In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph of London, Janet Daley scolded the new British prime minister, David Cameron, for unwisely commenting on the contention of George W. Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points, that waterboarding saved British lives. Mr Cameron said that he thought “torture” was wrong and that “there is both a moral reason for being opposed…
The following is the text of my remarks to a gathering to establish a Washington, D.C. chapter of the Friends of the New Criterion at the Tabard Inn on N Street N.W. yesterday evening, November 11, 2010 Thank you, Roger, for that kind introduction. I’m very grateful for the invitation to speak to such a…
A movie about a horse with the heart of a champion doesn’t have a heart of its own
This morning I could scarcely believe what I was reading when I saw the story in the Daily Telegraph of London. Former immigration minister Phil Woolas lost his seat as an MP today after an election court ruled that he knowingly made false statements about an opponent in May’s general election. The Labour MP could be…
Talk about putting the cat among the pigeons! They do talk about it in the UK, you know, which is where the popular entertainer Stephen Fry, described by one of his critics as “everyone”s favourite gay uncle,” has recently, according to The Sunday Telegraph “enraged feminists with a bizarre outburst in which he claimed that women…
If Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman can’t tell the difference between politics and economics, why should Charles Ferguson be able to do so?
Michael Tomasky of The Guardian had to admit that his worst fear about the Stewart-Colbert Rally on the Washington Mall yesterday — “that Fox would capture images of potentially offensive signage and go to [sic] town” — was not realized, but only because (he said) Fox “resolutely ignored” the rally. Also, we’d have to wait and see…
Ah, for the good old days, when the good old days were the bad old days — From The American Spectator of October, 2010
Why do the best and the brightest hate us simple folk as they do? — from The New Criterion of October, 2010
Writing in The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum notes that It’s common. . . to deride the pedants who constrict language with sterile rules of grammar. The problem, of course, is that there aren’t very many of those pedants left. The recent campaign against the word syllabi appears to have begun on the “Language Log” blog, a…
Intellectual snobbery, which is what Catholics would call the besetting sin of the Democrats, takes many forms, and Charles Murray’s splendid article in yesterday’s Washington Post makes a strong case for seeing it as, primarily, a new form of class warfare — or what he calls the “cognitive stratification” which has characterized American cultural and social…
A liberal gets alarmed at the state of our education system and the education establishment that runs it so badly — but not too alarmed
