Endless disaster has long been the result of endless U.S. interventionism. Texas Congressman Ron Paul was laughed at by Rudy Giuliani and others in the last election for daring to suggest that the U.S. helping to overthrow the government of Iran to install the Shah in 1953 was the first in a sequence of interventions that has helped lead to our … [Read More]

How Multiculturalism Killed the Counter Culture When I was eleven in 1970, Alvin Toffler published a book entitled Future Shock, which prophesied ever faster cultural change. In the wake of the tumultuous 1960s, this sounded like a sure bet. Hence, Future Shock became a huge bestseller. Yet, looking back, 1970 seems to be right about when the rate of transformation started … [Read More]

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”—Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism When he was 16, Bill McCain told his mother, “You won’t … [Read More]

I’ve come to admire Michele Bachmann, especially since she nailed Timothy Geithner to the wall while repeatedly asking him what provision in the Constitution gave the Treasury Department the authority to manage markets and the financial services industry. On that note, I found this story to be delightful. Try to not laugh at the last paragraph. Outspoken Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann … [Read More]

Given its monopoly of guns, bet on the Iranian regime. But, in the long run, the ayatollahs have to see the handwriting on the wall. Let us assume what they insist upon—that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election; that, even if fraud occurred, it did not decide the outcome. As Ayatollah Khamenei said to loud laughter in his Friday sermon … [Read More]

Under Consideration: Banquo’s Ghosts, by Richard Lowry and Keith Korman, Vanguard Press (2009), 352 pages.  You have to feel a little sorry for the two neocons who co-wrote Banquo’s Ghosts. The idea seems simple enough: a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a plot to kill an Iranian physicist before he can cook up a nuke for the mullahs. The problem is, where … [Read More]

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? I’m not so sure. I’ve been away from London for one year, and was dreading the return. The grey sky, the Dickensian streets, the fat-bellied lager louts, the knife culture, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, the coarsest of the coarse Alan Sugar in the House of Lords: a good place to miss, I told … [Read More]

Harry Browne, the former Libertarian Party candidate for president, used to say: “the government is great at breaking your leg, handing you a crutch, and saying ‘You see, without me you couldn’t walk.’” That maxim is clearly illustrated by the financial industry regulatory reforms proposed this week by the Obama Administration. In seeking to undo the damage inflicted over the past … [Read More]

What a relief. The demonstrations in the Islamic Republic, pursuant to the disputed election, have failed to cue the staple presidential speech we’d become accustomed to from George Bush. Barack Obama spared the country a lecture about the all-American duty to crusade for democracy and against tyrants and terrorists. Instead, the president confined himself to diplomatic, obligatory statements: He was “deeply … [Read More]

It will be Twitterized! Leave it to the neocons, their congressional allies, and much of the “conservative” blogosphere to make Barack Obama look like an elder statesman of Burkean inclinations. As the newly color-coded “Green Revolution” unfolds on Twitter and other hipster-powered social networks, The Messiah has been rather circumspect in his public statements: saying that he thinks the Iranian people’s … [Read More]