New York had Joe Dimaggio. Boston had Ted Williams         And Washington, D.C.? Well, we had Sammy Baugh, the greatest football player ever to pull on a jersey.         In 1943, Baugh led the NFL in pass completions, punting and interceptions as a defensive back with 11, calling forth the tribute of legendary sportswriter Grantland … [Read More]

In December we lost two great men, Paul Weyrich and Samuel Huntington. Both became l’enfant terribles in the establishments they were part of. Paul Weyrich helped create, and remained at the center, of the modern conservative movement establishment. The dozens of obituaries and tributes to Weyrich noted his involvement in the founding of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority. While … [Read More]

A “Guardianista” is, in the English variant of our common language, someone who ascribes to the general viewpoints of The Guardian newspaper. It’s more than just reading it (as I do) or writing for it (as I occasionally do, they use me as their rhetorically bomb throwing rightist occasionally), it’s really buying into that pinko leftie mindset where everything America does … [Read More]

A recent profile on Leonard Bernstein in a New York magazine brought back memories. The Bernstein piece was obviously a hagiography, written by someone who certainly knows his music but who allowed “Lenny’s” celebrity to overshadow his common sense. Bernstein was certainly musical, but he was shallow as a composer, vain in his conducting, a terrible show off when it came … [Read More]

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Of the dead, nothing but good. So said Dean Acheson of Sen. Joe McCarthy on his death in 1957. “Tailgunner Joe” had bedeviled the secretary of state for his lassitude toward communist penetration of State in President Truman’s time. But the passing of Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI in the later Nixon years, lately … [Read More]

Paul Michael Weyrich, a founding father of the New Right, has died. Eternity has stolen from us a great man. I first met Paul (he insisted on being called by his first name; once, when I addressed him as “Mr. Weyrich,” Paul snapped back, “Mr. Weyrich was my father, and he’s dead; call me Paul!”) in 1996.  The occasion was the … [Read More]

On Saturday morning, around 1 am, Jörg Haider, the charismatic Austrian nationalist leader, died in an accident in foggy weather on a dangerous road outside Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, the province of which Haider was Landeshauptman (governor). Haider was driving 142 kms per hour where only 70 is allowed. When he overtook another car, his own VW Phaeton skidded off … [Read More]

You have no idea what joy lies in discovering that there is another human being in one’s homeland who actually has heard of, and reads with pleasure, Samuel Francis. But so there is. Australia, where moral cowardice and insanely punitive libel laws have combined to produce an intellectual milieu even more squalid than the average Beltway think-tank, has actually allowed the … [Read More]

Once in a lifetime there comes a legislator so great that he transcends ideologies, political parties and personalities. Such a man was Jesse A. Helms, Jr. (R-NC). His greatness is beyond words. His opponents called him mean. He was one of the kindest Senators ever to grace the United States Capitol. His opponents claimed that young people hated the Senator. Among … [Read More]