Author: admin

The biggest mistake conservatives make is to suppose that Democrats control the media. In fact, the power relationship is the other way around: the media control the Democrats. That, I would argue is the legacy of Watergate. Since then, the media’s self-conceit that they brought down the Nixon presidency, though not quite true, has been…

As the author of a book about honor  I claim a certain standing to comment on Bret Stephens’s column in The New York Times  attempting to draw a contrast between the late Charles Van Doren, a man who was publicly shamed for his participation in the quiz show cheating scandal of 60 years ago, and…

The good news is that there is some actual news — about Brexit, I mean. Months and years of speculation have finally given away to a genuine fact (from the Latin factum or something done). The bad news is that the factual news is only that the EU has granted another extension of the deadline…

“If it weren’t so serious it would be funny.” All of us are familiar with this paradox of human affairs, which affects puzzlement at the equally familiar truth that things are quite often both serious and funny at the same time. But this mostly happens when the funny part is precisely that the serious part…

"Gridlock is a part of any democracy, and a very important part," former Senator Alan Simpson told Ellen Barry of The New York Times according to an article in today’s paper. "It forces compromise. You have to force it sometimes." Mr Simpson’s comment was a propos of Ms Barry’s claim that American-style gridlock has now…

It amused me the other day to hear a radio report of a town hall meeting in my Virginia town about the Ralph Northam scandal — once, when a medical student, the governor appears to have condoned the wearing of blackface by white college boys — in which one of the participants claimed to have…

A favorite topos of conservative talk radio is a taunt to the media consisting of some such hypothetical reversal of the political poles as: "can you imagine what the reaction would be if x did y" — where x is a conservative politician and y is some outrageous act by a non-conservative which has been…