Churchill
January 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I doubt Sir Winston would be entirely keen on the proposal to open up combat roles to women in our armed forces. But he would not be surprised it has come to this, as this excerpt from a Strand magazine article in 1938 hints: We take the immunity of women from violence so much for granted that we do not perceive what inroads are being made upon it. These inroads
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January 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Brother Mathis has done it again. Not content with provoking me to discourse on the nanny state last week, on Monday Joel produced a column about Martin Luther King Jr. and Obama. Our mutual pal Ben Boychuk suggested on Facebook that our pieces represented a good Right-Left counterpoint about MLK, as Joel’s account mostly follows the conventional liberal narrative, though with caveats that it’s “complicated.” (Isn’t everything “complicated” for liberals?)
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January 19, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Churchill’s description of Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, written in his World War II memoirs in 1948, includes a comparison with contemporary significance: All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combatting Marxism; the concept of the National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant
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January 13, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been thinking about bureaucracy a bit more than usual the last few days, and hence this remark of Churchill’s seems useful in our fiscally challenging times: There is no surer method of economizing and saving money than in the reduction of the number of officials. I bid a 50 percent cut in non-military government agencies. The only downside here is that most federal agencies would become more productive if
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January 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Now that we’re past the “fiscal cliff” (note I didn’t say “safely” past), we really ought to try to promote a term that is more accurate to our real predicament, which is much worse. How about “fiscal abyss”? This is the term of art we ought to use as we approach the political sequel to the fiscal cliff, which will come with the expiration of the debt ceiling sometime in
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December 29, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Everyone supposes that supply-side economics was a purely American phenomenon, with its antecedents going back to Calvin Coolidge and his tax-cutting Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and ending up with the Laffer Curve. And of course Ronald Reagan liked to quote John F. Kennedy on the wisdom of income tax rate cuts, much to the consternation of good liberals today. But in fact Churchill was part of the early supply-side revolution,
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December 22, 2012 — Steven Hayward
From a broadcast Churchill made from the White House on his visit to FDR in December 1941 a few weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked: Let the children play and have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie
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December 15, 2012 — Steven Hayward
This short fragment from volume III of The World Crisis, published in 1927, is worth keeping in mind as we watch the ongoing political fight over the fiscal cliff. (By the way, notice the curious but prescient mistake in this passage.*) The rigid Constitution of the United States, the gigantic scale of its party machinery, the fixed terms for which public officers and representatives are chosen, invest the President with
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December 6, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We continue our Christmas extravaganza previewing the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books through Friday. If you lean conservative and love to read about history, politics, economics, literature, culture and current events, the CRB has earned your attention. Subscriptions are available here for $19.95 (including immediate online access). Students of Winston Churchill know that Aristotle played a key role in his self-education. Churchill’s search for “a concise compendious
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December 2, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I still haven’t got out to see the new Lincoln movie yet—perhaps this week—so I’ll have to let it rest with Scott’s review here, with the caveat that I’m tempted to weigh in on his mention of Richard Hofstatdter, whose views on Lincoln are inadequate and defective in important ways. (But for a fragment of the argument against Hofstadter, see this old post.) Here’s what Churchill had to say about
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November 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal this morning carries a feature by my pal Stephen Moore about the elfin Grover Norquist, who reminds us that Democratic promises about future spending cuts to accompany immediate tax increases are “imaginary unicorns.” Which brought to mind a useful phrase that Churchill applied to his old friend David Lloyd-George that we ought to revive and deploy just now—“the Happy Warrior of Squandermania.” Here’s the full quotation,
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November 16, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’m always behind on my reading pile, so I was slow to catch up with the Wall Street Journal’s bizarro review last Saturday of the new Manchester-Reid Churchill biography, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm. Most of the “review” was more a memoir of the reviewer’s casual acquaintanceship with Manchester rather than a discussion of the book. The subtext of the review, most people I’ve spoken with agree, seems to
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November 11, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Some of Churchill’s most famous remarks involved election campaigns and their aftermath, especially losing campaigns. The most often recalled were his comment after the 1945 landslide loss when Clementine said that perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, to which Winston replied that if so, it was certainly very well disguised. Or: “In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.” But in light of this
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November 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While we await game day tomorrow, let me refresh everyone’s memory about book news. Back in May I brought Power Line readers’ attention to the forthcoming final volume of William Manchester’s multi-volume Churchill biography, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965. The official pub date is tomorrow, but Amazon is shipping it already and you can have your copy tomorrow if you want to distract from election day rumors
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November 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
From a 1949 Churchill speech that applies perfectly to tomorrow’s choice: The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination; between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals; between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition; between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and
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November 3, 2012 — Steven Hayward
By now you are probably suffering from opinion poll overload. I decided months ago not to sign up for automatic opinion poll updates and twitter feeds, for fear of jamming my mailbox. There seems to be a new poll about every 15 minutes; certainly several a day. As recently at the 1980 election the major polls came out only every few days, and one of the small details that made
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October 27, 2012 — Steven Hayward
With President Obama doing his best to obscure or deny his hostility to coal in the closing weeks of this campaign, herewith Sir Winston in 1928 on the importance of utilizing coal as an alternative to importing oil from you-know-where: We used to be a source of fuel; we are increasingly becoming a sink. These supplies of foreign liquid fuel are no doubt vital to our industry, but our ever
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