The first time I met Pat Buckley was in 1964 and the circumstances were rather strange. It was at the Palace hotel in Gstaad, and a few friends and I were drinking around the large piano in the grill while the pianist was playing a spirited version of Mussolini's favorite tune, "Giovinezza." Our ...

One of the least gratifying pictures I have had the bad luck to view on television this week for the portly figure of Richard Perle expounding his vile views in The Case for War. Even worse, it was on public television, which as everyone knows is paid for by our tax dollars. The heavy-lidded ...

Larry Ellison, the chief executive of the software giant Oracle and the world's 11th richest man, according to Forbes magazine, is not imbued by an ounce of grace or elementary good manners. He has constructed a basketball court on board his megayacht, the latter a monstrosity which pollutes more ...

One, two, three, four, Wolfowitz has got to go! Five, six, seven, eight, one more day will be too late. As the wise man said, once a crook and a liar, always a crook and a liar. Wolfowitz conspired with Douglas Feith to fabricate proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at ...

I remember when I was living in Flambertin des Creppieres, a small hamlet west of Paris with an admittedly extremely pretentious name, and listening to two butchers arguing about Camus. They both had obviously read him, but it was their evocation of other writers whom they compared him to which ...

Imus is an unpleasant fellow—one could never take him to a gentleman’s club, for example—but he didn’t say anything black radio jockeys don’t say every day about us whites. And it was meant, after all, to be a joke. Ethnic jokes have all but disappeared from the mass media due to ...

Fictitious enterprises are the heart and soul of low journalism, and no one is lower in my opinion than Lloyd Grove. Just that week I had launched The American Conservative magazine, so Grove needed to put a kibosh to it with an anti-Semitic slur against me. I vowed to kick him in the ass the next ...

The seizure of the British Royal Marines and sailors by Iran was always a no brainer. To Iran, Tony Blair is a lame duck, and the British people believe in their government as much as the Americans believed that Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Few Brits accepted their Government’s ...

In this week's New Yorker Philip Gourevitch takes a shot at Robert Mugabe, one of the leading psychopathic monsters among the rest of the crooks and murderers who lead the Dark Continent. He writes that the South African honcho, Thabo Mbeki and his gang have dishonored themselves by failing to ...

Last week I spent some days in Washington, D.C. for a conference organized by Fran Griffin at the National Press Club. The subject was Sam Francis, and his terrific book, Shots Fired, about America’s culture wars. Alas, Sam Francis passed away two years ...