The American Spectator

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(Page 2 of 3)

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ROBERT D. NOVAK

Witness by Whittaker Chambers. I have read it in full a half dozen times, and dipped into it countless times. More than half a century after its publication, it is still food for the soul and must reading for all Americans.

The Way the World Works by Jude Wanniski. Its twentieth anniversary edition, published in 1998, is still in print. This is the primer for supply-side economics, explaining how governments cause so much pain and suffering for ordinary people.

The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming. This is a brilliant description of the U.S. in World War I, the nation's bloody and unnecessary involvement in a bloody and unnecessary war. If you didn't like Woodrow Wilson, you'll detest him after reading this book.

Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders by Tom A. Coburn and John Hart. In three terms as a Republican Congressman from a heavily Democratic district in Oklahoma, country doctor Coburn raised hell with the pork-loving establishment. In this book, he tells what it's like behind the scenes in Congress where the Republicans are not much better than the Democrats.

A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat by Zell Miller. Arriving in Washington in 2000 as a lifelong moderate Democrat, Sen. Miller describes how his ancestral party's excesses turned him into a George W. Bush backer. The books tops the liberal hate list for 2003.

Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator.

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GROVER NORQUIST

The second to the last scene in Bruce Willis's film Die Hard has the master criminal with the cool German way of smoking cigarettes falling to his death from a much abused skyscraper. As he falls he screams out in impotent and incoherent rage and it is not quite clear what he is getting at.

One can prolong the sense of listening to impotent and incoherent rage this Christmas season by reading one or all of a series of books apparently part of a general series under the headings "Bush Sucks" and "Conservatives Suck." Largely interchangeable, the list includes Dude Where's My Country by Michael Moore, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken, Big Lies by Joe Conason, The Lies of George Bush by Nation writer David Corn, Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins and The Book on Bush by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. Political movements that see themselves as moving forward produce tedious books about their wild hopes and aspirations. The above chroniclers of the decline and fall of the American Left have produced more interesting reading but should not be allowed near sharp objects.

Second, I recommend a classic, The Defense of Duffer's Drift, by Captain E.D. Swinton, that was originally published in Infantry Journal in April 1905. The book, placed in the Anglo-Boer War, is a series of six dreams by Lieutenant Backsight Forethought (BF) who has been left in command of a 50-man unit to hold Duffer's Drift, the key ford for the Silliassvogel River. In each dream he tries to hold the Drift against Boers and loses, learning from each defeat and incorporating his lessons in the following dream. The book has been taught for generations in war colleges but it is more than a book on infantry tactics, it is about learning the right lessons from experience.

Third, most novels based on the Civil War are like professional wrestling. They can be very exciting, but you kind of know ahead of time how this is going to end. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstechen have written a very readable novel of the Civil War, Gettysburg, that avoids this problem by refighting Gettysburg so that the South wins the battle and ends the novel in a strong position to threaten Washington, D.C. and promising a sequel. Gingrich avoids the clichéd ways of refighting the three-day battle and argues that the traditionally assumed missed opportunities would not have shifted the battle. Instead, he has Lee's army head south, forcing the North to confront them on ground chosen by the South rather than fight uphill at Little Round Top. A great read.

Grover Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform.

topics:
Economics, Books, Constitution, Law, Iraq