This is the saddest column I’ve had to write in fifty years: Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving eating once a day, if that, every two or three days. America’s great ally Israel is imposing the starvation as a tool of war, something not even Nazi Germany forced upon conquered people. Senior Israeli officials openly and unashamedly exploit starvation as a tactic to pressure Hamas to release the rest of the hostages. And yet not even Hamas has starved its hostages, unlike our great ally Israel. What boggles the mind is how Uncle Sam can allow this. We are supposedly a moral society, yet while children die of starvation, a headline in a conservative newspaper calls pro-Palestinian protesters the Ku Klux Klan in an article written by Douglas ...
The opening sentence of a book can make or break it at times. Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” intrigued to no end. No, it wasn’t Captain Ahab speaking but a minor character in the hard-to-read novel. The great Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man ...
“Protect America from America’s President,” screams a New York Times headline. “His officers grab people off the streets,” rants a columnist whose name reminds me of the nice doctor who administers colonoscopies. (Mind you, colonoscopies can benefit one; left-wing buffoons like Times ...
Okay, history buffs, I write this on April 19, 2025, exactly 250 years from that most famous of midnight runs, that of Paul Revere and William Dawes to warn fellow patriots that the British army was on the march. Popular legend has it that Paul warned them by yelling, “The British are coming, the British are coming.” Not true. He yelled, “The regulars are coming,” as back then both sides thought themselves British. ...
Like everyone else I met on an overnight meeting in the Bahamas, I am worried about a recession. The world’s largest economy could dip into one, and very quickly, said a multibillionaire attending the same party as me. Personally, I have never understood much about economics. I have always left such matters to people who can tell the difference between a hedge fund and a mutual fund, duties and tariffs, and so on. So, let ...
A change of pace is always welcome, especially when writing a column about politics. The latter can be as boring as writing about cooking, and the only newspaper that used a cookery writer as a political pundit is The New York Times. I think he’s called Frank Bruni and he’s reported to be going blind due to his loathing of Donald Trump. Never mind. When your correspondent was still in shorts and newly arrived in America, ...
The irony of it is that we’re still living in the thick of so many of the left’s bad ideas and policies. Biological boys are still excelling in girls’ sports, and every Democrat in the Senate voted against a law to stop it. I could go on, but let’s look at how the media is reacting to The Donald’s Second Coming. A New York Times columnist who is among the very few not suffering from a nervous breakdown after the last ...
“I’ve often wondered why conservative Christians remain the most faithful friends of American Jews but have their friendship repeatedly spurned in favor of a Jewish alliance with the cultural and political left.” So wrote Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles magazine, a conservative monthly. The recent war in Gaza began with the butchering of 1,200 innocent Israelis, but as of this moment the response has been more than ...
At a male-only lunch high up in the Alps the subject of AI came up. We were five friends, and four of them were in favor. “But it will kill good writing,” said yours truly. The rest agreed. Info will trump grace, was the conclusion. Some time ago a friend had AI imitate my column and she played it back to me. I listened carefully. It was a good imitation of probably the worst writing I have ever done, clumsy, obvious, and ...
Okay, quiz fans, if you think Europe is in trouble, think again. There is always Hollywood, the place where megalomaniacal, pompous, boastful, self-entitled, bald, untalented jerks are taken seriously. The embarrassing but saccharine cesspool that is the Oscars has just voted Anora—a sanitized, voyeuristic movie about a hooker—as Best Picture. I have not seen it and do not plan to. I have nothing against the oldest ...
As everyone who has ever opened a book knows, the greatest scam of all time was the Trojan Horse caper, when the Greeks hid inside a giant wooden horse and left it standing in front of Troy’s gate posing as a gift from the departing Greek forces to the brave defenders after a ten-year siege. The Trojans were no fools, but they trusted the Greeks. After all, the noblest of them, Achilles, a semi-god, had returned the body of ...
This is for you poker players out there: Trump appears to be conceding far too much to Russia, but it could be part of a plan. In poker, the strong hand plays it cool at the start. The weak one bluffs, pretending to be strong. Trump could be bluffing giving away too much, but perhaps that’s the only way to get Vlad involved and talking. Let’s face it: Ukraine has no cards to play with, and Europe is a busted flush. So why ...
Ah, the beauty of language! The English one is as rich as they come, with words such as “osculation,” “verbigeration,” “concupiscence,” “mithridatism,” and “onomatopoeia.” I could go on forever. The latest to be added to an already bulging dictionary is “Toobin.” For any of you unfamiliar with what doing a Toobin is, it is something most young people, especially boys, do while dreaming of sex with a ...
Oh dear—shock horror, rather—the first man to think about displacing a whole populace was one Adolf Hitler, although he never went through with it. He decided to kill them instead. I am talking about plans to deracinate the Gaza population to faraway places, 2 million souls in all, give or take 100,000, depending on the death toll of innocent old men, women, and children following the Israeli bombardment of the place. Yes, ...
Let’s take it from the top: DEI was destroying Western values and the culture of meritocracy. The bigots of woke culture subverted our institutions yet claimed to occupy the moral high ground. A nation’s historic culture and values were thrown into the dustbin, while the sinister system abolished free speech. It was a systemic attack on our free society by so-called elites—in reality a nefarious bunch of lefties whose ...
Harry and Meghan looked like ambulance chasers in burning Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, but acting like virtue-signaling disaster tourists is what they do best. It does not surprise me. For those of you who don’t read comic books or gossip columns, they’re also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, he a Brit and she an American of mixed race. They’ve both become richer of late thanks to the lawsuit they brought ...
