While New Yorkers are obsessing over the possibility of a socialist Muslim becoming mayor of their town this autumn, I have yet to read or hear anything about the Palestinian woman doctor who is still operating on the wounded and dying while nine—yes, nine—of her children were killed after an Israeli bombing attack. I suppose if I go on I will be accused of anti-Semitism, such is the grip the neocons and the Israeli lobby have on the good old US of A. A recent know-nothing called Hammer, who works for Newsweek—I was surprised to read the rag still exists—accused The American Conservative of something along those lines, simply because TAC advised Uncle Sam not to get involved in the Middle East. A wise suggestion, and one that was the reason why Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and ...
Okay, you sport fans out there, The Gilded Age is back on our idiot boxes, and it’s a welcome respite from the garbage that untalented directors and writers of today have been shoving down our throats. At least garbage had its uses before it turned to waste, but this recent stuff...words fail me. ...
Both the system and the word “democracy” were invented by the Greeks, specifically the Athenians. “Demos” was the ancient word for “people,” hence the rule of the people is democracy. I’ve always preferred the selective kind, as practiced by the Brits until late in the 19th ...
For any of you out there hoping against hope that Israel might stop the bombing of Iran, forget about it. Israel, along with Uncle Sam, who now wears a blondish haircut, will not stop until there is regime change in Iran. As oil prices go through the roof, Israel will continue to destroy an unarmed nation with help from America. The Iranians aside, the biggest loser in this one-sided war is Putin, who now has only China and ...
Envy is one of the seven deadly sins but ever present among the writing classes. One would think they’d fake it, but envy, like unrequited love, cannot be easily hidden. I recently read a review of a Bill Buckley biography, one that pricked my fairness button despite the writer’s pretense of objectivity. It was a not-so-subtle attack on my onetime mentor William F. Buckley, but the more the hack tried to hide his envy of ...
The American Revolution was the first step in a global upheaval that would do away with a system called monarchy, creating a new world of equality and freedom. On paper this sounds about perfect, n’est-ce pas, as our French friends say, but in actual fact a few years later the Haitians revolted and massacred the ones who didn’t agree with the revolutionaries, appalling democrats the Western world over. The French chopping ...
Okay, sports fans, here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth: The year was 1957 or 1958 or perhaps even later. Those were the days of starched shirts, good manners, white rather than yellow tennis balls, and wooden rackets. The tournament was in New York City, and I was playing against Yale No. 1 Richard Raskind. He had a big left-handed serve that he used to come up to the net with, and an even bigger left-handed forehand. ...
Civilizations are impermanent, according to optimists. Simple accumulations of wealth and power are bound to fail, according to pessimists. I am somewhere in between, a firm believer that nothing can be sustained over the long term, with human fallibility precipitating the final collapse. The greatest of all early civilization was that of Athens. No society since 450 B.C. has even come close to matching it. What country or ...
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 ...
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 in possession of a great fortune,” and so on really got the ball rolling for Pride and Prejudice. My hero Papa Hemingway began A ...
“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 columnists do not benefit anyone.) It is obvious even to the simpleminded that criminals are grabbed at times off the streets. As are ...
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 ...
