In today’s Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports on a court test of the Stolen Valor Act, passed by Congress in 2005 in response to a proliferation of poseurs claiming to have been awarded medals for bravery that they had not, in fact, been awarded. Mr Barnes is struck by the opinion of the chief judge of…
There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the British media over the weekend about Cherie Blair’s telling an interviewer that she and her husband, the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, “have been married 31 years and known each other more like 35 years and even after 35 years he still excites me, in…
You could have guessed that if President Obama ever went to war, it would be like this: boasting of how others have taken the lead and the United States is only playing a supporting role — meanwhile blowing off the allied war leaders’ council in Paris (!) in order to go flying down to Rio…
A Norwegian film whose amusing qualities are the spoonful of sugar that helps the message-medicine go down
It is natural for those of us who have always opposed President Obama’s left-wing domestic agenda to think of his foreign policy as also having been inspired by the quasi-pacifism of the left. Carterism — which is Wilsonianism without the guts — has been something close to the default position for Democrats since the last…
This morning on WTOP news radio in Washington, one of the two morning hosts could not resist reacting to the latest news about Charlie Sheen — I forget what it was — with an assertion that he was heartily sick of hearing about Charlie Sheen. I know that this is an eternal and inescapable media…
The very funny if not quite morally serious tale of a modern day Candide.
An immensely moving account of goodness, holiness and Christian martyrdom — remember that? — amid a political landscape much like our own
How astonishing to me is the amount of attention given — worldwide and not just in America — to the Oscars. Why on earth should anyone outside the Motion Picture Academy itself care about the opinion of a group of people whose own lack of taste is demonstrated by the steady stream of rubbish, that…
What has the kabuki dance of left-wing outrage answering right-wing outrage have to do with art anyway? — From The American Spectator of February, 2011
Let’s not be beastly to crazy people. At least they’re not Republicans. Or are they? — From The New Criterion of February, 2011
The unconscious humor of the New York Times headline to its editorial welcoming the decision of the Obama justice department to defend no longer the Defense of Marriage Act cannot go unnoticed. “Mr. Obama Moves Against Bias,” it read — which might move alert readers (or even dozy ones) to ask: so he was a…
