No conservative or libertarian can possibly contemplate voting for either of the “major” party candidates, this time around, on several grounds, the most conspicuous being their intractable and almost instinctive predilection for deploying the all-too-visible hand of government as the end-all and be-all of “solutions” to our problems, foreign as well as domestic. As far as the frontrunner, Barack Obama, is … [Read More]

Now, let me just close by saying this. I do not think this is going to be easy. It’s not going to come without costs. We are all going to need to sacrifice. We’re all going to need to pull our weight, because now, more than ever, we are all in this together. Now, that’s part of what this crisis has … [Read More]

I was going to live-blog the debate, but it was so boring that I fell asleep before I could post it on Takimag. In any case, this was supposedly a debate about foreign policy, but more than half of it was taken up with the peculiar obsession of the insufferable Jim Lehr, of PBS, who manages to combine earnestness and pretentiousness … [Read More]

If you think that FOX News—with its bleached-out blonde anchorbabes made up to look like mid-price hookers, and its braying neocon mouthpieces trumpeting the party line—is the televised voice of conservatism, then think again. Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, et al. offer up plenty of “conservative” platitudes on the war in Georgia, the war in Iraq, and the permanent wars on Jihadism, … [Read More]

I love political conventions, in part because I remember the olden days, when there was some doubt as to their outcome. Nowadays, of course, party conventions are carefully choreographed events, as is the coverage. I’m watching MSNBC, out of habit, but their “reporting” is barely tolerable: it’s like watching what one imagines Soviet television must have been like, “covering” the latest … [Read More]

“The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives–people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary–plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.” Sounds like Pat Buchanan, writing well before the first … [Read More]

In what is surely an “only in America” phenomenon, the most patriotic holiday of the year celebrates the overthrow of the government. That says a lot about this country, or, rather, about the way it used to be. This time around, the Fourth merely underscores how far we have wandered, and raises the question of when we reached that fork … [Read More]

The recent decision by the California Supreme Court overturning a ban on gay marriage has, once again, thrust this issue into the malestrom of political debate, and, simultaneously, revived the sagging fortunes of groups on both sides. On the liberal left, the gay marriage movement is stoking up its engines for a major push to legitimize–so they believe–homosexual relationships in a … [Read More]

Life is a circus, and we pundits are the ringmasters, and so, as we segue into the weekend, let’s take a look at what the clowns are up to .... The Prosecution Rests —In a new report issued by Physicians for Human Rights,  Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba—the officer in charge of the Abu Ghraib investigation—writes: “ “After years of disclosures by … [Read More]

Some people never learn: “I don’t think the lessons of Iraq necessarily discredit liberal internationalism, or realism, or neoconservatism, or any of the many theories of U.S. engagement with the world that were invoked to justify support for the war. I don’t come away from the events of the last five years convinced that we should never intervene abroad on purely … [Read More]