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,” contends that orthodox Islam and “American conservatism” (whatever that may mean at the present moment) are eminently compatible. Traditional Muslims, we are told, object not to Christianity or to traditional Western values but to American pop culture. Complicating this situation … 
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Let me tell you a sad tale of Russian politics. In July, 1990 I attended a conference in Prague on the emerging democracies in the former Soviet orbit. Most of the speakers told the audience that the Soviet Union would live forever; but that it would lose Eastern Europe. When I got up to speak, having been there since 1989 and by this time having been to a number of the Soviet States, I said that what the audience was hearing was a bunch of nonsense. I said I believed that the Soviet Union was falling apart and soon there would … 
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The Feast of Pentecost is one of the most important to Christians, for a number of reasons. First, it marks the birthday of the Church, the day when the Holy Spirit came down on the Apostles and Mary, and gave everyone the nerve they needed to preach the risen Christ to a hostile mob.   Pentecost also reverses the story of the Tower of Babel—the Old Testament tale of a king so ambitious he wanted to reach heaven through technological means. God tweaked him by inventing that bane of American schoolchildren over the millennia: foreign languages. In what we might call … 
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The funny thing about Sarkozy being president of France is not his size, but his family. His father, Pal Sarkozy, used to frequent the same nightclubs I did back in the early Sixties. Of the beau monde he was not. Pal was rather sleazy, a bit of a conman, and something of a playboy. None of us knew what he did, and by that I don’t mean to suggest he was dishonest, but there were always rumours about him. And an inveterate womaniser, a good thing for a father of a French president to be. But his women, alas, were a … 
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Perhaps Baby Boomers were earmarked to shrug off tradition in order to do away with the restraints that had sidelined many Americans for centuries. For all one knows though, it could it be that that remarkable epoch of the 20th Century, known as the 1960s, was merely one of many infinite calls to the man, if there is one, running the showboat we call creation. Whichever the case may be, scores of American children born since then have been stunted and swindled by their rather naïve and quixotic parents. Forty years ago, Joan Didion undertook the mission to demystify the offspring … 
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The attempt by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas to discuss what happened and why—to account for the 9/11 terrorist attacks—is an enormous breakthrough on the American political landscape. The incident occurred during last week’s Republican “debate” among Presidential hopefuls and was aired live on Fox News from Columbia, South Carolina. This may be the first time that the subject has been broached in a serious, intelligent manner by any U.S. Presidential candidate. Rudy Giuliani saw his opportunity to grandstand, and he jumped on it. He chose to dodge, distort and demagogue the issue. As a result, Giuliani received almost a standing … 
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I’ve already briefly mentioned my recent trip to West Point for the funeral of Timothy J. Vogel, one of America’s greatest warriors. Tim meant a lot to me, so please forgive me if I repeat myself a little. Before I go on, however, a brief and nostalgic look at the soldiers of another war and their representations in celluloid. The film was The Bridges of Toko-Ri, after the book by James Michener, starring William Holden, Grace Kelly, Frederic March and Mickey Rooney among many others. The plot was a simple one. Our hero, played by Bill Holden, is recalled to duty … 
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We all know that picture of the late Warren Gamaliel Harding Calvin Coolidge bedecked in a Sioux war bonnet.  In my own youth, in late May thirty seven years ago, a rather less honorable man crowned himself with a construction helmet bearing the title Commander in Chief, a consolation prize for the honorary doctorate my Alma Mater withdrew at the last moment, after the invasion of Cambodia.  Richard Nixon was king at least of the building trades, laborers in which had violently disrupted commemorations of the four students who died protesting the invasion. I remembered the incident last Christmas.  I was … 
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George Mitchell, the former senator in charge of Major League Baseball’s investigation into the use of steroids by ballplayers, has reportedly found that while the stars of certain teams been using performance-enhancing drugs, another team has tested positive for off-label use of an older, performance-detracting drug. Members of the floundering, last-place team the Washington Neocons—assembled by former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush in 2001—have turned up traces of the drug in their speeches, memos, and memoirs. While Bush had promised a “world championship, or benevolent hegemony” for his team, the team has instead set all-time records for consecutive losses. For … 
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Ahmet Ertegun was the greatest Turk since Kemal Ataturk, but unlike Mustapha Kemal, he never killed anyone, especially a Greek. In brief, Ertegun was the supreme record man ever, the signer of the most important rhythm & blues, jazz, pop and rock artists of all time, the founder and builder of Atlantic   Records, a company he began with the ten thousand dollars he borrowed from his dentist. He was a diplomat’s son, his father having served as ambassador to Paris and Washington among other posts. I met him in 1956 and we stayed friends until his death last October, when … 
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