The lies in truth
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013 Posted in Faith and Life, Policy and Politics | 21 Comments »Michelle Obama called herself a "single mother" last week and we'll probably be hearing about it years from now. Some Obama opponents consider it evidence the president is an absentee father, others that he's gay, others simply that the Obamas ...
White ashes
Thursday, March 21st, 2013 Posted in Policy and Politics, Theology | 20 Comments »Last I checked there were 36,000 mentions of Jimmy Fallon in the news, and 8,820 of Kermit Gosnell. It's understandable if you haven't heard of Gosnell. He's a Philadelphia abortionist on trial for, among other things, murdering newborns by snipping their ...
Sodas and guns and minimum virtue
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 Posted in Policy and Politics | 13 Comments »On the radio I heard a shill for some agglomeration of sugary drink manufacturers inveigh against NYC mayor Bloomberg's attempted regulation of soda sizes. "We believe New Yorkers are smart enough to make these decisions for themselves," he said. If you've ...
Cheaper by the dozen
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 Posted in Policy and Politics | No Comments »There is a difference between being anti-intellectual and being anti-intellect, and this is where Russell Jacoby foundered, in his essay last year about the lack of intellectualism among conservatives. As Peter Lawler notes, it's shoddily done for want of defining ...
Gays, Boy Scouts, and dogma
Monday, February 4th, 2013 Posted in Policy and Politics | 19 Comments »The Boy Scouts of America is considering an end to its prohibition against homosexual troop leaders, deferring that decision to local councils. Sexual molestation! cry opponents, and so into the breach rushes the conscientious journalist, whose moral obligation is to ...
An open letter to the weeping conservative
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 5 Comments »Look, it's not the end of the world, or America, or really much of anything. In fact, it could become the beginning of something. Here are eight reasons you should take heart from what you consider last night's loss. 1. Congressional ...
Voting is its own revenge
Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 1 Comment »On Election Day, it helps to keep in mind who is to blame for the mess we're in. Which reminds me to share with you an excerpt from my most recent essay at Image's Patheos channel: "Sports talk is well suited ...
Conflict of Visions
Monday, September 17th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 7 Comments »I suppose the Constitution has seen better times. Time Magazine asked last year if it's still relevant, a former Speaker of the House scoffed at the notion that a radical expansion of federal power might be forbidden by it, and ...
Honoring Muhammad
Saturday, September 15th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 36 Comments »The thing is, I didn't know we'd all gotten together and decided to officially call this guy "the Prophet Muhammad." I know that's what he is to 2 billion or so Muslims, but that leaves around 5 billion of us who ...
Lessons from the news to come
Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 Posted in Irritations, Policy and Politics | 5 Comments »In case you don't have time to follow the news for the next week, here's a summary: 1. Someone insulted Mohammed. 2. Otherwise intelligent and civilized ambassadors for the Religion of Peace murdered some people for being American (they'll get around to ...
Letter to an Aspiring Kingmaker
Saturday, September 1st, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 4 Comments »Hey you. Yes, you, the one poring over push-poll numbers and wondering how you can get more smug college kids to accost people with clipboards in swing districts. We are ten weeks from The Most Critical Election in the History ...
Monetizing infanticide
Monday, May 7th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 1 Comment »I suppose it should come as no surprise when a country that has long encouraged widespread killing of unborn and newborn children, and which nourishes a commercial avarice untempered by virtue, hits upon a way to make money from the ...
Hunting dogs
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 Posted in Debating Libertarians Gently So Gene Healy Doesn't Get His Feelings Hurt, Policy and Politics | 30 Comments »"When the law is against you," goes the adage, "argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both the facts and law are against you…." Here we may turn for instruction to Jerry Taylor, ringleader of ...
For taunt-seekers
Monday, March 5th, 2012 Posted in Debating Libertarians Gently So Gene Healy Doesn't Get His Feelings Hurt, Policy and Politics | 7 Comments »God, now I have to go back and read a bunch of crap I wrote ten years ago to see if I still agree with it. I don't know much about this Cato business. I do of course know Koch. I ...
On the vice of chimps with shotguns
Friday, February 10th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 5 Comments »"Voting is a universal right." This wisdom from Victor Sanchez, president of the United States Student Association, explaining his efforts to get more college students to vote. Mr. Sanchez is himself a recent college graduate, and a fine illustration of ...
On Conservatives as Rapists
Saturday, January 28th, 2012 Posted in Policy and Politics | 5 Comments »It used to be required, of an intellectual seeking to hold forth on an idea, that he define his terms. Words are slippery things, after all. But then so are intellectuals, and perhaps this is why they often play faster ...
Against principle
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 Posted in Policy and Politics | 4 Comments »Some of you may appreciate my latest post at WORLD, where I argue that Alabama's contested anti-immigrant law is neither conservative nor Christian, and hence people who imagine themselves Christian conservatives have no business supporting it. Here's an excerpt: "If conservatism ...
Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!
Monday, December 20th, 2010 Posted in Irritations, Policy and Politics | 3 Comments »Agents from the Federal Reserve have decided visible displays of Christian faith are verboten. At a private bank, no less. "Specifically, the feds believed, the symbols violated the discouragement clause of Regulation B of the bank regulations. According to the clause, ...
The slaughter continues
Thursday, December 16th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | 1 Comment »Jennifer Rubin, on the continuing exodus of Christians from murderous Muslim strongholds, and the Obama Administration's inaction: "For Obama, Muslim outreach has too often amounted to telling Middle East despots what they want to hear. Since this has generally been a ...
UNICEF’s compassion deficit
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | No Comments »"So in short, if you want to give to a charity which does not spend any money on harming children, UNICEF is a poor choice." Read the rest here.
Iraqi persecution
Friday, November 19th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | 2 Comments »I have a post up at the WORLD blog going into more detail than my earlier post about the Iraqi Christian persecution, and the shameful U.S. record of addressing it thus far.
What Huck should have said
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | 6 Comments »Watched Mike Huckabee on Bill Maher's show, and he held his own, except for one critical error and one missed opportunity. The error was to apply to his host Maher's maddening misnomer: libertarian. Bill Maher is about as libertarian as ...
Exploding underwear and pick-up sticks
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | 2 Comments »Thankfully, National Opt-Out Day is one of the few days this year when I won't be getting on an airplane, which makes it all the easier to root for civil disobedients exercising their rights to be groped rather than dangerously ...
Let them in
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | 2 Comments »Here's a consequence my Republican, Bush-supporting friends probably don't like to hear about: one of the Iraq invasion's greatest victims is the Church. What's more, it's not entirely unanticipated. The godless Hussein tolerated religious minorities, but with him out of ...
Nanny fetches a switch
Thursday, November 11th, 2010 Posted in Irritations, Policy and Politics | 2 Comments »How out of whack is a society when government officials need to come up with penalties for people who don't want to work? It used to be that not working carried its own penalty, in the form of an empty ...
On the Tweedledumbing of America
Monday, November 1st, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | 5 Comments »In the closing hours the advertisements are redoubled; we see the candidates peddling their functional families, juxtaposed with a grim gallery of closed factories and soup lines and dead children, for which the fresh-faced candidates' grainy-faced opponents are responsible, either ...
A free press is good, especially when it’s competent
Monday, November 1st, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | No Comments »John Miller, my editor 500 years ago at The Michigan Review before he moved on to write for National Review and a host of other fine publications, along with authoring several books, recently started a much needed organization called the ...
On the conservative as warmonger
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 Posted in Judo Chops, Policy and Politics | 2 Comments »The problem with political science professor Corey Robin's claim that warmongering is woven into the DNA of conservatives is that he can't seem to define his subject. One minute a conservative is a Burkean, the next he's a tea-partier, then ...
A genocide by any other name . . .
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | No Comments »From Anne Appelbaum's review of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin: "As the Stanford historian Norman Naimark explains in Stalin’s Genocides, the UN’s definition of genocide was deliberately narrow: 'Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, ...
Hip hop’s friends on the Left and the Right
Sunday, October 24th, 2010 Posted in Policy and Politics | No Comments »Thomas Chatterton Williams on hip hop: "Lil Wayne is emblematic of a hip-hop culture that is ignorant, misogynistic, casually criminal and often violent. A self-described gangster, he is a modern-day minstrel who embodies the most virulent racist stereotypes that generations of ...
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