son Michael who called me literally a second after the Sunday Telegraph did to inform me of his death. “I gave dad a drink and he smiled,” said Michael. I asked him if it was an … [Read More]

What can one say about Norman Podhoretz, and his latest lunatic ravings, that has not already been said? At first glance, silence may appear to be the healthiest response to this mentally unbalanced creature—whose writings are in any case duly condemned by liberal internationalists. Never mind that, for the time being, such a madman has an iron grip on the foreign … [Read More]

Meir Brand , the head of Google Israel, explains to a conference on “cyber-hate” why Google isn’t going to censor “hate speech”: “At Google, we have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression.” The Jerusalem Post whines that Google’s “free-access philosophy puts it on the sidelines of the war against cyberhate.” The rest of the Jersusalem Post piece … [Read More]

As the President of “pro-Western” Georgia shuts down the non-governmental media, jails his political opponents, accuses anyone who dissents of being part of a pro-Russian fifth column, and orders his thuggish police to beat anti-government demonstrators flooding the streets, Matt Bryza, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, had this to say: “The president of Georgia has shown remarkable leadership.” … [Read More]

The drumbeat for going easy on the two AIPAC lobbyists caught committing espionage on behalf of A Certain Country gets louder as the trial date—January 14—approaches. The latest: a piece in the War Street Journal that avers,  among other things, “The AIPAC lobbyists are the victims of selective prosecution for behavior that has become commonplace. They did what journalists and lobbyists … [Read More]

The livre de scandale of John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, was for me a mostly disappointing read. Having seen the earlier article by these two illustrious academics, one at Chicago and the other at Harvard, “The Israel Lobby,” in the London Review of Books (May 2006), I found nothing particularly original about … [Read More]