The racial reference that forced Geraldine Ferraro to leave the Clinton campaign and fly off on her broom brings back for me bittersweet memories of teenage years and Queens. I’d grown up in the congressional district of benevolent, pro-life Mafia-connected Democrat Mario Biaggi. He’d done a good job, as far as we could see. He’d voted right. He’d made key phone … [Read More]

Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, Double Day, 336 pages.  It is always risky to write the obituary of neoconservatism, despite the now fashionable view that this is an idea whose time is finally gone. As Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrates in They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, the neoconservatives have always been … [Read More]

  “Belgium agrees to Holocaust restitution,” cries a New York Times headline on March 12. This is good news ... except that I was unaware that Belgium had been on the Nazi side 68 years ago. The piece goes on to clarify that campaigners welcomed the decision to compensate those whose propery and gold in Belgium had been looted by … [Read More]

Mickey Kaus beat me to the punch.  For that matter, so did Richard.  One of the reasons that I have frequently noted the obsession Obama supporters have with his appearance, his heritage and the symbolism of his candidacy is that I was sure that this obsession would make it not only possible but entirely legitimate for Obama’s critics and political opponents … [Read More]

To everyone who got exercised about the “Vatican’s” new so-called “list of deadly sins” for the modern age, I have some good news—or bad news, if you’re a jaded secularist looking to pick a fight: The Vatican didn’t publish anything of the kind. In fact, if I might explain a little about how things work here in Rome (just a few … [Read More]

Admiral Fallon resigns as any honest man, and an admirable soldier, because he realizes that the Cheney-neocon network is still at work. We are at best hoping for a holding action in Afghanistan, and the same in Iraq, yet the madmen of the administration believe they can still pull a rabbit out of their hat before next November. Back in New … [Read More]

Yesterday I drew on the Niall Ferguson’s latest history of the 20th century to show how two vaunted alternatives to liberal capitalism—socialism (the fetish of class) and tribalism (the fetish of race)—all but drowned the Eurasian land mass in innocent blood. Each ideological movement presented itself as a source of renewed community to modern, “mass” men alienated from traditional folkways, cut … [Read More]

Imagine a 15-year-old boy with a pronounced sense of the dramatic and emphatic right-wing political views of a libertarian bent, one who is, furthermore, looking for some comprehensive explanation of the world around him and often wonders why people are such inveterate idiots. He already imagines that the world is divided into two irreconcilable camps: him and his coterie of … [Read More]

“And so the blood-drenched cycle begins again, each side convinced that it has no option but to make the other suffer.” This from a London Daily Telegraph editorial. What my favorite London paper did not write about the latest outrage in Israel is that there is an option, and it is in Israel’s corner. The Jerusalem religious college that was attacked … [Read More]

Among the first tributes paid upon the death of William F. Buckley Jr. was that he “waged the war of ideas”—indeed, that he may have died doing so. I leave aside to what extent “he waged the war of ideas” aptly describes any part of Bill’s career. Let us consider only to what extent it may be regarded as praise. To … [Read More]