Crunchy Con: April 2007 Archives

Matthew Yglesias comments on conservative team spirit, riffing off this part of Brooks's last column, the one about prospects for conservatives:

Second, there is the corrupting influence of teamism. Being a good conservative now means sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking new and adventurous thoughts. Those who stray from the reservation are accused of selling out to the mainstream media by the guardians of conservative correctness.

So says Brooks. Yglesias responds:

That said, why shouldn't "being a good conservative" mean "sticking together with other conservatives?" It seems to me that that's exactly what it ought to mean.

Well, because to go along with whatever most people who call themselves conservative are pushing in a given time or place can mean violating conservative principle. Were the conservatives who signed off on the crazy pork-barrel spending during the years when the presidency and the Congress were in putatively conservative hands being "good conservatives" -- or just team players? Or something that implicates me: when the conservative mainstream marched off rah-rah to war, and condemned conservatives who didn't agree with us as somehow false conservatives, were we really being true conservatives, or were we wielding the term "conservative" as a way to suppress thought?

Obviously I have a personal interest in this question, because I've tried to make the case for my sort of neotraditionalist conservatism based on conservative principles. Some critics, rather than argue the principles, have decided that because my ideas don't sound like the standard-gauge GOP line, especially on economics and culture, then they couldn't possibly be conservative. On the other side, a fellow I met at the Kirk conference recently, who said he was moving toward the left, wondered why I had to identify as a conservative at all. I told him that I was, or was striving to be, a Kirkian conservative. If that put me closer to Democratic Party policy on some matters, well, so be it. I don't see that that makes me a bad conservative, but it does make me not such a good Republican. I imagine pro-life Democrats who remain so out of liberal conviction that tells them the law should protect the most vulnerable human beings might feel the same way.

Point is, whether we're on the left or the right, we can't all be eclectic gadflies and get things accomplished in the political realm. But when any movement gets caught up in groupthink, and forgets first principles in favor of power politics, it runs the risk of ossifying. As Burke said, change is the method by which we will conserve that which most needs conserving. What we conservatives should be doing is seeking to reinterpret our principles in light of present circumstances, and figuring out how they might best be transformed into policy. I fail to see what is to be gained by treating conservatism as if it were a dogmatic religion.

An Orthodox reader writes to point out a local church tradition we could do without.

"On the other hand," he suggests, "if combined with liquor this might be a way to evangelize the South."

Hmm...

I've come to see SCOTUS's recent partial-birth abortion decision like this: it's a good that the Court put a limit, however minor, on the unrestricted practice of abortion, but the reasoning here is pretty feeble. As William Saletan points out, the only thing separating an unborn child protected by the SCOTUS ruling from one the exact same age who could be legally killed by dismemberment is a matter of inches. It makes no moral sense to say that a late-term baby whose life is protected by law because it has been partially born has no right to life even though she resides wholly inside the mother's womb.

That being said, doesn't this put pro-lifers more or less on the same ground as pro-choice Roe diehards, in that we appreciate a weakly-reasoned SCOTUS ruling for its instrumental value? I don't feel so great about that.

Saletan, who is pro-choice, points out that the next front for pro-lifers is passing bills requiring women seeking abortions to watch an ultrasound image of their unborn children before exterminating them. He writes, "Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we." More:

Critics complain that these bills seek to "bias," "coerce," and "guilt-trip" women. Come on. Women aren't too weak to face the truth. If you don't want to look at the video, you don't have to. But you should look at it, and so should the guy who got you pregnant, because the decision you're about to make is as grave as it gets.

UPDATE: A lawyer reader disagrees about my negativity on the SCOTUS ruling, writing:

While I agree with you about being happy on the way this case turned out, I have to disagree with the assertion that the reasoning was feeble or weak. After distinguishing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act from the one struck down in Stenberg, the Court does not have to give reasons why "intact D&E" and "D&E" are different and therefore one is better, morally, than the other.

What the Court does (and should do) is examine Congress' factual findings regarding the banned procedure. While some of the conclusions are disputed, the Court rightly decided that Congressional factual findings are due more deference than some district court judge's findings made in this trial. That was as far as the Court needed to go, it was merely an application of law.

The difference between reliance on this case and reliance on Roe is that this case is not made up whole-cloth. It's a standard application of legal principles, settled precedent, and not the hijacking of the Constitution and replacing it with personal preferences. While it's not as far-reaching as Justice Thomas's dissent would wish (ie, reversal of Roe v. Wade), that question wasn't properly before the Court and it properly wasn't reached in the majority opinion.

Really sad news this morning: the historic Eastern Market on Washington's Capitol Hill burned down last night. I used to shop there when I lived on the Hill, and loved it. The WaPo's Marc Fisher gets it right in this requiem:

Eastern Market was what people talk about when they get all misty about the possibilities of a city. It was a place where people came not merely to gather necessities or shop for frills, but rather a place where people came to see and be among each other. I don't live on the Hill. I don't even live within 20 minutes of the Hill. But my family and I try to get over to Eastern Market regularly because we know for a certainty that we will run into people we know, that we will meet folks who will enrich our lives, and that we will feel as if we are part of something less random than a walk through downtown or a visit to a suburban shopping center.

The Hill residents who live nearby and stop in at the Market each morning or afternoon to buy meat, cheese, bread or produce, or the people who make it a habit to buy a salmon cake or crab cake from Market Lunch on the way to work are, along with the merchants, the heart of Eastern Market. This was the kind of gathering spot that many city neighborhoods once had. After the collapse of the O Street Market in Shaw and the conversion of a similar facility in Georgetown into a very upscale gourmet shop, Eastern Market was all we had left. It became, all at once, a neighborhood marketplace, a symbol of what the District could be for people of all races and economic levels, and a draw for tourists and visitors.

Citing US military documents, today's WaPo reports that the Maliki government has been cashiering Iraqi military and police officials who have been aggressively going after Shia militia leaders:

"Their only crimes or offenses were they were successful" against the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia, said Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, commanding general of the Iraq Assistance Group, which works with Iraqi security forces. "I'm tired of seeing good Iraqi officers having to look over their shoulders when they're trying to do the right thing."

Do you remember the three goals that President Bush, in announcing the surge, said he expected the Iraqi government to make progress on? Oil revenue-sharing, reversing de-Baathification, and amending the constitution? They're all but dead in the water. And while our soldiers risk their lives in oppressive heat daily to make Baghdad safer, the Iraqi Parliament is planning to take a couple of months off this summer (better not do that, fellas, said the House Armed Services Committee chairman today).

But look, here's the really stunning evidence of the collapse of White House policy. The CBS News/New York Times poll last week made news because of its findings about how public opinion has become more favorable with regard to the environment. But check out the full poll results in this PDF file. According to the poll question Do you think the United States should or should not set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq sometime in 2008?, 64 percent said yes, 32 percent said no. That's a seven-point increase in support for a troop withdrawal deadline in only two weeks.

And this question's response is a stunner:
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Currently, President Bush and Congress disagree about what to do about U.S. troop levels in Iraq. Who do you think should have the final say about troop levels in Iraq: the President or Congress?

Get this: 57 percent of those polled believe Congress, not the Commander in Chief, should have the final say over troop levels. Only 35 percent said that the president should retain ultimate authority in this regard. The president lost nine points on this question in just two weeks. That is a collapse.
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Condi Rice said yesterday that the administration won't accept any timetables on a spending bill. She's just whistling past the graveyard. Reality is going to impose a timetable on this president and his party. When Bush vetoes the military spending bill this week and sends it back to Congress, they should pass a compromise that funds the troops, without a withdrawal deadline -- but only for the next six months. Let's revisit the funding issue in November after 10 months of surging. We'll see how many Republicans are willing to stand by "no withdrawal deadline" staring down the barrel of an election year.

Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer rips ex-CIA director George Tenet over his new self-exculpatory book. Brutal....

David Brooks writes today (behind Times Select) that the Republican Party's mood on Capitol Hill is that of a slope-shouldered mob passively marching off a cliff. Excerpt:And at the presidential level, things are even worse. The party is blessed with...

It's like when Martin and Lewis broke up. It's like when Lennon and McCartney split. It's like the peanut butter disassociating itself from the chocolatey coating in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. I speak, naturellement of Ross and Reihan going...

Michael Medved told me a while back, just after my first child was born, that I shouldn't be under the impression that my wife and I could create for our children an environment that would be sufficient to shape their...

My brother-in-law Michael James Leming, a Louisiana National Guard officer, got his deployment orders on Friday. He's shipping out to Baghdad, via a short training stint in Wisconsin, on July 15. That's later than we thought it would be, but...

William F. Buckley is not optimistic on Iraq:It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an...

A soldier-reader in either Iraq or Afghanistan who posts here under the name "AnotherBeliever" put this on the most recent war thread here last night. Well worth reading:We soldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, even those of us who...

1. Saith Ruth Gledhill, the BBC will air, as part of its Sunday worship programming, a recording of a "gay mass" from San Francisco's church of the Most Holy Redeemer, a Catholic congregation in the Castro. The event happened last...

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's part of David Byrne's posting on the great bee disappearance afoot worldwide now:According to Einstein we’ve got a little over 4 years. Here’s a quote from him: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the...

This week I read "Plenty," a book written by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who started the famous "100 Mile Diet" (only eating food raised within 100 miles of where you live). The book tells the story of what it...

Last night at bedtime, I read around in E.B. Sledge's WW2 memoir "With the Old Breed." Not the thing to read before sleep. Sledge was a Marine who fought heroically on Peliliu, Okinawa and other island hellholes. He writes of...

Oh my. Bob Novak reports that Bush has tunneled down deep and is not, not, not going to abandon Gonzales, no matter how much it costs him:Such derision of Gonzales is viewed by Bush as the arrogance of Washington, and...

You see the news that Toyota has passed General Motors to become the world's No. 1 car retailer? In this interview with a BusinessWeek automotive correspondent, Toyota's top US auto executive explains that money isn't the most important arbiter of...

The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was in Dallas last night to give a talk at an awards dinner. I was lucky enough to hear his speech, which included showing clips from his upcoming 14.5-hour PBS documentary "The War," which is...

This is how our civilization will die: not with a bang, but with an attaboy, champ, you're doin' great! The Stuart Smalley-ization of America proceedeth apace......

Well now:WASHINGTON, April 24 — Melamine, the chemical suspected in the deaths of pets around the country, was in food given to hogs and chickens in several states, and the Food and Drug Administration is trying to determine if the...

First Lady Laura Bush, on the Today show this morning, was asked about the war and its effect. She answered: “Believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this.”Really? No one? No one...

Writing on today's NYT op-ed page, Linda Hirshman says it's just awful that more women are dropping out of the work force to become stay-at-home moms:New mothers with husbands in the top 20 percent of earnings work least, the report...

Four years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, Spengler hailed the ongoing release of the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy as "the most important cultural event of the past decade" (a claim he backtracked on later). In...

Archbishop Chaput has written the most important thing you will read today. I cannot say enough good things about this talk and its significance. It explores Kirk's view that conservatism is built on a fundamental recognition that the material order...

Photographer Norris Harrington photographed an eerie statue at Dallas's Fair Park. Look at the interesting shadow cast by this statue; it brings to mind the statue of the demon Pazuzufrom the Exorcist movies. Ever so slightly creepy, that....

A reader in Singapore sends this cool video clip of a Bjork-like singer named Feist, who sounds like a non-insane Bjork (did you see Bjork on SNL over the weekend? Banshee time, have mercy!). It reminds me of an obscure...

Readers continue to write me privately about Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita." One non-Christian reader wrote to say that in his reading, the first chapter offers insight into the Orthodox mind because of the way the Devil says that...

The most obnoxious thing about this Tony Auth cartoon depicting the Supreme Court justices who ruled in the majority on the partial-birth decision as Christian bishops is its facile assumption that the only reason anybody could oppose partial-birth abortion is...

A soldier serving in Afghanistan wants to know how come President Bush orders flags lowered at his Afghanistan base to commemorate the deaths of the Virginia Tech students, but not the deaths of US soldiers based there....

I had a conversation today with a colleague about why it is that the professoriat seems so irrelevant to the national conversation. Why are all our public intellectuals either think-tankers or journalists? One reason Camille Paglia is so captivating is...

I'm working right now on an editorial about the life and times of Boris Yeltsin. Two images come to mind, both of which tell us something true about him. The first was his standing on top of the tank outside...

Edward Cardinal Egan, the Archbishop of New York, gives an interview to the New York Times today. When asked why he hasn't followed the lead of other archdioceses and made his archdiocese's financial report public -- after all, whose money...

Couple of things.1. In a column I wrote last week, adapted from a blog post here, I mentioned that discovering Kierkegaard in college helped lift me out of my freshman-year depression and introduced me to the living Christian faith as...

Here's my column from today's paper, based on my interview with Camille Paglia. It's probably the only place in the history of the written word you will find the names of Camille Paglia and Russell Kirk in the same paragraph,...

Here's a letter to the editor from today's NYTimes Magazine:Thank you for Russell Shorto’s insightful article (April 8) on Pope Benedict XVI and his determination to provide a spiritual underpinning for an increasingly secularized West.The pontiff may well be correct...

Maybe the Virginia murderer was mentally ill. Maybe he was wicked. Maybe he had been abused by others. Maybe a combination of all these things. Or maybe, as Bible Girl says, Cho Seung-Hui was oppressed or possessed by evil spirit:I...

For Christians only: take this online quiz to find out if you are a heretic. Happily for all, Your Working Boy is 100 percent Chalcedon-compliant....

Ross notices conservatives like Mark Levin getting all mad at Harry Reid for saying that we've lost the Iraq War, and asks:Is there any imaginable point in any imaginable conflict where Mark Levin would admit that the United States had...

Terry Mattingly sends an amazing WaPo piece about a recent social experiment the Post conducted in a busy DC metro station at rush hour. The post paid Joshua Bell, one of the world's leading classical violinists, to pose as a...

Via the Plank comes this McClatchy report with some thrilling news:WASHINGTON - Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have...

Megan McArdle, a libertarian who considers herself to be "moderately pro-choice," doesn't like the SCOTUS decision on partial-birth abortion, but believes that America's abortion politics would probably benefit from Roe being overturned and the abortion issue being sent back to...

Alec Baldwin goes medieval on his 12-year-old daughter. If you listen to this phone message, which was released publicly this week by ex-wife Kim Basinger, keep in mind that the actor is talking not to a longshoreman, but to a...

I am not a pacifist. The late Rev. George Zabelka wasn't either, but he became one after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Catholic priest here reflects on his role as a military chaplain in the south Pacific...

My Dallas Morning News friend and colleague Mike Hashimoto explains why the Cho shooting reaction reminded him why he never bothered joining the Asian American Journalists Association....

I'm often on Derb's side, but Pod's completely right here: it's bizarre and wrong to blame the dead students for not fighting back when, oh, a gun-wielding maniac bursts into their classroom and starts firing. God bless the teachers and...

President Bush thinks AG Gonzales did fine today on the Hill. Whatever they're drinking at the White House, I need me some. Reality is overrated....

I won't like to David Brooks's column today, because it's behind TimesSelect, and my cookie won't work, so I'm flat out of luck. But it's about how discoveries in neurochemistry and genetics are undermining the idea that we have free...

Rich Lowry asks if Cho's plays included savage violence and slurs aimed at women or minorities, would Virginia Tech have been so tolerant of his speech, or would they have taken concrete measures against him? It's a great question, not...

I was overjoyed yesterday by it, but on second thought, Ross is rightl, it's not as big a deal as pro-lifers wish it were or pro-choicers fear it is. Excerpt:Remarkably successful? Because a quarter-century after Roe vs. Wade, in a...

Touchstone's Tony Esolen is a remarkable writer. Here he reflects on the decline of England, as evidenced by a recent example of crushing speech there:The National Catholic Register reports that a new law has been enacted in Little Britain, on...

I'm listening to Alberto Gonzales's Senate testimony live, and boy, is he ever getting roasted. He's in deep, deep trouble. He's being evasive, he's shuffling blame off to his staffers, and he's demonstrating that he was really disengaged from running...

Russell Kirk defined "moral imagination" as the power of ethical perception. He wrote:When the moral imagination is enriched, a people find themselves capable of great thing; when it is impoverished, they cannot act effectively even for their own survival, no...

For the first time in, I dunno, two years, I'm feeling good about my 2004 vote for Bush. Because that meant John Roberts and Samuel Alito on SCOTUS. Which in turn meant today's major pro-life victory: SCOTUS upheld the federal...

This morning I was saying my prayers, and I prayed for the dead at Virginia Tech, and then for their friends and family. Then I thought to pray for the parents of the murderer ... and I paused to consider...

Max Goss at Right Reason has some kind things to say about Your Working Boy's presentation at the Kirk conference, and some illuminating commentary about Prof. Dermot Quinn's remarks on Kirk and religion (Prof. Quinn seemed to be saying that...

... Cho Seung-Hui was to dramaturgy. From his college one-act play titled "Richard McBeef":JOHN: I hate him. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick ... Richard McBeef. What kind of name is that? What an asshole name. I don't...

...is what Douglas Wilson wishes I had titled the chapter on housing in "Crunchy Cons." He really likes the chapter, by the way. I appreciate his continued critical attention to my book. He's somewhat more critical of the chapter on...

"Pat often inhabited a world of high society many of us here aren't familiar with, but we all had something profound in common with her, since she loved NR and loved Bill Buckley." -- Rich Lowry, National Review editor, gracefully...

Last night Julie and I stumbled across a PBS film about Iraq War veterans who have written about the experience of war there. It was riveting. Painful to watch at times, but we couldn't look away. I found this essay,...

This has got to be one of the strangest quotes of the day:"Above everything it's his family values we share. When we're eating our dinner, watching TV at night and we see two homosexual men kissing, it upsets us. As...

Ludwig Wittgenstein's most famous remark was surely "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." He meant it in a specific philosophical way, but I find the general sentiment appropriate in the wake of the Virginia Tech...

In the UK, fewer doctors are willing to perform abortions:The stance by [physicians], taken on ethical grounds, has led to a doubling of abortions carried out by private clinics, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The swell...

From the speech I gave in Indianapolis on Saturday:Now, I’ve been talking about applying the traditionalist conservative worldview toward the right ordering of our relationship to the world as it is. But I think the most delightful aspect of crunchy...

"The slave-labor camps of the communist Chinese are economically efficient, after a fashion – but only because they take no reckoning of human lives or moral principles. Thus our American economy, though good in itself, is important not merely for...

For your Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse file, this story from the latest issue of New Scientist, about the return of a disease that devastates wheat crops, and which stands to put the whole world into famine:"This thing has immense...

And so, it happens again, this time at Virginia Tech. One man -- evil, insane, or both -- has ended the lives of at least 31 people (including his own), and wounded an unknown number of others. For both the...

Sad news this morning that William F. Buckley's wife Patricia has died. Julie and I were remembering this morning the time we went with a National Review group to the Buckleys' place in Connecticut for a magazine staff cookout. Pat...

Well, that was fun. It’s really encouraging to get together with people who are intensely interested in the life of the mind, and in traditionalism, to drink wine and talk about ideas. Specifically about Russell Kirk’s ideas, and what we’re...

Oh, this is supah-fine. So is this. Masterful. Anything I'd have to say would just be bouncing the rubble. Well done, Daniel, well done....

So I come back to my room here at the Columbia Club in Indianapolis after the ISI dinner, and call Julie to say goodnight to the boys. She answers the phone like this: "We're fine!""Is something wrong?""You don't know?"Turns out...

If the weather cooperates, I'll be leaving later today for Indianapolis, where I'll be speaking at ISI's Saturday conference on "Russell Kirk and the Prospects for Conservatism." If you're a crunchy con or any other sort of traditionalist in the...

I had a blast today talking on the phone with Camille Paglia. I hadn't spoken to her in several years. I'm writing a column in connection with a local humanities event she had something to do with, so I'm saving...

Caleb Stegall, who's writing a book called "Kansas First!", e-mails to say:I was driving this morning and (like a good American) growing bored with the silence so I flipped on the radio and it happened to be Rush Limbaugh, who...

Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.) has been a war hawk. He teaches at West Point, and has just come back from touring the Middle East. He talked to a Dallas Morning News reporter yesterday in Dallas. Read it and weep. Or...

Lots of buzz today about a Wall Street Journal cover story on Europe's evangelical atheism. It's a subscriber-only story online, so I can't link here. Here's how it starts:CAEN, France -- With 40 minutes to go before show time, the...

I completely agree with John Podhoretz about how classy the three exonerated Duke lacrosse men were yesterday in that press conference. I feel pretty strongly about that case for some personal reasons. For one, my first impulse was to believe...

The editorial board met today with George Abercrombie, who heads US operations for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman La Roche. He's in Dallas today to speak to a group at SMU's business school about the necessity for corporations to have...

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democratic candidate for president of a nation that faces serious crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, economically (re: the deficit and entitlements), immigration ... is on TV now being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer about Don Imus's big mouth....

I'm watching on CNN right now coverage of an anti-Imus rally at Rutgers, and I'm thinking if anything makes me feel sorry for the wrinkled old buzzard, it's this "Bonfire of the Vanities"-style pile-on. That bathetic press conference by the...

There is, or was, a little Orthodox monastery in Blanco, Texas -- they were freelance for a while, I think, then at least for a time hooked up with ROCOR, which I believe gave them the boot -- which throughout...

Well, brethren and sistren, I have returned. I see that the Murphy thing blew up in my absence, and that James Taranto got it all explained for us. You will notice that in my initial posting on the foofarah, I...

I will be away from the blog for a day or so, and headed to the New York area to give a talk on Tuesday at Bergen Community College. No new postings till after I get back. Y'all be good...

Two bishops -- the Catholic bishop for the British armed forces, and the Anglican bishop of Rochester, a top Anglican prelate -- have come out in praise of the Iranians for releasing British captives! Excerpt:The Roman Catholic bishop who oversees...

He's a retired law professor from Princeton and a Marine Corps veteran. If this story is true -- and I devoutly hope that reporters are checking it out -- he is an enemy of the state simply because he criticized...

The British captives are going to make a nice sum selling the rights to their stories for film and video. The Ministry of Defence approves! Excerpt:John Tindell, the father of Joe Tindell, another of the hostages, said his son had...

Stuart Buck sends a link to a one-hour video conversation between Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben. Happily for my work schedule this afternoon, my Mac here at home doesn't have the right plug-ins to watch it. Later, on the laptop,...

A Michigan reader writes:Wal-Marts, sprawl, strip-malls, downtown businesses closing, mom-and-pop stores being bought out, local cultures being obliterated, traditions evaporating, having to drive anywhere of significance, opportunities to take walks and greet the people in your neighborhood disappearing, buildings with...

For we who appreciate the University of Dallas as a Catholic institution of higher learning that's reliably traditional, this blog item from the Dallas Morning News' metro desk. Kent Fischer is an education reporter:Apparently the University of Dallas wants to...

...and boy, is he sleepy. Well, I am. Was. I'm drinking coffee now WITH HALF-AND-HALF, YAY! We got in from Pascha liturgy at 5 a.m., exhausted and very, very happy. This was our first Pascha as Orthodox Christians, and it...

Charles Moore, a Catholic and distinguished British editor, writes about attending a high-profile public debate recently on the subject of whether or not society would be better off without religion. A fair-minded fellow, Moore admits that the atheists on the...

Columnist Marina Hyde, writing in Britain's leftist daily The Guardian, inadvertently answers Harvey's call to provide military figures critical of the British sailors' behavior in Iranian captivity. (The title of this blog post, and the reference in her final line,...

It is Holy Saturday here in Dallas, Texas, and a fire burns in my hearth here at home, and I'm looking out the window of my home office at snowflakes falling. And I can hear birds singing....

Woke up this morning thinking about this British sailor business again, and about some things I've been reading lately to prepare for my Russell Kirk lecture a week from today in Indianapolis. Well, really I woke up thinking about coffee,...

Even though the Iranians violated the Geneva Conventions in the way they treated the British troops, they did not apparently engage in anything resembling the kind of torture that the US has visited upon its detainees, thanks to Alberto Gonzales's...

I've been quite critical of the behavior of the British soldiers in captivity, denouncing their country in propaganda broadcasts for the Iranians, but I've been saying for a couple of days on this site that once we hear from them,...

Today's NYT reports on the growing popularity of niche retirement communities for Baby Boomers. They're communities built around things shared in common: sexual orientation, religion, vegetarianism, hippieness, and so forth. Excerpt:“This old idea of being born in a town that...

Get a load of this:Alan Mulally, Ford Motor Co.'s new president and chief executive, received compensation valued at $39.1 million during his four months on the job last year, according to an analysis of a federal regulatory filing made Thursday.Mulally...

We don't watch a lot of TV around here, not so much out of any sense of virtue, as much as because it gets in the way of life. If there's any TV to be watched, it's usually whatever comes...

I'll leave this evening on a happier note, also from the Atlantic. The magazine's indispensable food writer, Corby Kummer, tells of a new Italian grocery store that supposedly makes Whole Foods look like A&P -- and it's coming to America....

Caitlin Flanagan has a wrenching essay in the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly, about abortion. Here's the link, but I'm betting it's subscriber-only. She's pro-choice. Here's part of the reason why:The history of abortion is a history of stories,...

You want to know the difference between those British sailors all chummy with Ahmadinejad, and American POW John McCain? Read this, the whole thing. It's McCain's account, given shortly after he returned from prison camp in North Vietnam of his...

When Clive Davis posts, I listen. And today he's tough on us American rightists who are appalled by the behavior of the British sailors who made propaganda broadcasts for the Iranians while in captivity. He focuses on Derb, who wouldn't...

I've been living in north Texas for four years, as of this month. Four years is a long time to go without any decent Chinese food (I'll be in NYC one day next week, and Father Wilson and I intend...

I'd been looking forward to seeing "The Reaping," in part because I like supernatural thrillers, but mostly because it was filmed in my hometown, St. Francisville, and Hillary Swank lived with her then-husband just up the road from my mom...

Genetics, pretty much. And that they are the Chosen People. So says Charles Murray, writing in Commentary (where my wife, the lovely Shiksabelle, used to work, which probably helps explain why she observed the boys fighting in the back yard...

The British hostages held by Iran are free. I can't see that the Blair government had any realistic choice but to negotiate, given how weak Britain is militarily. We're vastly stronger, but would it have been in America's interest to...

The European Union has instructed its spokesmen to use the phrase "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" instead of "Islamic terrorism." This, to avoid giving offense by, you know, suggesting that Islam has anything to do with terrorism or jihad (jihad,...

I deleted the post from earlier this week about teacher Paula Payne and her lawsuit victory. It occurred to me that even though I've not spoken to any of my family members who work in the school system that lost...

Just when you think you've heard it all...The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last writes (in the Philly Inquirer) about the Bush administration's chronic and deeply self-destructive problem with putting people in important jobs whose only real qualification is political loyalty....

An account of how the newly liberated (but not yet free to leave) prisoners at Dachau celebrated Pascha (Easter) in Dachau that year. Stunning. Excerpt:On Easter Sunday, May 6th (April 23rd according to the Church calendar), - which ominously fell...

A friend sends me a link to an akathist (in Orthodoxy, a kind of chanted litany) of thanksgiving, which was composed by a Russian monk who died a martyr at the hands of Soviet communism. Here's an excerpt of the...

"And over all the years every up, my father has been there to say how splendid (and how deserved) was this particular up; and for every down, he has been there to say how splendid (though not at all deserved)...

Matthew Dowd, who helped G.W. Bush get elected as a top strategist in 2000 and 2004, came out against the president on the front page of The New York Times. He's become so disillusioned with the president, and especially the...

If you want me to come speak to your group about crunchy conservatism, faith and culture, conservatives and the environment, or other topics you see talked about on this here blog, I'd love to have the opportunity to consider it....

My Sunday column was a positive reappraisal of Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations." Excerpt:Here, says Mr. Huntington, is the heart of the matter:The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization...

The juniper-and-vermouth-scented reader Mark in Portland sends along a stark tale from the alt-weekly Austin Chronicle, in which the author describes a lonesome car trip through dying towns in the Plains. In some towns, people look at him with hatred....

Newt Gingrich is in trouble because he said this:"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country...

Good lord, what on earth is happening in Britain? Some schools refuse to teach about the Holocaust for fear of upsetting Muslims? Just how badly do the British people want to be dhimmis, anyway? Because that's where they're headed.On the...