From Edmund Burke to Richard Weaver, conservatives urged respect for a code of chivalry not because they were simply quaint but because chivalry at its best represented a restraint against the sheer brutalization of human life. Nowadays, that conservatism is itself quaint, replaced by a creed that believes just about anything is justified [...]
If Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts had had their way, our Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches would have diminished earlier this week. This editorial from the Roanoke Times is a little crude, but get the principle right. And this part puts the “conservative” justices’ argument in a nutshell:
The court Wednesday ruled 5-3 that [...]
Late last year the Lincoln Group, a Pentagon contractor, attracted notoriety for planting pro-American stories in Iraqi newspapers. Now the Defense Department has decided that the Lincoln Group did not violate any of the government’s rules by doing so. Pentagon contractors are free to misrepresent themselves in the foreign press.
That’s bad enough; what’s worse [...]
Over at National Review Online, John Podhoretz is at it again. He’s outraged by Andrew Stuttaford’s temerity in criticizing Tony Blair. To put his limey colleague in his place, Podhoretz resorts to a debating tactic that I have never before seen an adult try to use: Podhoretz boasts of his reading comprehension test scores [...]
Funny fellow, that Andrew Sullivan. He was grossly wrong about the Iraq War in 2003, when he supported the invasion, and he now acknowledges as much. But even when he knows he’s wrong, he insists he’s right — you see, we critics of the war from the get-go didn’t say that there absolutely [...]
RNC chief Ken Mehlman seems to be trapped in the closet of 1993. In a piece about the disarray of the Republican agenda — at this point, what can the GOP say beyond “vote for us: better the devil you know!” — the Washington Post quotes Mehlman as saying, “you’re going to have a clear [...]
If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for it. Not that Bush doesn’t deserve censure, but the Senate’s hands aren’t much cleaner than his. There’s something silly about a mugger calling an arsonist a criminal, even if it’s true.
Maybe a good way around that would be to censure Sen. Pat Roberts [...]
It’s mildly ironic that neocons like Don Feder and Junior Podhoretz dislike “V for Vendetta” so much. They wouldn’t have any reservations about, say, a Kurdish vigililante who went around blowing up Saddam’s palaces and assassinating Baathists, would they? They’re always hot on the trail of Islamo-fascism. But a film about old-style Euro-fascism [...]
I wasn’t eager to see “V for Vendetta,” but someone who calls his blog the Tory Anarchist can hardly fail to go see the movie that has the Wall Street Journal talking about anarchism. A similar sense of duty — I wanted to popularize Richard Weaver’s idea of the Great Stereopticon by tying it [...]
Young people frequently ask me what the next big thing is going to be. Should they be listening to Spiggy Topes? Maybe Zeigeist from Sweden? Plausibly; but Malcolm McLaren has tipped Cansei de Ser Sexy (”Bored of Being Sexy” in Portuguese) of Sao Paolo, Brazil, which sounds about right, particularly “Music [...]