Article Archive
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Life Beyond the Party
The antiwar, pro-life Right--including Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and others who've opposed the Iraq War--doesn’t fit the narrative that hawks and neocons have built over the past six or seven years. What is that narrative? Essays by Joseph Bottum in First Things and James Hitchcock in the Human Life Review reveal the outline: neocons want to co-opt pro-lifers by convincing them that the bloodshed involved in wars of choice is not inconsistent with an ethic of life that rejects abortion and euthanasia [Read More]
Taking Back the Constitution--A Case for Impeaching George W. Bush
On Saturday, March 8, 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a congressional bill that would have explicitly banned interrogation techniques like waterboarding. In doing so, Bush cemented his worthiness of impeachment. The impeachment power allows Congress to keep the other two branches from grasping at powers that the Constitution gives to the Legislative Branch. Congress is described in Article I of the Constitution, and its structure was the chief issue in the Philadelphia Convention. Why? Because in a republic, it is to be the most important branch. [Read More]
The Surge--Is It Soup Yet?
Is the Surge working—really? Sure, it’s working fine, just like my sister’s car. I had to drop her off at the garage where they were looking over her Ford Probe. It’d been overheating since she bought it, and there was something wrong with the alternator, too. But she didn’t have the money to fix it so she asked the mechanic, “Can’t I just keep leaving the heater on and adding water and using my battery charger?” The mechanic blinked a couple times and said, “Yeah, you could do that….” Meaning, “You could, if you want to drive around sweating, wait for the charger to power up when you’re late for work, and generally ruin your life for the sake of a hopeless junker." That’s the best answer I can give on the Surge: if you’re willing to go on throwing away men and money to prop up a lost cause, then yeah, it’s working great! Just like my sister’s dumb techniques; they kept the car on the road all right, but she'd have been way better off just junking it, which she ended up doing anyway. [Read More]
What the Hell Happened to Jim?—James Webb Talks Like Pat Buchanan, Votes Like Harry Reid
James Webb was once the great white hope of the paleoconservatives. A little over a year into his first term, Jim Webb so far looks like something else entirely: a paleoconservative Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan always had many admirers on the right, especially among the neoconservatives. But in the Senate, he was a standard-issue liberal voting the Democratic Party line. Will Webb also roll over and play party regular? Washington has a way of taming mavericks and draining people of everything that makes them interesting. Steve Sailer once referred to "the Joe Liebermans and Daniel Patrick Moynihans who talk like Irving Kristol but vote like Walter Mondale." Webb writes like Pat Buchanan but votes like Harry Reid. [Read More]
A Chosen People without God--The Rise of the Neocons
The fact that neoconservatives have thought and acted in terms of secularized Judaism places them in the larger company of many other atheistic ideologues who were more than willing to bring heaven down to earth through political action. In the post-Holocaust age, it is not terribly shocking to discover that even secular Jews are tempted to embrace political messianism. Still, when neoconservatives see themselves as a “chosen people” struggling to break out of their intellectual captivity, this has more to do with leftist adulteration of biblical thought than with any teaching of the Old Testament. My favorite phrase for describing this misuse of the Bible is the indulgence of believing in “chosenness without God.” [Read More]
The Day I Met Ayn
When Ayn Rand appeared at the blue-green podium, peering intently at us through reading glasses that seemed too big for her face, I thought, for a moment, that there must be some mistake. The woman who stood before us was short, with her dark hair swept impatiently back from her forehead in a page-boy haircut. She was wearing a severe suit that may have been fashionable at some point in the distant past, and looked to be in her late fifties. A wave of disappointment swept over me: where were Dagny Taggart’s “show-girl legs”? And where was Dagny Taggart? The woman standing on the stage resembled a Russian babushka who had somehow been diverted on her way to the Moscow market to pick up a sack of potatoes and instead had wandered, improbably, into the NBI auditorium. That visual impression, however, lasted only as long as it took her to begin speaking. [Read More]
Mr. bin Laden, Meet Mr. Kennan--A New Containment Policy
My Country of Flickering Lights—Dispatches from the New South Africa
Marvels and Missed Opportunities
Climate of Here
Is a conservative climate consensus possible? If hard cases make bad law, soft science makes sensible politics even harder. The Climate Wars present legislators on both sides of the aisle with few certainties, among them that one side is prone to construe any human impact on climate as tantamount to Weather of Mass Destruction. It does so with Hollywood's full arsenal of special effects at it disposal, and makes its case using lines corny enough to make Captain Planet wince, yet the results seldom face scientific criticism. This stands in stark contrast with its token opposition, chosen for political reliability rather than scientific acumen, and scripted by conservative media often as scientifically impoverished as they are well funded. The result is that Republicans find themselves poorly armed and bizarrely outnumbered in the Climate Wars. The Right and the Left will clearly have two very different views of the world, but there can be no armistice in the Climate Wars until both sides acknowledge that, from the atmosphere's point of view, there can be, at most, one kind of physics. And it’s not the Discovery Institute’s. [Read More]