Kudos to Richard for nailing the hack agenda proposed by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in Grand New Party, and saving me $23.95 on something I would have hurled across the room. The authors’ ideas for reviving a “pro-family” social policy and buying the votes of the middle and working class with their own tax money sound at once unprincipled and … [Read More]

This might surprise you, but I wasn’t always such a mild, soft-spoken guy. Before my conversion to St. Francis of Assisi’s gospel of peace, you might have called me… contentious. Provoked, I acted rather “prickly”—and I mean that as an adverb. Growing up bookish in a blue collar ‘hood full of guys named Vito who thought my pointy head could … [Read More]

Without my winter beard I’ve got a baby face, and am often mistaken for a 30-year-old. But teaching college students gives me frequent reminders that I really am fortysomething. These kids don’t remember Communism. It collapsed in Eastern Europe while they were in tiny diapers, and most of what they know of the Soviet bloc comes from the character Borat. So … [Read More]

“Don’t like the weather?” they say here in New Hampshire. “Wait five minutes.” As summer comes, our polar clime becomes instead bi-polar. Four times this week, the day has turned almost instantly from brightness and balm to lightning and sheets of rain—then back again—several times. The sky is alternately black and blue, as if the weather had been punching it in … [Read More]

Paul Gottfried’s a lot more patient than I am, if he’s willing to spoon through thousands of pages of Marxist analyses to find the chunks of edible meat that float in the spoiled soup. If I see that an argument is based on false premises, I rarely spend time tracing its every convolution through to the end, in case the author … [Read More]

Some immigrants assimilate more slowly than others. My best friend from childhood had parents from Abruzzi who lived in NYC for 40 years and never learned English—the need for it never arose. I guess I’m another sort of “unmeltable ethnic,” having been for long periods of my life an expat New Yorker who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) learn how to drive. And … [Read More]

One thing about paleocons—they’re not predictable. When I mentioned in a previous article the fact that Pius XII helped save Jews and Serbs from genocide through (among many tactics) ordering priests to issue fake baptismal certificates, it never occurred to me that readers would write in denouncing me for slandering that pope. Would the great Pope Pius countenance deceit, even … [Read More]

It was a balmy New England dawn, in that brief slice of the year when our clime is as mild as Malibu’s and the pine trees bend in sweet obeisance to the breeze…. On such a day, a man of my years climbs from the coverlets and thinks: “All shall be well….The perfect day for a colonoscopy.” Perhaps I view all … [Read More]

Neocons think in news cycles, the Vatican in centuries—and Patrick J. Buchanan? In the body of worthy, provocative books he has produced, his thought ranges over decades. Having nobly failed to affect American elections and nudge our policies closer to prudence, it’s clear that Buchanan has withdrawn from the dismal business of trying to sober up the Republican party—and decided instead … [Read More]

Like a catfish slipping off deck into cool, polluted waters, I’m back in NYC tonight—staying in an Orchard Street apartment rented off Craig’s List, taking a much needed vacation from hazardous trees, menacing highway entrance ramps, dour Yankees, and undergraduates. At long last, I can hear not a single cricket, bird, or bee—but instead the buzz of the street, and a … [Read More]