Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I’m So Bored With MLK

I had a dream I stood on the mountaintop and puked. As we all gather around the Guilt Pole to commemorate Martin Luther King’s approximate birthday, 94% of Americans agree that he was a mighty swell fella. That’s a tremendous shift from the last few years of MLK’s life, when never more than a third of Americans seemed to approve of him. But ever since his 1968 murder, a carefully constructed religious aura has been fashioned around King like garland being wrapped tightly around a Christmas tree. His ongoing canonization is such that Jesus is now merely Martin’s towel boy. Compared to ...

The Bloody Red Flag

Trending online news topics often cough up amusingly odd juxtapositions, such as when “Auschwitz” was #2 behind “LeAnn Rimes” and right ahead of “Holiday Bread ...

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs: The Triumph of Worth Over Wealth

Much ink and pixelated type have been spent this week eulogizing Apple founder Steve Jobs. The outpouring of respect, gratitude, and sadness reflect the measure of the man more ...

The Insight of Hindsight

The day John Kennedy was killed, few thought it was anything other than exactly what it seemed to be. Most believed that the crime was committed by the party named as the ...

Archduke Otto von Habsburg

Death of an Imperial Pen Pal

The San Fernando Valley in the 1970s was a very dull place. Hot and dusty, filled with lackluster architectural construction thrown together during the postwar housing boom, it ...

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Better a Hero Than a Celebrity

I first met Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in the summer of 1977 in Corfu. I was onboard Gianni Agnelli’s boat, and the charismatic Fiat chairman asked me to go ashore and bring “a ...

Marilyn Monroe

Good Riddance, Norma Jeane

Growing older is an odd experience made stranger by knowing things which should be familiar to everyone but that hardly anyone knows. This is brought to mind when the topic of ...

Requiem for a Patriot

“Conservative Tycoon ... Dies at 95,” said the New York Times headline on New Year’s Eve about the death of Roger Milliken. Clearly, the headline writer did not ...

Rest in Peace, Dear Elaine

The death of anyone well known - especially in New York - invokes more clichés than you know what draws flies in summer. Every obituary I read about Elaine included the words, ...

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Did FDR Engineer Pearl Harbor?

As a history buff, I have tried to come to terms with the “surprise” Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. That lugubrious anniversary"€”December 7th"€”is fast ...

Giving Thanks for American Ingenuity

One of my favorite television programs is “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel. The documentary series shows “how the everyday objects people use become ...

A Patriotic Conservative

Though most famous for coining the phrase “axis-of-evil” in President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, Frum’s second most famous act was to try to ...

Missing Mark Sanford

That a man whose entire career had been defined by his staunch fidelity to the American taxpayer would throw it all away by committing infidelity seemed like a fate fit for some ...

A Wise Man of Liberty

More years ago than I care to remember, Burt Blumert saved my life"€“with the sort of advice only a born wise man could proffer. During some crisis or other, perhaps personal, ...


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