Just as I was thinking that National Review couldn’t get any worse, I ran across new and even more tasteless verbiage on its pages. The comments by David Frum in the June 25 issue, on why it had taken him so long to change his mind about immigration, commits character assassination of a kind that left me gaping at the author’s … [Read More]

A Fourth of July Washington Post-syndicated column by W’s former speechwriter and the author of his Second Inaugural, Michael Gerson, struck so many Republican, neoconservative, and not least of all Evangelical themes that his words should be archived as illustrating self-induced illusion. The column is decorated (or at least it was in the New York Post) with a picture of Martin … [Read More]

In the last few months I’ve been stumbling across statements in Orbis, The American Conservative, and in other magazines for which I’m still allowed to write to the effect that the neoconservatives are falling from power. Although this group is no longer as prominently represented in W’s collapsing administration as they once were, there is no indication that they are shrinking … [Read More]

A debate in the French weekly Courrier International (December 21, 2006) held between Polish political scientist Marek Cichocki and Claus Leggewie, a widely respected German professor at the University of Giessen, points to two diverging paths into the European future. Both commentators explain how their views about the end of the Second World War have affected their visions of Europe. For … [Read More]

It is not generally my practice to answer bloggers responding to my commentaries. I’ve also had the strong sense that some of the respondents to Paul Weyrich’s attack on the Fairness Doctrine were doing so well that my own efforts might appear superfluous.  But since my older son has now taken the side of my neighbor and friend Wes McDonald, against … [Read More]

Having read Rich Lowry’s latest gripe in National Review about the application of the Fairness Doctrine and how this liberal trick would hurt “conservative” radio commentators, my immediate, sarcastic response was “this guy must be kidding.” As someone on the old right, I couldn’t imagine how any blow against truth would result from a change in the format of Rush … [Read More]

It is hard to understand why those who are not cognitively challenged write inexplicably stupid things. Although Professor Allan Wolfe and I would not agree on much politically or philosophically, from all accounts he is an intelligent man. In June 1999 he wrote a reasonably perceptive review of my book After Liberalism for The New Republic, the publication in which his … [Read More]

A recent exchange held on WDAY’s Hot Talk with Scott Hennan between Serb journalist and author of Sword of the Prophet, Srdja Trifkovic and best-selling neocon celebrity Dinesh D’Souza underscores the silliness of what today passes for high-toned political discussion. In a widely discussed book, The Enemy Within (Doubleday, January 2007), D’Souza, a John M. Olin Scholar at American Enterprise Institute,” … [Read More]

Having forced myself to watch the most recent display of Republican presidential intelligence in Columbia, South Carolina on May 15, I came away with impressions that clearly jar with those of the authorized FOX commentators. Unlike Hannity and Colmes, who after the debate rushed to assure us that the “Mayor” had performed brilliantly, I cringed with disgust at Hizzoner’s verbal ineptness. … [Read More]

In August 1966, while visiting Vienna as an ABD graduate student from Yale, I chanced upon the office of Aktion-Europa, a group that would soon change its name to the Paneuropabewegung. As I learned from going to its offices on the Prinz Eugen Strasse, Aktion-Europa was an organization that defended the Habsburg dynasty. As the nephew or in one case distant … [Read More]