Okay, I tried to watch it. Tried really, really hard. I made a phone date with my long-distance love to view the debate “together.” I arranged my schedule around it. I even—and let me emphasize this—passed up a free circus ...
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed for 20 minutes or so that America might revert from being a crusade back into a country. For 50 years, we’d served as the arsenal of democracy, its moneybags, its poolhall bouncer. With the cave-in of ...
I’d like to say “Thank God” for John Derbyshire, except that the crotchety old Brit has convinced me not to believe that he exists. God, I mean—not Derbyshire, whom I have met in person. Although, come to think of it, my ...
Finally, someone has worked up the courage to say it. We’ve all been thinking it. It’s the soothing mantra we repeat while sitting in drive-time traffic, a petition we send up to the God of Battles with each breath like the Jesus Prayer, ...
Okay, of late I’ve been a really lousy political commentator. Not much of a citizen, either. I would have cheered on our guys and gals in the Olympics, had I known they were going on. (I’m a big fan, in theory, of beach volleyball and ...
One of my favorite living essayists (let’s face it, few of them really measure up to the dead) is Thomas Sowell—who once or twice a year lets himself off the hook and instead of composing a column, pens a series of aphorisms designed at ...
Last week in this space I was grossly unfair to a vast swathe of our country, one of America’s most hard-working and patriotic regions. In mocking the Midwest as humorless—indeed, affectless—I surely offended many thousands of my ...
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 ...
“Do you think you could turn the volume down on that war game you’re playing so I can least pretend that you’re listening to me?” So my beloved asked, very sweetly, in her slight Dallas twang. What could I say? “Why ...
The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of ...
So there I was at the 21 Club, eating raw meat with The Gun Lady…. That was the best journalistic lede I ever wrote—and it never saw print. My editor at a second-tier business paper snipped it right out of the profile ...
There’s nothing to shake your residual faith in journalists than to see a news report of an event in which you took part, or read a media account of yourself (especially a friendly one that unwittingly links you to the sort of person ...
