F.H. Buckley
One of my favorite comedians is Alfred Brooks, whose Looking for Comedy in the Moslem World portrayed a Jewish comic (himself) trying to pitch a sitcom that would appeal to Moslems. What he came up with was a comedy about…
WELL, THAT WAS A BUMMER. Still, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.The good news is it’s going to get a lot worse. The bill for…
OVER THE LAST 250 YEARS there have been four American constitutions, each giving us a very different form of government. The first constitution was that of the pre-Revolution Crown colonies, under which royal governors dominated the elected assemblies. These were…
The failures of American foreign policy may be seen in the ashes of the Benghazi mission, and the question that remains is how we may repair the damage. Manifestly, what we’ve done up to now has been inadequate, and it’s…
THE HOTTEST BOOK THIS SUMMER is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, on how liberals and conservatives see the world differently. Haidt, an NYU psychologist, wrote the book to explain that conservatives are not the morally repellant lizardbrains that his fellow…
THIS IS THE CENTURY OF THE RULE OF LAW. In the 20th century, that wasn’t thought so important, and Milton Friedman argued that to succeed, all a country need do was shrink the state by privatization: Just after the Berlin…
There’s a uniquely American ritual that has so far escaped the attention of cultural anthropologists. A group of people huddle, near a water cooler perhaps. One of them lowers his head, looks nervously from side to side, and then begins…
There is a certain kind of inside-the-beltway conservative (you know the type) who emerges from his cocoon from time to time with the good news that all is well in America. “We’re a center-right country,” he tells us. “It can’t…
American Exceptionalism has taken a few hits of late, with the country lagging in important measures of performance. We used to think America was the freest country in the world, but now the Heritage Foundation begs to disagree. It ranks…
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It By Lawrence Lessig (Twelve, 383 pages, $26.99) Larry Lessig, a liberal at Harvard Law School, has written a book he thinks conservatives should read. And he’s right….
