In a heartwarming opinion piece today at the New York Times, Thomas Edsall laments the internet’s toxic effect on what it calls “democracy” — a term that, if I understand the piece correctly, is to be defined as a political system in which two political parties, and a few other “dominant organizations” (here, the Times […]
February 24, 2017 – 11:11 pm
By now you’ve probably heard about the flagrantly tendentious decision by the Fourth Circuit in Kolbe v. Hogan, which upheld a flimsy “assault-weapons” ban in Maryland. The ruling is here. Here, here, here, and here are some responses.
February 8, 2017 – 4:14 pm
Here’s tart piece by Porter on Cass Sunstein’s vision of the Constitution. (I always enjoy Porter’s astringent writing, except for those doggone sentence fragments.)
February 8, 2017 – 1:14 pm
It turns out that “Publius Decius Mus”, who wrote the influential essay “The Flight 93 Election” back in September (we commented on it here) is Michael Anton, a former editor of the Journal of American Greatness. He is now a member, I’m glad to say, of the Trump administration. Therefore he is also a Nazi.
February 8, 2017 – 11:53 am
From a scathing editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal (my emphasis): The Senate made history Tuesday when Mike Pence became the first Vice President to cast the deciding vote for a cabinet nominee. The nominee is now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The vote came after an all-night Senate debate in a futile effort by […]
January 31, 2017 – 12:49 pm
With concatenated hat-tips to our friends Horace Jeffery Hodges and Bill Vallicella, here is a superb essay on the Trumpian assault on the postmodernism that has had a death-grip on Western culture for some time now (and which, I have argued, has its roots in the radical skepsis that was born in the Enlightenment itself). […]
January 29, 2017 – 11:24 pm
In an earlier post, I castigated President Trump for a “blunder”: not exempting green-card holders from his U.S. entry-restriction list. Scott Adams argues that this might not have a blunder at all: that to restrict them first, then exempt them after all hell broke loose, was, perhaps, a carefully considered move. Perhaps he’s right (which […]
January 29, 2017 – 6:50 pm
As I imagined would happen, the Trump team has apparently realized its error, and has added permanent residents to the list of persons exempted from its temporary entry ban. Good, I’m glad that’s sorted out. I do wish they hadn’t made this colossal boo-boo in the first place, but at least they’ve put it right. […]
January 24, 2017 – 6:43 pm
Behold Sally Boynton Brown, an industrial-strength ethno-masochist who wants both to “have a conversation” and “shut other white people down”. (If you’re a student of political language, by the way, and you’re looking for examples of Orwellian phrases that mean exactly the opposite of what they say, it’s hard to beat “have a conversation”.) I […]
January 22, 2017 – 7:07 pm
In this torrid political season, if your sympathies are with the Left, you may have been saying to yourself: “Boy, I’m frustrated! I can’t believe we actually lost!! It’s so unfair!!! Is it OK now if I just go out and assault people I disagree with?” Well, I’ve got good news: the New York Times […]
January 22, 2017 – 6:50 pm
Barack Obama has left office, and in a weepy item called “Obama’s final ride into a wet, foggy California night“, the Washington Post grieves. (The article was written by “Greg Jaffe”, which seems an odd name for a teenage girl. I had to squeegee estrogen off the screen several times to maintain legibility.) This eulogy […]
January 21, 2017 – 12:53 am
Finally, to borrow a phrase from another presidential transition, “our long national nightmare is over.” That was quite a speech Mr. Trump gave today (video here, transcript here). Yes, it had its moments of hyperbole — we will not, for example, be eradicating Islamic terrorism from the face of the Earth any time soon, I […]
January 20, 2017 – 11:16 am
Right, then, today’s the day. The inauguration is about to begin. Mr. Trump can expect to be tested at once. From today’s NightWatch: China-US: On 19 January, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ms. Hua Chunying answered a question about China’s relations with the new US administration. Her reply is China official position regarding the US on the […]
January 18, 2017 – 11:25 pm
Making the rounds today (with a hat-tip to our old e-pal Dennis Mangan): a poem written for Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s called “Pibroch of the Domnhall” and was written by Joseph Charles MacKenzie (originally published at ClassicalPoets.org). I reproduce the first few stanzas, with prefatory notes: § The refrains at the end of each stanza […]
January 15, 2017 – 1:07 pm
The spat between John Lewis and Donald Trump is all over the news today. It began when Mr. Lewis announced that in his view the Trump presidency was illegitimate, which is no small thing for a member of Congress to say on the eve of a presidential inauguration. If I were Donald Trump, which I […]
January 13, 2017 – 10:32 pm
Here’s something you might be surprised to see: a balanced and reasonable look at the Trump movement in the pages of The New Yorker. It is built upon an interview with the pseudonymous essayist “Publius Decius Mus”, whose anti-Clinton article “The Flight 93 Election” caused a such a stir last September. (We linked to it […]
December 20, 2016 – 6:42 pm
I always have to admire those who present quantitative data in visually compelling ways. With a hat-tip to David Duff, here is a wonderful example: Trumpland and the Clinton Archipelago, from the site Vivid Maps.
December 20, 2016 – 12:10 am
Well, the Electoral College has cast its votes, and the results are in. The envelope, please? Aaaand … the winner is…. …Donald Trump! Hillary Clinton loses again! The best part? More of Hillary Clinton’s electors defected than Donald Trump’s. There is special kind of wonderfulness about this election: not only did we get […]
December 14, 2016 – 1:18 pm
On Monday, the nineteenth of December, the Electoral College will register its votes. Many on the Left have staked their hopes on “faithless electors” denying Donald Trump the presidency. (Yes, this is really where we’ve got to in America, folks. Please fasten your seat belts.) Leaving aside the seismic social consequences of such a thing […]
December 2, 2016 – 12:36 am
I’m happy to to see that Donald Trump has named James Mattis as his choice for Secretary of Defense. (Just think: a warrior who understands what the miltary is and isn’t for. Amazing.) As a recently retired member of the armed forces, he will, according to the National Security Act of 1947, need a waiver […]
November 21, 2016 – 12:41 am
Sorry for the lack of substantial content here recently. I’ve felt it possible to have a bit of a breather after the election, and apparently the Muse has felt the same. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been much worth commenting about — the Left is writhing like a wounded serpent, but it is […]
November 16, 2016 – 1:05 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Bill Keezer, we give you a rousing essay by Daniel Greenfield on what has just happened in America. It begins: This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution. It’s midnight in America. The day before fifty million Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel […]
November 15, 2016 – 10:19 am
My liberal Jewish friends are on the fainting couch after the Trump victory. One said to my wife that as a Jew he now felt very afraid of what might be coming. I think they should relax. Here’s the economist David P. Goldman, whom you may know as the pseudonymous Asia Times columnist “Spengler”, and […]
November 13, 2016 – 12:30 am
Following the Trump victory in last week’s election, many on the losing side have been calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. To do this would be to remove yet another Constitutional bulwark against raw democracy, which the Framers rightly saw as a buttered slide to tyranny (beginning with the tyranny of the majority). […]
November 11, 2016 – 1:27 pm
From Patrick Buchanan yesterday: a call to action in the wake of victory. Here. This “magnanimity” business is certainly attracting a lot of attention. (More on that later.) Meanwhile, see the discussion at the Maverick Philosopher, here.
November 11, 2016 – 11:50 am
It’s awfully (though darkly) amusing to hear, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, all the cries from the streets denouncing his supporters as ‘Fascists’. The word, of course, has nearly been drained of all meaning, and like ‘racist’, is now little more than a cudgel for the faithful to use against anyone from whom […]
November 10, 2016 – 11:53 pm
I’m trying to hang on to that “magnanimous” feeling tonight. It’s not going so well.
November 9, 2016 – 8:28 pm
Hillary Clinton supporters: let’s not hear a lot of whingeing, please, about how your gal “won the popular vote”. Leaving aside the most obvious response — that in this federal republic it is, by careful design, the States that elect the President, and not the mob — your argument depends upon the assumption of an […]
November 9, 2016 – 12:30 pm
With the election of Donald Trump, many of us (count me in!) are hoping that the Clintons will at last be held to account for their criminality. One thing stands in the way: the power of the President to grant pardons. “But wait,” I hear you saying, “can President Obama pardon the Clintons in advance […]
November 9, 2016 – 10:54 am
Well! Here we stand, on the morrow of our victory. In this glorious dawn, let us survey the battlefield. The Clintons are finished, done. Their political careers are over, and the parasitic criminal syndicates they run, which draw their life’s-blood by selling access to power, have been expelled by the host. Each of them has […]
November 9, 2016 – 2:52 am
Donald Trump has won the election. This means that Hillary Clinton will never be President. She will be lucky to stay out of prison. We did it.
November 7, 2016 – 11:40 am
It should be obvious to all at this point that a very great part of our nation’s political sickness is due to the ever-increasing concentration of power in the hands of the Federal leviathan in Washington, at the expense of local government. (That this is, even at this late stage of the disease, not obvious […]
November 6, 2016 – 6:26 pm
Well, here’s a fine state of affairs: the lovely Nina has thrown out her back here in Wellfleet, MA, and so we can’t make the long ride back to New York — which is where we are registered to vote. I very much doubt that Hillary Clinton will take New York’s electoral votes by a […]
November 5, 2016 – 2:58 pm
From the Podesta emails: “With friends like that…” See also this. Three days to go, folks. Choose wisely.
November 2, 2016 – 2:01 pm
Here’s a nifty visualization of the Clinton, etc. emails.
November 1, 2016 – 8:13 pm
Here is an amusing item: a secret report, ostensibly leaked by the hacker cartel “Anonymous”, outlining the extent of the Clinton disadvantage in the upcoming election, together with some highly imaginative ways to prevent a Trump victory. Fake, of course – but as I said, amusing. What times we live in! Read it here.
November 1, 2016 – 2:14 pm
In a post from 2013, we quoted Will and Ariel Durant on the persistent delusion of Equality. The pursuit of an unattainable equality has been a reliable political implement throughout the modern history of the West, despite the natural impossibility of its achievement. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read […]
November 1, 2016 – 12:48 pm
With seven days to go until the election, the walls of Festung Clinton are beginning to collapse. The FBI disclosure by James Comey has the campaign furiously denouncing the same man they praised so highly back in July. Clinton mole Donna Brazile is out at CNN for helping Mrs. Clinton cheat on the debates. The […]
October 28, 2016 – 11:59 pm
I’ve been on the road all day — eight hours battling traffic in a fully loaded car with wife, daughter, grandson, and mother-in-law — and only made it to the stormy Outer Cape late this evening. We hadn’t listened to the news during the trip — the A.M. radio in our old Volvo stopped working […]
October 25, 2016 – 6:00 pm
Hardly a day goes by now without new evidence of Clintonian corruption. The latest has to do with the FBI’s curiously handled investigation of the Clintons’ email server, and the FBI director’s audacious decision not to recommend charges in the case. As the Wall Street Journal reports here, after the FBI began its investigation of […]
October 19, 2016 – 8:31 pm
We’ve just had another intractable disagreement in our most recent comment-thread (with, of course, our resident Clintonian gadfly). The dispute is, in microcosm, the same that is pulling America, and indeed all of the West, to pieces. As I have said many times before, so much depends on axioms, and on what words mean. We […]
October 18, 2016 – 12:11 am
It’s been a busy few days, with little time for writing. But I won’t run off without offering a morsel to sustain you (and to reassure you that things are, indeed, as they seem).
October 11, 2016 – 9:41 pm
Bil Vallicella comments here on the selectivity of Democrat outrage over Donald Trump’s hot-mike remarks. The gist: The insight is that the Left uses our decency, which they don’t believe in, against us, mendaciously feigning moral outrage at what doesn’t outrage them at all. (Cf. Saul Alinsky’s RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to […]
October 9, 2016 – 8:54 pm
Tonight we have the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Before watching you might like to read Diplomad’s thoughts, which are generally the same as my own. In response to anyone who is on the fainting couch over the latest peek into Donald Trump’s character, and can’t imagine how anyone could vote for […]
September 28, 2016 – 2:46 pm
It’s September, and the lovely fall weather is here. Feeling refreshed and optimistic? Well, snap out of it. Need some help with that? This jeremiad, by the distinguished scholar Angelo Codevilla, ought to do the trick.
September 28, 2016 – 1:20 pm
If you are able to achieve the detachment necessary to view politics as a spectator sport (no easy trick, when the existential stakes are so high), then one of its most entertaining features, for those of us up here in the cheap seats, is what has come to be called “narrative collapse”. It affects the […]
September 26, 2016 – 11:44 pm
I actually watched the debate tonight (my plans for a far more enjoyable evening, which included a body-cavity search by the TSA and stepping on a nail, having fallen through at the last moment). I’d give it to the team of Lester Holt and Hillary Clinton. They worked well together, and Mr. Trump was on […]
September 23, 2016 – 10:56 pm
The idea of an Article V convention — the remedy the Framers gave the States to rein in an out-of-control Federal government by amending the Constitution without the participation of Congress — is slowly gaining support, despite the fact that most people, were you to ask them about it, still don’t even know that such […]
September 22, 2016 – 11:35 am
Adam Walinsky, a career Democrat, has written a lucid and persuasive essay to explain why he will be voting for Donald Trump. It begins: I was a Democrat all my life. I came to Washington to serve President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the president was murdered and his brother struck off […]