In one of his best TAC columns, Fred Reed took issue with the kind of contrived story telling engaged in by many of the practitioners of so-called “evolutionary psychology,” including one fellow, whom Reed came across, who’d just written an article expanding on the subject of why guys like the girls with big knockers. It’s all about the reproductive strategic signalling, … [Read More]

Early yesterday morning, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo announced his decision to begin looking into war crimes allegedly committed by Russian and Georgian troops in South Ossetia.  The announcement, though misguided, was appealingly symmetrical .  After all, if overreaching by one international body was partly responsible for this mess (when the United States and Russia compete to prove how … [Read More]

Suggesting that movie director Woody Allen, who has abandoned the Big Apple and is residing in Europe now, has been transformed from a New York Liberal into a Continental Conservative would certainly sound like a stretch. But after watching his 2005 Match Point, in which the main character is a professional tennis player by the name of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys … [Read More]

Dan McCarthy addresses one of the several questions I posed in my last post--“Is the conservative movement worth conserving?”–namely, “To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?” Dan responds that the movement hasn’t in fact promoted its … [Read More]

In a 1955 foreign-policy cabinet meeting, Dwight Eisenhower is reported to have remarked, “Adenauer’s the West’s ace in the hole.” The president was of course referring to the chancellor of the German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, who was at the time rather assiduously pursuing good relations with Washington and taking the lead in the establishment of various international institutions: from the … [Read More]

The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO. Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile … [Read More]

Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After … [Read More]

Someday I’d like to meet Monsieur Tourette, and ask him about his syndrome. Because over the years I’ve had close friends, colleagues, mentors, siblings and girlfriends suggest—sometimes quite tactfully—that I must suffer from this condition. Nothing else could explain why I said the things I did, in the contexts where I said them. “I mean,” a childhood friend explained with warm … [Read More]

Every so often, someone in the Bush Administration actually makes a sensible point, though often not in the manner they intend.  Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, before jetting off to the Caucasus (an area that makes the Balkans look friendly), stated that the Administration’s “message is that Russia has perhaps not accepted that it is time to move on from the … [Read More]