Whatever happens in the wake of President Bush’s new Iraq strategy, one thing won’t: Saddam will not come back. This is not a statement of the obvious, or a lame joke. The power that dictators and their supporters acquire by actual acts of violence is augmented by fear—fear of their omniscience, their omnipresence, their indestructibility. Read More
The most interesting thing about Gerald Ford is that he was the only President that no one ever voted for with that office in mind. People may not have thought very hard about Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman or the other Veeps destined for higher things when they cast their Presidential ballots. But after the first Read More
I don’t know how the poet Horace managed to get an advance copy of the report of the Iraq Study Group—everyone expects leaks, but 2,000 years ahead of time?—yet he seems to have managed it: “Mountains will be in labor, the birth will be a single laughable mouse.”
James Baker is an intelligent man, so Read More
John Ruskin, the English art critic, never consummated his marriage because on his wedding night, he discovered with revulsion that his wife’s pubis did not present the smooth, polished surface of a Greek statue, but was instead covered with hair. Ho ho ho, we laugh, those sick Victorians, while our sons and daughters shave themselves Read More
John Ruskin, the English art critic, never consummated his marriage because on his wedding night, he discovered with revulsion that his wife’s pubis did not present the smooth, polished surface of a Greek statue, but was instead covered with hair. Ho ho ho, we laugh, those sick Victorians, while our sons and daughters shave themselves Read More
The other side holds no elections. No one in Al Qaeda has called for a timetable whereby they would begin to stop blowing up Iraqis and crusaders. No one in Iran has proposed a bipartisan commission to re-examine the country’s nuclear program, or its war on Jews. So every problem we had on the first Read More
The other side holds no elections. No one in Al Qaeda has called for a timetable whereby they would begin to stop blowing up Iraqis and crusaders. No one in Iran has proposed a bipartisan commission to re-examine the country’s nuclear program, or its war on Jews. So every problem we had on the first Read More
The midterm election was decisive—the election of 1874, that is. The Republicans went from a 111-seat lead over the Democrats in the House of Representatives to a 79-seat deficit. The Democrats also picked up numerous governorships and state legislatures. President Ulysses Grant still had two years to go in his second term, and the Senate Read More
The worst thing that happened to Eliot Spitzer’s gubernatorial campaign was getting caught in the Buffalo blizzard. Mother Nature can slow down the Democratic nominee, temporarily—a feat beyond the power of his Republican opponent John Faso, who, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll, trails him by 52 percentage points. Since Mr. Spitzer’s lead would, by Read More
The worst thing that happened to Eliot Spitzer’s gubernatorial campaign was getting caught in the Buffalo blizzard. Mother Nature can slow down the Democratic nominee, temporarily—a feat beyond the power of his Republican opponent John Faso, who, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll, trails him by 52 percentage points. Since Mr. Spitzer’s lead would, by Read More
