Monthly Archives: April 2005

Kerry Wants A Mulligan

The New York Post’s Deborah Orin has an amusing account of John Kerry’s anger over Senator Mark Dayton’s apparent endorsement of his rival for the ’08 nomination, Hillary Clinton: A fuming John Kerry had “daggers in his eyes” after a fellow Democrat promoted Hillary Rodham Clinton for president »

A revolutionary historian

We continue our debut of essays and reviews from the just-published spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books with an overview of the career of Harvard Professor Bernard Bailyn by Hans Eicholz: “A revolutionary historian.” Bailyn is best known as the author of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Eicholz provides an excellent introduction to Bailyn’s scholarship and its relationship to developments in the study of the political »

Team leadership, Washington Redskins style

Last year, legendary football coach Joe Gibbs returned to the helm of the Washington Redskins after an absence of more than a decade. In his first stint, he led the Redskins to three championships. He was able to do this without many star players because he populated his squads with players of outstanding character — guys like Mark Rypien, Brian Mitchell, Jeff Bostic, Mark May, Donnie Warren, Earnest Byner, Tim »

Less Than Meets the Eye, Maybe

Zacarias Moussaoui entered a guilty plea today, confessing to being part of a plot to murder Americans. Apparently the plea was a surprise; Moussaoui’s prosecution had dragged on for years and seemed to have become an embarrassment to the Justice Department. Moussaoui said in court that he was not part of the September 11 plot, but was training for a later attack on the White House. I suppose that could »

Tough love or tough hate

Austin Bay supports the nomination of John Bolton on the theory that the U.N. desperately needs to reform, and that Bolton has the spine and pugnacity to help reform it. I support Bolton on a different theory. I don’t think the U.N. can meaningfully be reformed, or transformed into an organization that will help advance our interests. The U.N. inherently will reflect the traits of the states that comprise it. »

Thomas Friedman is flattened

I find the prominent New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman to be fatuous, as I’m sure many of our readers do. It’s not any one thing in particular that makes him insufferable, but rather a combination of flaws — vacuity, lack of insight, and a chump’s will to be duped. I quit reading Friedman when he proudly reported the “peace plan” coincidentally pulled from the drawer of a »

Yesterday’s “agrarian reformers” are today’s “business professionals”

Diana West blows the whistle on the “happy talk” about Hamas emanating from the Bush administration. It seems that Scott McLellan characterized the members of the Palestinian Hamas ticket as “business professionals” who are interested in “improving the quality of life for the Palestinian people” and “not terrorists.” The administration is still lagging behind the EU which, as West shows, extends the happy talk beyond Hamas’ political wing to its »

What He Said, And What They Wish He’d Said

I’m yielding the floor to Dafydd ab Hugh for his dissection of a story by WLS in Chicago about their interview with retiring Congressman Henry Hyde: A transcript of a video report that appeared on an ABC affilliate makes a rather startling claim Upon careful parsing, however, there appears to be an awful lot of gravy for so little pot roast. Here is the screaming headline: Clinton impeachment was retaliation »

The Reid-Coburn Act of 2005?

Mike Krempasky at Red State.org has good news on the online freedom of speech front. It seems that bipartisanship has broken out, as Senators Reid and Coburn are set to co-sponsor legislation to protect freedom on the internet. »

Hating the Pope

The UPI’s Religious Affairs Editor, Uwe Siemon-Netto, catalogs the abuse to which Pope Benedict has been subjected since his election, noting that Googling the phrase “Nazi Pope” turns up nearly 700 entries. Much of the abuse directed at the Pope is superficially anti-German, but in reality, as Siemon-Netto acknowledges, it is anti-Catholic: “They knock the Germans but they are motivated by their anti-Catholicism,” Catholic League president William Donohue proposed. New »

Question and answer

In her column on John Bolton today (“Bolton has common sense — that’s why Democrats hate him”), Mona Charen refers to an essay by Bolton on the United Nations: “The Creation, Rise and Fall of the United Nations.” The essay was published as chapter 3 of a Cato book edited by Ted Galen Carpenter, the libertarian foreign policy commentator. Bolton’s chapter is an interesting essay that sheds additional light both »

Demolition in progress

One of the reasons that the Claremont Review of Books is my favorite magazine is that each issue constitutes a virtual education in politics. Another of the reasons is that the CRB wages intellectual battle against the administrative state on behalf of the founding principles of the United States in the spirit of “rollback” as opposed to the spirit of “containment.” (Subscribe online here.) The spirit of the CRB is »

Clinton case mystery witness identified

Josh Gerstein follows up on his New York Sun story of yesterday regarding the identity of the informant in the Clinton fundraising case. As our readers helped us guess last night, the mystery witness is Senator Kennedy’s brother-in-law Raymond Reggie: “A Kennedy relative acted as informant in Democrat circles.” Gerstein writes: The disclosure that Reggie was surreptitiously recording conversations for the FBI may have caused some heartburn yesterday for Democrats »

Why George Soros moved on

From the Washington Times’ Inside Politics feature, we learn that George Soros would be a Republican today if the GOP hadn’t purged its moderate members. That’s what Soros told the Washington Times anyway, after criticizing the way the paper has attacked him in print. Soros didn’t identify the moderate Republicans that the party has purged (I don’t believe there are any). Nor did he explain why, having rejected the Republicans, »

How Sick Can the Left Get?

I don’t know, but we haven’t hit bottom yet. A reader called me to point out this sickening display on Cafe Press. American political history is often not pretty. But I don’t think we have ever experienced anything remotely approaching the current descent of liberals into hate. Not only hate, but weird hate. And it will continue until voters definitively reject the Democratic Party. UPDATE: Another reader points out this »

It’s not just soccer they’re playing in Britain

John O’Sullivan at NRO takes a look at the upcoming elections in Britain. He predicts that Tony Blair’s Labor party will narrowly defeat the Conservatives. The primary element in Labor’s favor is 13 straight years of economic growth. The fact that, in O’Sullivan’s view, this prosperity is due mostly to Thatcherite reforms and subsequent Conservative fiscal stabilization doesn’t matter. We experienced the same phenomenon here, when President Clinton rode the »

Clinton case mystery witness?

One anonymous reader and one Boston-based reader have nominated a candidate for the mystery witness referred to in Josh Gerstein’s New York Sun “Clinton case mystery” article this morning. They note that Senator Kennedy’s brother-in-law is Raymond Reggie and that Reggie was charged with bank fraud in February (click here for access to the press release on the indictment). It appears, however, that the case had been brewing since 2002, »