Kim Jung-Il’s dictatorial taste in cinema, cuisine, and above all public sculpture remains deeply mysterious, witness the fusion of folk culture and socialist realism in the Lunar Rabbit Zodiac Memorial installed at Pyongyang’s uninhabitable 105 story Pyramid Hotel. While a symphony orchestra can be sent to the DPRK in reasonable expectation of returning unscathed from a state banquet, rabbits are another … [Read More]

Did anyone else catch the unsettling comment made by Karl Rove on the O’Reilly show last night. When O’Reilly asked Bush’s former grey eminence whether Obama had benefited from the speech given in Philadelphia, which failed to condemn the racist pastor Jeremiah Wright unequivocally, Rove showed why the American Right is justified to view him with loathing. He proceeded to compare … [Read More]

Whatever happened to David Horowitz—the ex-leftist -turned-neocon whose hysterical maunderings are practically emblematic of the species and who used to make quite a bit of noise as a kind of right-wing Bizarro World version of the campus lefties of the 1960s? We don’t hear much from him anymore. His web site, Frontpage, used to attract attention on account of the … [Read More]

On Saturday, March 8, 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a congressional bill that would have explicitly banned interrogation techniques like waterboarding. In doing so, Bush cemented his worthiness of impeachment. The impeachment power allows Congress to keep the other two branches from grasping at powers that the Constitution gives to the Legislative Branch. Congress is described in Article I … [Read More]

This day, the most solemn in the Christian calendar, is an occasion to avoid any kind of frivolity or mirth. Which makes it a hard day for me to write about. The feast is especially important to wretched, lukewarm sinners like me who spend the whole year trying to wriggle out from under the Cross. Today, it’s standing right in front … [Read More]

Revenge of the Mutterites Last week I spent five frenetic days at a conference on politics and religion held at Trinity Western University, outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. A faculty member, Grant Havers, who arranged to have me invited, and his gracious fiancée, Theresa, were my kind hosts; and they took me on the last day of my visit on a … [Read More]

It’s hard to know how to feel about the fact that Sen. Obama’s, er, “racialist” background has finally emerged above the waterline—suggesting that his campaign may have “jumped the shark.” If it does lead the Democratic party’s grand panjandrums to hand the nomination to Hillary, even if she ends up having won fewer real delegates, I don’t think there’s anything the … [Read More]

It would take the greatest bloodhound reporter of all time to discover a person with a good word to say about Eliot Spitzer, the first man ever to bully Congress for an invite on bond insurance so he could meet with cutie pie Ashley Alexandra Dupre in room 871 the night before. When the crumbum finally threw in the towel, the … [Read More]

It’s always dangerous to let your view of history get stuck in a single moment. For the neocons, it’s always September 1938, with a weak Hitler bluffing his way into bloodless conquests while building up his army. The English and French let him get away with this because they were still living in August 1914—when diplomatic blunders converted a Serbian terrorist … [Read More]

Many people seem to enjoy repeating “the is Surge working, the Surge is working…” over and over again on television. So just before we pop the Champaign at the fifth-year anniversary party for the invasion of Iraq, and celebrate the completion of the freshman year of our ballyhooed "new strategy," perhaps we should ask, “is the Surge working—really? Sure, it’s … [Read More]