The Obama administration has reached the unenviable stage in
which it’s almost impossible to determine where one scandal ends
and another begins.
The most recent case in point is President Obama’s decision to
kinda sorta intervene in the Syrian civil...
Conservative
politicians in the modern world generally despise their own voters.
They need them at election time, but they do not enjoy meeting
them, and find their views on morals, migration, education, and
crime embarrassing. This is a problem only when...
Despite his evident reluctance to take America into the Syrian
civil war, President Barack Obama appears to be traveling down that
road step-by-step. He has decided the U.S. will provide weapons to
the insurgents. If that action fails to transform the con...
“Wooly Bully,” the famous hit of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs,
was recorded almost fifty years ago. It begins with the bland
assertion, “Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.” But today, the
mere existence of that innocent sounding conversation...
Remember the power ballad? It was a subgenre of rock music
pioneered by Boston in 1976 and Styx a year later. From
near-symphonic beginnings in “More Than a Feeling” and “Come Sail
Away,” the power ballad elbowed its way to prominence in the early...
The
ShahBy Abbas
Milani(Palgrave Macmillan, 496 pages, $18
paperback edition)
The Islamic Republic of Iran has elected a “moderate” successor
to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, infamous for his threat-laced
apocalyptic rhetoric. All the candida...
Although I enjoyed the first season of Mad Men, which
aired in 2007, I got a bit bored with it thereafter. It seemed to
me to have degenerated into mere soap opera. This was also true of
The Sopranos, which the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner,
had worked...
A top-shelf gag of Evelyn Waugh’s, often misquoted, is recorded
in the old misanthrope’s diaries.
Upon learning that a benign tumor had been removed from Randolph
Churchill’s lung, he remarked to a friend that “it was a typical
triumph of modern s...
Tuesday
Today, while I was visiting my son and daughter in law and
granddaughter in wonderful Greenville, SC, marveling at the loving
gift my son and his wife had given me for Father’s Day — a
triptych of my Pop, me, and Tommy and his daughter, th...
Talk about burying the lead. In a
piece in its upcoming Sunday magazine, the New York
Times allows in an absurdly roundabout way that a recent study
has found that the vast majority of women denied abortions end up
glad that they gave birth.
If you blink...
