We — and the world — now have Israel’s answer to President Obama’s June 4th address in Cairo. Yesterday, November 3rd, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the non-binding resolution shown below. The vote was 344 Aye, 36 Nay, 22 Present, and 30 Not Voting. (For those who would like to see it, the [...]
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing — Vince Lombardi
Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I hate football metaphors, and I’m none too fond of football coaches either. It may be because I went to high school in the late Fifties, when every coach seemed to be a survivor of Iwo Jima, with [...]
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
The quote [...]
Random before-coffee thoughts:
What James C. Dobson, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter want is Afghanistan under the Taliban.
What William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer (foreign policy) and Pat Buchanan (domestic policy) want is Germany under Hitler.
What the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Federal Reserve want is England under the Stuarts.
What [...]
The post I’ve been working on, Post-Industrial Politics, has been unavoidably detained. The crew has developed a touch of scurvy, we lost a topmast somewhere off Greenland, and almost half our casks of bully-beef have gone rotten.
Never fear, we’ll eventually reach port — Lord willing, etc. In the meantime, have a look at this:
The Triple Revolution
In [...]
It felt very strange, reading President Obama’s speech just two days after finishing my last post. Very strange, and — I don’t know how to put this without sounding like a sycophant — very inspiring.
What he said desperately needed saying, and I have no doubt now that he means it. How could I, when it [...]
Jack Kemp is dead. Full stop.
The media commentary on his passing is mixed. Some say he was a nice man, and some say he wasn’t, which is about what you’d expect for a public figure, particularly one who spent as much time as he did being controversial. Although I was around when he was making [...]
The unbearable lightness of being. This is a case history of what happens when good people trade good will for a stunned complacency.
Garrison Keillor, of all people, thinks that prosecuting the miscreants who attempted to square the circle on torture would be victor’s justice, a pallid, sour mockery of the real thing. Let’s have the [...]