Monthly Archives: July 2010

Peggy Noonan’s urgent agenda item

Even those of us who warned against the “canonization” of Shirley Sherrod didn’t expect that right-of-center commentators would propose that her radical manifesto become part of the canon. Yet that’s what Peggy Noonan is calling for: This September, when school begins, we should make [Sherrod’s] speech required viewing in the nation’s high schools. Gee, can’t this wait until February, when Black History Month rolls around? JOHN suggests: Or May Day »

The key question the Wikileaks documents don’t answer

I haven’t looked very far into the story of the leaked files concerning the Afghanistan war that’s the talk of Washington today (at least among those who, unlike me, haven’t lost their electricity). Max Boot finds them “insignificant”: [T]he only new thing I learned from the documents was that the Taliban have attacked coalition aircraft with heat-seeking missiles. That is interesting to learn but not necessarily terribly alarming because, even »

WikiLeaks and the New York Times

There is much that could be said about the leak of more than 75,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan through WikiLeaks, reportedly by Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst. It goes without saying that those who leaked and published the documents did so in hopes of impairing the U.S.’s war effort in Afghanistan. This is deeply reprehensible, and we have consistently opposed all such efforts to use »

Two Cheers for the Administration on Megrahi

We noted yesterday the controversy over the Obama administration’s reaction to Scotland’s proposed release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohment al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, i.e., the claim that he was about to die. Foreign newspapers quoted a letter from a U.S. Embassy official in London, Richard LeBaron, which said that the U.S. would prefer that Megrahi not be released, but that if he were to be let go, the Obama »

JournoList Sinks Lower

The Daily Caller has released the latest batch of JournoList messages, and it’s a shocker: the journalists and other assorted left-wing intellectuals (!) debating what apparently was the hottest topic of the hour, Sarah Palin’s son, Trig. I had thought that the belief that Trig was really Bristol’s baby was an insane idea held only by Andrew Sullivan. It is an insane idea all right, but it turns out that »

Getting beyond racism through racial socialism

This piece in yesterday’s Washington Post by Charles Ogletree and Johanna Wald provides a revealing glimpse of what leftists — including President Obama and Shirley Sherrod, I suspect — really mean when they talk about getting beyond racism. Ogletree (a long-time race man) and Wald use the Sherrod affair as their starting point. They claim that the incident demonstrates how “at the barest suggestion of race, we line up at »

Lewis, Carson, Cleaver and the phantom n-word

Yesterday the New York Times ran an ambiguous correction of Times reporter Matt Bai’s assertion that Tea Party protesters had abused Rep. John Lewis with “epithets” during the Obamacare protest on Capitol Hill on March 20. What was Mr. Times saying? I’d like to take a look at that in the next day. In the meantime, here is an altogether more straightforward message from the gentleman who calls himself Marooned »

The unpresidential president

Earlier this month President Obama attended the groundbreaking of an advanced car battery factory in Holland, Michigan, subsidized by the stimulus bill. It was President Obama’s fourth battery-related trip, and it came as the White House makes an aggressive push to tell what one senior official called “the battery story.” Veronique de Rugy isn’t buying the battery story. The groundbreaking occurred in the district of Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who »

Journ-O-Lists Run Interference

Journalists have done all they can for the Obama administration, but their efforts are getting a little threadbare. Michael Ramirez depicts the relationship between the press and the administration; click to enlarge: I thought, as I think most people did, that the support of the liberal press would do Obama more good than it has. One wonders whether he might have been better off if not surrounded by sycophants. »

The Lockerbie Bomber: What’s the Story?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohment al-Megrahi, a Libyan, was the only person convicted in connection with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which a Pan Am flight was blown up over Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard as well as eleven on the ground. The flight was en route to New York and most of the victims were Americans. The bombing was generally believed to have been orchestrated by Libya’s dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi. »

Coming Soon: The Biggest Tax Increase Ever

The Democrats’ legislative program has proved unpopular with voters, but we haven’t yet gotten to the really unpopular part: the most massive tax increase in American history, scheduled to occur on January 1. Congressional Democrats have mostly avoided talking about it in hopes that voters won’t notice that their taxes are about to shoot up. The Democrats’ plan has been to defer discussion of taxes until after the election, when »

Uncommon Knowledge with Charles Hill

Not so long ago, and for a very long time, great literature was the school of statesmen. Yale Professor Charles Hill recaptures the tradition in Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, just published by Yale University Press. Professor Hill spent an incredibly distinguished career in the foreign service and in the State Department, where he rose to chief of staff. Among Professor Hill’s awards are the Superior Honor Award »

A Very Partial Correction

We have been waiting for liberal media sources to correct their many misstatements about the events of March 20, when three Democratic Congressmen falsely claimed that protesters against Obamacare at the Capitol yelled racial epithets at them. As our readers know, multiple eyewitnesses and videos disprove this claim, while Andrew Breitbart’s offer of $100,000 to anyone who can provide evidence in its support has gone unclaimed. Today the New York »

Our man in Morocco

In today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune my friend Katherine Kersten reports on the performance of United States Ambassador to Morocco Sam Kaplan. Kaplan is a Minneapolis business attorney/businessman who demonstrated his qualifications for the position the old-fashioned way. He bundled campaign cash for President Obama. Kaplan thus provides something of a local angle on the Hope and Change delivered by the Obama administration. At the time of his appointment Kaplan commented »

A change we would like to see

According to Politico, Norm Coleman has begun talking to high-level Republicans about a bid to become RNC Chairman when Michael Steele’s term is up in January. Asked about this possibility on CNN on Friday, Coleman didn’t deny interest, but said he was focused on the elections this November. Currently, Coleman heads a conservative group called the American Action Network which, says Politico, has helped fill the fundraising void left by »

John Kerry Does Something Right

John Kerry is easy to poke fun at. He is a man of modest abilities who has had, apparently from childhood, an outsized sense of entitlement. Even when he was a relatively unknown politician, he was notorious in Boston for demanding privileges and, if balked, asking imperiously, “Do you know who I am?” And he acquired his vast fortune the old-fashioned way: he married it. Currently, Kerry is under fire »

A Sobering Thought

Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, writes: [S]ome commentators have suggested that after the election a lame duck Congress will pass some version of cap and tax. The Wall Street Journal suggests that it may be a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) which would require utilities to obtain mandatory percentages of their total electricity from renewable generating sources such as solar and wind. Until practical »