The American Spectator

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Current Wisdom

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The Spectator (UK)

The editor of the famed British weekly asks minicon David Frum(p) to comment on the state of American conservatism toward the end of the Prophet Obama’s first 100 days, and what does he get for his hospitality? More of young David’s narcissism:

I’ll make some claims on behalf of the website I edit, a forum for conservative reform and renewal titled NewMajority.com, which has run innovative and courageous pieces by young writers and veteran public servants.
(April 18, 2009)

Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC)

A Miss Janeane Garofalo, possibly a historian on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, puts the recent tax protesters in historic perspective while making Mr. Keith Olbermann’s knees knock:

“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.”
(April 16, 2009)

New York Times

As the recession grinds on, the venerable Times reports the moral costs of economic slow down in the Hawkeye State, where homosexual couples, all 23 of them, were forced to live in sin for 72 more hours:

Licenses for same-sex marriages were supposed to be issued in Iowa starting this Friday. But because of a crimped state budget, court employees will be on mandatory furlough that day and the courts will be closed. Gay couples cannot start filing for their licenses until Monday.
(April 24, 2009)

Harvard Crimson

A promising investigative journalist working for the student gazette of Harvard State University passes on a controversial e-mail from that great university’s Muslim chaplain, the Rev. Taha Abdul-Basser (Class of ’96), wherein the holy man puts in a good word for haria law’s injunction to butcher a lapsed Mohammedan if the slacker refuses to return to the faith and pray in the now-familiar bottoms-up fashion:

There is a great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostasy]), and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of hegemonic modern human-right discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.
(April 14, 2009)

University of Chicago Magazine

In the correspondence section where old Maroons gather in the afterglow of days gone by, Michael from San Francisco remains true blue for the North Vietnamese while still unafraid of those business-school ruffians:

There is something unsettling about the cover feature on David Booth. Something is missing in the story of a student arriving at the U of C in 1969 with the campus and country seething with turmoil, and the only mention of Vietnam is how school kept him from the war. To speak only of the stimulating atmosphere and the great departmental parties, while thousands of others, mostly of a different color and economic class, were being maimed and killed, is to display a convenient myopia. Those of us who marched at the time recall the appearance of business-school students, from their distant precincts, to obstruct the protests to a brutal war.
Michael Brant, AB’70, AM’82
San Francisco
(March/April 2009)