Keeping track of the ever mutating bailout debate is becoming increasingly difficult. With the Federal money spigots now thrown wide open, and with no one of influence advising restraint, the only debate is where to direct the torrent. During the past week, the talk began with Detroit and Citigroup, but by Friday had shifted to a massive “stimulus package” to bail … [Read More]

Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the archduke and his wife. Tactically, that act of … [Read More]

The concept of “culture” permeates many aspects of our lives.  A ‘culture’ search for recent articles on Google News returned no less than 70,000 hits.  One hears of high-brow culture (or used to), low-brow culture, American culture, black culture, white culture, gay culture, cultural homogeneity, cultural wars, and, more recently because of immigration, cultural assimilation. Historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that without … [Read More]

Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions: To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So … [Read More]

In the frantic post-election scramble for a plausible narrative of How Things Went So Wrong, we see the outlines of the future battle for what’s left of the conservative movement, and the party it fitfully influences. The spin could be decisive, as spin often is. The spin that prevailed in Germany after World War I—“We were stabbed in the back”—bore no … [Read More]

Those who cheer for Obama now are essentially cheering for nothing, as those who bash Obama are essentially bashing nothing. Obama has done nothing. But like a team mascot, a Mohawk haircut or the Cross, Obama the symbol creates a divide to which many feel compelled to take sides and defend or attack accordingly. They may not know why, but they … [Read More]

With all due respect to Derek Turner and the authors of A Bridge Too Far, Philip Claeys and Koen Dillen, and the Vlaams Belang, the organization to which these excellent young men belong, I must dissent from their brief against Turkish entry into the European Union. The last reason I could imagine for keeping Turkey out of that cesspool of political … [Read More]

The morning after Barack Obama’s election, the congratulatory message from Moscow was in the chilliest tradition of the Cold War. “I hope for constructive dialogue with you,” said Russia’s president, “based on trust and considering each other’s interests.” Dmitry Medvedev went on that day, in his first State of the Union, to charge America with fomenting the Russia-Georgia war and said … [Read More]

Neoconservatives afraid that a President Obama might even partially live up his promise to remove troops from Iraq have been warming up to the new administration and hedging their bets where they can. Not since Operation Chaos during the primaries have we seen some Republicans so anxious to jump off the “Stop-Hillary Express” and on the Clinton bandwagon. The sort of … [Read More]