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It is strange to think that it was only a little over a month ago that Crunchy Cons hit shelves and the Crunchy Cons blog began working through the claims of crunchiness, tradition, authenticity, sacramentality, conservation and religion, among others, and what these entailed for the life of a modern American conservative who purports to […]
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Filed under: politics
He has been decorated with attributes superior in dignity and splendor to those of a king of Great Britain. He has been shown to us with the diadem sparkling on his brow and the imperial purple flowing in his train. He has been seated on a throne surrounded with minions and mistresses, giving audience to […]
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Maybe Sen. Feingold, staunch libertarian that he purports to be, should read the Federalist Papers. He might start with No. 72, in which Hamilton warned, for the sake of liberty, that Americans remain on guard against “[t]he propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other […]
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If you try to understand American politics as a philosophical debate between “left” and “right,” you will go crazy. It all makes sense, however, if you see it as a struggle of shifting coalitions of ethnic groups and regions– Northeast and Midwest, South and Pacific Coast, Latinos and Jews, evangelicals and Catholics, whites and […]
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Each individual all over the world has the God-given right to express themselves. I’m not just going to visit places where people agree with me. That would be really unfortunate. ~Condoleeza Rice
It would also drastically cut down on her travel schedule.
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Via Kathryn Jean Lopez, The Corner
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Times
My favourite is the caption the Times gives to the third picture: “US President George W. Bush pretends to lose his balance as he and Mexico’s President Vicente Fox walk the steps of an ancient Mayan Pyramid yesterday.” If true, does Mr. Bush […]
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Before crunchy cons rush to embrace Daylight Saving Time because it supposedly promotes outdoorsmanship and family values, read the piece in today’s WSJ by Michael Downing (no free link) — he points out that consumerism is a big part of the motivation behind DST, because it lets golf courses operate later and so on. But […]
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The reaction to the Harvard University study by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” [.pdf] has been fury by the Lobby and its partisans – and a demotion for Walt, who, it was announced shortly after the paper’s release, would be stepping down from his post as dean of […]
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This became a cause célèbre only because of the presence of American troops in Afghanistan: having Rahman killed for apostasy under their noses would have made too explicit a debacle of the already farcical neocon phantasy known as “democratizing the greater Middle East.”
No, when Christians are routinely mistreated and killed by our other trusted […]
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My Enchiridion Militis colleague, Paul Cella, has a good post at RedState, where he says this:
My point is rather to lay out what can only be a sketch of a great and largely unremarked fact: that under an ostensibly conservative President and center-right governing coalition, the Conservatism that still characterizes the American people, and still […]
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Until now, short-sighted conservatives have thought of Hispanics as something of a genial caricature of themselves, a caricature that accords with their personal impressions from fleeting encounters with bus-boys, landscapers, and others in service industries. The caricature is that Hispanics are quiet, docile, hard-working, and politically irrelevant people. The ideas of Hispanics themselves on wide-ranging […]
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“In other words, Americans understand you’re newcomers to the political arena. But pretty soon it’s time to shut her down and get governing.” ~AP Wire
Via Antiwar
Well, four months and no government later, a skeptic might be forgiven for thinking the exercise of establishing a “unity government” in Iraq rather hopeless. Mr. Bush speaks here […]
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She’s a classic pragmatist, and like all pragmatists her views are, well, pragmatic. And that means that they change over time. ~Anne Applebaum, The Spectator (registration required)
Ms. Applebaum has managed to save “Condi” from being “pigeonholed” with anything so constraining as a consistent set of principles. Why this is supposed to recommend her to […]
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Filed under: politics
It can’t be repeated often enough: War always brings unintended consequences. Nobody foresaw that the Iraq war would lead to Bush’s claim of intellectual leadership. If we had, there might have been more resistance at the beginning, even from conservatives. ~Joseph Sobran
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Personally, I’d rather endure a Bush press conference than see this movie again. ~Steve Sailer
That’s just about the most damning part in a justly brutal review of a horribly overrated and really very silly movie.
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Filed under: miscellaneous
I have spent, as I am sure many of you have, a lot of time in and around Hispanic culture. I don’t mean this in the sense of, “I’ve run in to some Hispanic people from time to time,” but rather in the sense of having gone frequently into their homes and partaken in their […]
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It occurred to me that I have been approaching Walter Russell Mead’s characterisation of the “Jacksonians” the wrong way around. Perhaps, I thought to myself, he does not mean the label quite so literally as I have insisted on taking it. Maybe the modern-day “Jacksonians” aren’t supposed to have anything to do with […]
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Filed under: politics
By their own lights, Jacksonians are populists (and “profoundly suspicious of elites,” according to Mead); unselfconsciously patriotic or nationalistic; and deeply religious, with a tendency toward fundamentalism and its emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God. Country music is their quintessential cultural expression.
They admire self-sufficiency, but unlike Jeffersonian libertarians, Jacksonians are not averse to […]
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Someone get Daniel Henninger a chair. He is swooning so much over Mr. Bush’s recent speech in Wheeling, West Virginia that he might faint (I was passing through Wheeling last week at just the same time that Mr. Bush was there, but managed not to swoon). This is a speech where Mr. Bush […]
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Basically, Linker sets out to prove that Neuhaus is a would-be theocrat bent on Christianizing America by force - but lacking significant evidence for that point of view, he settles for proving that Neuhaus is . . . a Roman Catholic. ~Ross Douthat
That sums it up pretty well.
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I am not sketching out specific scenarios, but I’m just saying that the development of a civil war in Iraq is a horrible prospect, and I in no sense want it to happen.
But if one looks at it coolly, one sees that it’s not, from an American or for that matter Australian point of […]
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I refer to the sheer scope, speed and urgency of the issues that go to a president’s desk, to the impossibility of bureaucracy, to the array of impeding and antagonistic forces (the 50-50 nation, the mass media, the senators owned by the groups), to the need to have a fully informed understanding of and stand […]
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Exactly what happened on Sunday night is in dispute, but in a political sense it no longer matters. Tension between the Americans and Shia leaders had been rising for weeks, since Washington started pushing for Mr Jabr’s replacement as police minister and went on to oppose Mr Jaafari remaining as prime minister.
The Americans insisted yesterday […]
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With the vote on 99.5 percent, Kadima had a less than expected 28 seats. Labor held at 20 seats, and Shas rose to 13, making the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party the third largest faction in the Knesset.
The Likud had hoped to block a center-left coalition, but with almost all of the votes in weakened to 11 […]
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Do the theocons really want a police state? Maybe I shouldn’t take it for granted that they don’t. ~Daniel McCarthy, The Tory Anarchist
What is interesting about Neuhaus’ “End of Democracy?” criticism of the government is that its justification of contemplating the overthrow of the regime rested on the consent of the governed and the right […]
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Filed under: politics