Monthly Archives: March 2004

Bill James in the abstract

The American Enterprise Online has an interview with the incomparable Bill James, the man most responsible for bringing the study of baseball out of the dark ages. I’ve sometimes wondered what James’ politics are. My guess was that a guy that bright and iconoclastic would hold at least some conservative views. The AEI interview suggests that this is the case. Note for example, his impatience with non-meritocratic approaches, his reference »

In praise of great leaders

What can we do but tip our hat to Spain’s outgoing prime minister? Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar proved himself to be an outstanding leader, a friend of the United States, and a man who understands the war in which we are engaged. His piece in today’s Wall Street Journal puts an exclamation point beside the ascription of each of those attributes to him: “The truth about 3/11.” (Courtesy of »

In praise of great writers

On Monday Laura Bush celebrated Southern writing in a literary symposium over which she presided at the White House. The symposium celebrated three indisputably great American writers selected on the merits without a tincture of political correctness — Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote. The USA Today account of the event is “First lady celebrates Southern writing.” Below is a photo of the magnificent Tom Wolfe at the event, »

Four floors down…

from where No Left Turns Baghdad correspondent Robert Alt slept last night, a missile took out the deck at the Isthar Sheraton in the early morning hours. He shares his midnight thoughts in the linked post. Alt is a little less daunted than I would be. He concludes his post by stating: “This morning, the terrorists came after the civilians in my hotel in a cowardly attack. But tonight, I »

U.N. Stonewalling Iraq Oil Probe

All those (like John Kerry) who believe that the United States needs to take moral guidance and foreign policy leadership from the United Nations and France should be called on to explain the U.N.’s reluctance to come clean about its “oil-for-food” program: U.N. bureaucrats are stonewalling requests from Iraq’s new government for records from the scandal-plagued oil-for-food account set up in Saddam Hussein’s handpicked French bank, officials said yesterday. The »

A Bad Day for Republican Air Travelers

The New York Times has this morning’s dumbest headline, on yesterday’s terrorism commission hearings: “For a Day, Terrorism Transcends Politics as Panel Reviews Failures.” While the Times will never admit it, the fact is that this commission, and these hearings, are about nothing other than politics, as will become even clearer when the fraudulent Richard Clarke testifies today on behalf of the Kerry campaign. So let’s turn for a moment »

The world turned upside down

Though I would have thought they had little in common, my parents and the parents of Victor Davis Hanson both inculcated remarkably similar lessons in liberalism and liberality in their kids. The lessons still apply, but viewed in their light it appears as though the world has turned upside down: “When I was young…”: The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has »

Last Refuge of a Scoundrelette

I think it was in Holidays In Hell where P.J. O’Rourke described Bianca Jagger in Nicaragua, looking forlorn after the Communists lost the election there in the mid-80’s. P.J. memorably described Bianca as inhabiting the “lonely Hell of the formerly cute.” And that was twenty years ago. Bianca now occupies the lowest rung on the ladder of has-been celebrity: “human rights activist.” Today she was in Berlin to participate in »

E.J. Dionne goes toe to toe with Justice Scalia

The other day, I linked to Justice Scalia’s opinion explaining his refusal to recuse himself from a case brought by the Sierra Club and others against the Vice President, in his official capacity, notwithstanding that Scalia had gone duck hunting with the Vice President and others. I noted that my favorite part of the opinion was Scalia’s response to certain editorial writers who constituted the Sierra Club’s primary authority in »

Clarke then and now

Reader Daniel Aronstein draws our attention to the indirect statement by Richard Clarke from Jane Mayer’s August 4, 2003 New Yorker article, “The search for Osama.” Mayer writes: “Clarke emphasized that the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, President Bush, and, before him, President Clinton were all deeply committed to stopping bin Laden; nonetheless, Clarke said, their best efforts had been doomed by bureaucratic clashes, caution, and incessant problems with Pakistan.” Aronstein »

John Kerry strongarms a vet

Our Northern Alliance colleague Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters has an excellent post following up on John Kerry’s VVAW Kansas City meeting at which the assassination of United States Senators was mulled over. Ed labels the mainstream media’s noncoverage of the Kerry VVAW Kansas City meeting a “whitewash.” The original VVAW Kansas City meeting story belongs to Thomas H. Lipscomb of the New York Sun, who notes that the story »

Sure to be overlooked…

in the coverage of today’s 9/11 hearing are the following excerpts of the mind-boggling testimony by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responding to questions posed by Commissioner John Lehman: LEHMAN: Did you know about Abdel Rahman Yasin and his fleeing to Baghdad and his support and cooperation with Saddam’s intelligence service? Did you see any significance in that? He being, of course, one of the main plotters of the »

Dick Clarke’s American Grandstand

Rich Lowry devotes his column today to a review of Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies: “Richard Clarke’s misfire.” If we use the old Dick Clark American Bandstand Rate-A-Record scale running from 35 to 98, I think it’s fair to say that Lowry gives this book a 35: Clarke’s book reads like a typical just-out-of-government memoir, a genre usually premised on the idea that if only the author’s advice had been »

No sympathy for the devil

John Kerry is displaying his cojones by rejecting the endorsement of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez: “Kerry attacks Venezuela’s Chavez.” Kerry’s cojones are of the modified limited hangout variety one might expect from an international man of mystery: In his declaration dated March 19, the Massachusetts senator accused Chavez of undermining Venezuela’s democracy, supporting Colombian rebels and “narco-terrorists” and trying to torpedo a constitutional bid by foes to hold a referendum »

A man of letters

My favorite magazine is the Claremont Review of Books. It fills the niche occupied on the left by the New York Review of Books, and wages intellectual war against the progressive bureaucratic state on behalf of the founding principles of the United States in the spirit of “rollback” as opposed to the spirit of “containment.” Today’s good news is that the spring issue of the review has just hit the »

Their bin Laden

I hear the brilliantly clear voice of Saul Singer in the Jerusalem Post’s editorial “Our bin Laden” (also linked and quoted by Deacon below) on the successful IDF attack on Sheikh Yassin: Almost no one in the US would suggest that killing Osama bin Laden could be counterproductive in the war against terrorism. Yet our airwaves are filled with the equivalent idea. Whether it is the terrorists themselves, the mid-level »

Sympathy for the devil

The Jerusalem Post reports on the condemnation by “world leaders” of Israel for killing Ahmed Yassin, the Palestinian bin Laden. It is difficult to say which leader’s statement is the most sickening. Leading contenders surely include Javier Solona, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, and of course France’s despicable Dominique de Villepin, both of whom see the killing of Yassin as a blow to the “peace process.” But, as this »