The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate today—has been mocked out of meaning. To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution. Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked through the night to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian … 
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Poor Michael Jackson. His last words were: ‘Take me to the children’s ward.’ But it was nice of the jockeys in Santa Anita to wear a black mourning band in honour of a man who rode more three-year-old winners than anyone. Mind you, I thought the great Paul Johnson was the best when I happened to tell him over the telephone of Jackson’s untimely death: ‘Was he a member of the Beatles?’ Er, well no, dear Paul, but he was in the same undignified business. It has been said that you only ever meet the world once, in childhood. All the … 
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Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica. The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another term. Will someone please explain why this bloodless transfer of power to the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers or Barack Obama? For … 
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Wonkette, if you have the good fortune of not knowing, is a left-liberal site that manages to consider itself cheeky and iconoclastic while endorsing only the most exquisitely conventional, establishment-approved opinions.  If you’re not located somewhere along that fantastic spectrum of genius that ranges from Chuck Schumer to Arlen Specter, Wonkette will expose you to the world as the misanthropic imbecile you obviously are. In order to remain as predictable as possible, Wonkette’s writers have decided they really don’t like Rep. Michele Bachmann, member of Congress from Minnesota. Of all the geniuses in Congress, they select for special ridicule one of … 
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Jacko was the King of Celebrity Eugenics. The late Michael Jackson was a strange individual, but his various obsessions, such as weight loss, whitening his skin, and expensively designing his children, were hardly unique to him. They are shared by more than few of his legion of female fans. To become a superstar, you have to embody some of the inner fixations of either the male or female publics. And in popular music in recent decades, the biggest names have had largely feminine audiences because male tastes have fragmented into multitudinous narrow genres, such as, say, Melodic Death Metal. First, Jackson’s … 
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A recent syndicated column by Thomas Sowell “Republicans in the Wilderness” includes useful advice but also misleading conclusions. According to Sowell, while “Republican moderates” Bob Dole and John McCain “lost disastrously to Democrats,” Republicans who have stood their ground, like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, have been more successful politically. Victorious Republicans have understood that “far more Americans describe themselves as ‘conservatives’ than as ‘liberals,’” and dynamic conservative Republican leaders have therefore “come up with alternatives to the Democrats’ many solutions rather than simply be nay-sayers.” Although Sowell’s advice to the GOP, to paint in sharp pastels rather than in shades … 
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Speaking on FOX News the same day Sanford dropped his bombshell, former Bush adviser Karl Rove said: “With all due respect to Governor Sanford, I’ve never thought he was a particularly strong candidate. If you looked just beneath the surface in South Carolina, for example, there were a lot of strong conservatives who were very upset with his performance in office… it’s a sign of the lack of popularity that he’s got in the state that the immediate response of a lot of political leaders in the state was he’s got to go, and he’s got to go right now.” That … 
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People often ask me how I can write about Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln or the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution or the South.  Hasn’t it all been said?  Isn’t there already a mountain of books about them? They are right to think that a great amount of ink has been spilled on these topics.  Where a layman’s intuition fails him, however, is in telling him that these subjects must have been, or can ever be, exhausted. Consider the current state of Thomas Jefferson scholarship. In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.  Gordon-Reed, … 
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Rolling though picture-perfect hills and fields of maize and barley towards Wembury House, Devon, for the annual Hanbury cricket match. At times it’s a scene from a ‘50s film of a long-ago England, beautiful, tranquil and law-abiding, with glimpses of broad greens, riverside walks and winding country lanes. But then comes the announcement in an English I can hardly comprehend, however hard I try, apologizing about a diversion because of hay on the tracks. “Hay on the tracks?” I ask incredulously. The bucolic view of beeches and oaks, as well as the armour of decorum, is suddenly replaced by the uniquely … 
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The fascinating news that the ageing William F. Buckley, beset by bladder problems, developed the habit of opening the door of his moving limousine and urinating into passing traffic—revealed by his son, Christopher Buckley in Losing Mum and Pup, his unsparing memoir of his just-deceased parents’ final year—is almost laughably symbolic. CB himself—whose father certainly presented him with much more distressing problems at the terrible end—seems to think WFB was just importing the manly casualness of his much-publicized yachting days. He writes jovially to WFB’s possible victims: If you’re out there, the answer is, yes, you were selected from among thousands … 
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