Monthly Archives: April 2011

The correct response is: “I welcome the support of all local residents, whether I share their political views or not. The Village government does not decide state and national issues, about which there are many views.” If you don’t know … Continue reading →

Governor Andrew Cuomo is pushing the New York legislature to legalize “gay marriage.” Once again I repeat the arguments in defense of real marriage and its meaning. Here’s a sample of comments made in a comment thread elsewhere: Legalizing “gay … Continue reading →

Abortion and the Negation of Love.

The wealth of wealthy people, through the agency of self-interest, has incalculable value to the extended economic order. It buys productivity. It builds. It invests. It becomes Apple and Microsoft and your favorite restaurant. It takes risks. It is the … Continue reading →

I use the term “orthodox Marxist” to mark a distinction beyond “Leftist,” the latter indicating a strong general tendency toward Marxist principles, but with many of those principles watered down by “bourgeois” concerns. The orthodox Marxist isn’t about a “tendency.” It’s not the … Continue reading →

Progressive government was well deep into our bones before Obama took the stage. He’s here to finish a job begun long before he was born. But he’s an order of magnitude beyond even what most liberals thought he was. Their … Continue reading →

Why does anyone take Obama seriously anymore? Because the mainstream media treats him like a public relations client? Six months after he took office the “If Bush Did This” catalog was already full. If perception is power, then having a sales … Continue reading →

Both sides exhausted their strategies in this preliminary budget battle. The mainstream media was out in full force, however, supporting the usual infantile Democratic sob story, which always works to some degree (there’s nothing that can ever be done in the moment … Continue reading →

Shorter on Petraeus: Gone native. It happens. He has effectively submitted, and his lecture back to Americans on Quran burning was obviously well-received at the White House. So he is also an instrument of American policy. He is said to … Continue reading →

The recitation of Qaddafi’s murderous past is beside the point right now. Let’s look at what has changed from before to after in this Libyan moment: 1. Before: Obama (Cf. Andrew McCarthy) had continued and increased the American outreach to … Continue reading →

[Another comment made tonight at Belmont Club.] “Obama is…a figurehead” No, short answer: Obama is in power. Longer answer: Obama could care less about what we call “competency.” This is something that we had to know yesterday, or two years … Continue reading →

[A comment made tonight at Belmont Club.] Methods and meanings: Obama listens to what his supporters and enemies want, then he throws out predicates for them and waits for them to organize themselves around those predicates. He is not in … Continue reading →

Well, no one can say that Beck didn’t wear it out. There were days when he was spellbinding in his presentation. But when he would appear with O’Reilly on the latter’s show, one got the sense of a “cocktail personality,” … Continue reading →

Stanley Kurtz illuminates how Obama used Samantha Power’s foreign policy theory to get the U.S. involved in the Libyan civil war. I offer a differential diagnosis: Samantha Power is a Leftist who has established a latter-day Leftist trend in foreign policy. Like … Continue reading →

The geniuses who run the Freeman, the daily newspaper based in Kingston, N.Y., just up the road from New Paltz, ran an editorial today that out of the blue starts up about the Nixon presidential library. Whose mind that was … Continue reading →

As the Libya situation leads to the next (still unknown) situation, to which I contend Libya will be but a footnote, I think that any conventional understanding of where we are and what we face will be of not much … Continue reading →