Monthly Archives: February 2007

Too hot to handle

The red-hot University of Maryland men’s basketball team won its sixth straight game tonight, defeating Duke (at Duke) 85-77. Two staight wins against the Blue Devils? Back-to-back wins over Carolina and Duke? It doesn’t get much better than that. Unfortunately, I missed most of the game because of work, and ESPN experienced technical difficulties during the home stretch. But the box score tells the story. We outrebounded and outshot the »

Saturday’s Radio Show

Last Saturday, we had Washington Post movie critic Stephen Hunter as a guest, and got his predictions and commentary on the Oscars. I put that interview up as a podcast right away, since the Oscars were the next night. Now I’ve done the first hour of the show, which was fun but not as news-intensive as some. I missed the first two segments, as I was filming an appearance on »

Heroic history

Mark Moyar is the author of the revisionist Vietnam war history Triumph Forsaken, which we have discussed here previously. Today’s New York Sun carries Mark’s thoughtful review of the new book by H.W. Crocker III, which Mark highly recommends: “Over There: America’s Unsung Heroes.” Here is a part of Mark’s lead-in to the review proper: The Vietnam-era journalists began a tradition that today’s press consistently upholds. We hear very little »

The News War, cont’d

Michael Freund of Israel National News has an interesting Jerusalem Post column on the uses of the blogosphere in countering the Arab propaganda war against Israel: “Right on! Circumvent old meda — go for the blogosphere.” Michael includes a list of blogs that have in his view proved adept in seeking to circulate the truth in matters related to Israel (to which I’m adding links): As a blogger myself, I »

The Dems Try Again

House Democrats have now retreated from Jack Murtha’s “slow bleed” strategy (aptly named, as we now know, by John Harris) to bring about failure in Iraq, and are casting about for a new approach. The latest trial balloon, being discussed by the Democrats behind closed doors, is described here by the Associated Press. It isn’t described very clearly, however: House Democratic leaders are developing an anti-war proposal that wouldn’t cut »

D’Souza’s descent

In a post at his AOL blog, Dinesh D’Souza responds to the title of my New Criterion essay (“D”Souza goes native”) on his new book. D’Souza’s post is “Mr. Johnson goes nativist.” D’Souza disparages the New Criterion, praises himself, and seems to criticize my Midwestern parochialism (or is he referring to readers of the New Criterion?). And he also calls me a nativist. See if you can follow the logic: »

Follow That Armadillo!

One of the early articles that Scott and I wrote was called, with characteristic understatement, “The Global Warming Hoax.” It appeared in the Minnesota Journal of Law and Politics in late 1992. One of the things we wrote about was the global cooling scare of the 1970s; we quoted articles from Time and Newsweek about fears that we humans were about to cause another ice age. This has been on »

Mission Accomplished?

There is a lot of commentary this morning on the suicide bomber in Afghanistan who killed a number of people in what the Taliban claimed was an attempt to assassinate Vice-President Cheney. The attempt didn’t come close to succeeding, of course, and I think it’s safe to say that no one would send a suicide bomber to an Air Force base with the serious expectation that he would be able »

D’Souza’s critics at home

At Dean’s World Ronald Coleman has posted an extremely flattering and thoughtful reading of my New Criterion essay on Dinesh D’Souza’s new book. Coleman views my essay as opening a breach on the right. However, I am not aware of any conservative who has risen to the defense of D’Souza’s book. Conservative critiques of the book include those by Roger Kimball (in National Review), Victor Davis Hanson, Dean Barnett, Robert »

May the hairier party’s candidate win

The Boston Globe has obtained a copy of consultant Alex Castellanos’s 77-slide Power Point presentation on the Romney campaign. The Globe story by Scott Helman is of interest in several respects. Perhaps most striking, as our friend Hugh Hewitt comments herehere, is the fact that the Globe has posted precisely one of the 77 slides to accompany the online version of the story. According to Helman, Castellanos’s analysis of voter »

A Cooper Union preview

I’m in New York to attend the Cooper Union event with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former New York Governor Mario Cuomo tomorrow night at 6:30 p.m. (Eastern). Speaker Gingrich and Governor Cuomo will discuss what they believe to be the leading issues of the 2008 national election. The Cooper Union event can be viewed by webcast here. It perhaps grandiosely seeks to elevate the discourse of »

A season to remember?

Long-time readers probably know that I’m anything but a fan of Duke University sports. In fact, the biggest victories I root for in sports every year are Everton over Liverpool in soccer; the Redskins over Dallas in football; and Maryland over Duke in basketball. (There are a minimum of six such contests each year, and many years I’m lucky if I get satisfaction once). However, I’ve decided to follow and »

A truth, maybe; inconvenient, without a doubt

Here’s Jimmy Carter, as quoted in today’s Washington Post, on Al Gore: My favorite Democrat. . .has been Al Gore. . .His burning issue right now is global warming and preventing it. He can do infinitely more to accomplish that goal as the incumbent in the White House than he can making even movies that get Oscars. . .I’ve put so much pressure on Al to run that he’s almost »

Someone’s spinning, but it’s not Dick Cheney

Vice President Cheney continues to infuriate E.J. Dionne, surely a good sign for the Republic. Dionne is unhappy with this statement by Cheney: Al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That’s their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home. And my statement was that if »

Al Gore Night at the Oscars

Last night, my wife and three daughters and I attended a fun Oscar party hosted by AM 1280 the Patriot, and featuring Michael Medved. It was Al Gore night, which I found amusing on several grounds. I commented on the Oscar program and on Al Gore’s prospects for another Presidential campaign at our AOL site: Get Out A Cross and a Clove of Garlic. »

Trouble In Paradise

The Associated Press offers a surprisingly candid appraisal of the Democrats’ position, as they struggle to do something with their majorities in Congress: Swept into power by voters clamoring for an end to the war in Iraq, Democrats have seen their efforts falter under a reality more complicated than they found on the campaign trail. While the public is fed up with Iraq, there is little consensus over what to »

Bomb Factory and Iranian General Discovered in Iraq

American military spokesmen told reporters in Baghdad today that a facility for manufacturing bombs from Iranian components has been discovered north of Baghdad: U.S. officers said Monday they had discovered a factory for assembling sophisticated roadside bombs from Iranian-made components _ the first such facility uncovered in a religiously mixed province north of Baghdad. The officers, who displayed weapons for reporters at a U.S. base in the capital, said the »