Tom Bethell
I worry that by the time Obama is through with us, the U.S. will be a second-class country. A lot of people feel the same way. A similar concern has been in the back of my mind for years. In…
World population, once “exploding,” is still increasing, and “momentum” ensures that it will do so for decades to come. But fertility rates have tumbled. In Europe every country has fallen below replacement level. Some governments, especially France’s, are beginning to…
I am trying to be optimistic but it isn’t easy. The Obama people have been in office for less than six weeks (as I write) and yet everything seems to have gone from bad to worse. Certainly that was the…
AFTER BARACK OBAMA was sworn in, Elizabeth Alexander read her “Praise Song for the Day.” I hesitate to call it a poem because it had so little connection to poetry as that art has been understood for centuries, indeed millennia….
I write before Christmas, but our first African-American president should have been sworn in and the inaugural festivities completed by the time you read this. On a more somber note, an auxiliary bishop in Washington has drawn attention to something…
I HAVE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF World War II: the drone of distant night bombers in formation (coming from America? heading to Germany? I don’t know); the skittering contrails of a “dog fight” in a clear blue sky; great Wehrmacht-obstructing concrete…
I bought my condo in Washington, D.C., 25 years ago, for a little over $100,000; two bedrooms, two baths, in a “good” part of the city (meaning safe, about a mile north of Georgetown). As a freelance writer I had…
When I was in England this summer my brother asked me if I knew anything about “peak oil.” I wasn’t too sure, to be honest. He is inclined to accept the theory, and even gave me a book to study,…
This article ran as the “Capitol Ideas” column in the May 2008 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here. “Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is…
It took until March, by which time Senator Obama had been running for President for a full year. But when all those Rev. Jeremiah Wright quotes began to emerge, there was some decorous murmuring about how Americans needed to have…
