These days, I’m constantly impressed by how much of our political debate is affected for the worse by our loss of the language and the very concept of honor — a loss which I have documented in my book Honor, A History (2006). One example comes to mind in the international uproar that has greeted the…
Inevitable Schadenfreude at what is beginning to look like the spectacular failure of the Obama health-care initiative should not prevent us from contemplation of the puzzle of why it has happened, if it has happened. It’s not enough to blame the intrinsic deficiencies of the legislative program itself, still less the “lies” and “misrepresentations” allegedly…
![Inglorious Bastards [QT, note SP]](https://jamesbowman.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ingloriousbastards.jpg)
Did you think you would never see a movie that was worse than Kill Bill? Prepare to be amazed, for its pop culture auteur has outdone himself.
The death of Robert Novak, like that of William F. Buckley Jr. last year, is proving the occasion for both men’s political enemies to justify their own rhetorical excesses while giving a good hiding to conservatives. This is all part of the bizarre but continuing claim on the part of the left-leaning but ostensibly “objective”…
The one slightly sour note in Nora Ephron’s cloyingly sweet Julie & Julia comes near the end of the film when one of our two heroines, Julie Powell (Amy Adams), has become a hit with the public — or at least enough of a hit to realize the prospect of the book deal which will…
A story in today’s Los Angeles Times by Maeve Reston quotes President Obama as telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars, gathered in Phoenix, that the War in Afghanistan was not “a war of choice” but “a war of necessity,” adding that “the insurgency would not be defeated overnight.” I imagine that the vets — at least…
“False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots” claims the headline to an article by Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes in today’s New York Times. “The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent…
Cleverness and humor in the manipulation of absurdity can only take you so far. Just about this far, in fact.
Every so often for the last half-century or so, we have seen some American arriving, breathless and sweating, with the latest post from the old country. And his news is always the same. It is that Britain is finished. All washed up. No more to be seen on the world stage — except, perhaps, as…
Is it me, or did Hillary Clinton sound just the tiniest bit defensive when she thought a Congolese student had asked her about Bill Clinton’s view of the offer of a Chinese loan to the Congo’s government? No, others appear to have noticed it as well. Here’s how The Times of London reported the incident: Less…
You’ve got to wonder if the lesson of the “teachable moment” in the Henry Louis Gates affair wasn’t, in some minds anyway, that black people should be immune from criticism on account of their race. Faced with a simple and entirely reasonable inquiry by the police into suspicious behavior, Professor Gates acted like a jerk,…
This summer, on eight successive Tuesday evenings, I am presenting a series of films under the rubric of "Crime and Punishment" at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. (go to www.eppc.org/movies for details). The eighth and last film in the series, Fargo, by Joel and Ethan Coen, was screened Tuesday evening, August 4th,…
