The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The FBI and ‘Fedora’

Wow. OK, I just finished reading Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, a 1978 book by Edward Jay Epstein, and as soon as I finished it, I got on Google to solve the mystery. This is complicated. The mystery at the heart of Epstein’s book is this: Why did Oswald defect to the […]

Alienated and Angry and Arrogant

We have recently been presented with the puzzle of James Holmes, who has been arrested for the massacre that killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at a Colorado movie theatre. You have to shake your head in dismay at reading stories like this: Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of […]

America’s Decadent Elite

More than 15 years have passed since Robert Bork published Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, one of the most astute analyses of its kind ever written. Bork emphasized that the 1960s were the pivotal epoch. In his introduction, however, Bork made an important point: The remarkably sudden collapse of the “Establishment” under the assault of Sixties […]

‘Having Persevered Through Those Days of Horse Drawn Computers . . .’

Oh, you were one of the lucky ones who could afford a horse to pull your computer! When I was starting out, we had to pull our computer by hand — uphill! — to work every morning at dawn, then we’d blog all day in Fortran or Cobol, using an awl and a mallet on […]

Boreal Supremacy: Bruce Bartlett’s Tendentious History of Partisanship

Years ago, when I was living in Georgia, I coined the term boreal supremacy to describe the attitude of certain people that all things Northern were superior to all things Southern. That attitude has offended me ever since the 1970s, when Yankees started flooding into my native Atlanta, where the municipal motto might as well be, […]

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky … Obama!

Yes, comrades, they all share the same slogan: “Forward!” The Obama campaign apparently didn’t look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, “Forward” — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism. . . . The slogan “Forward!” reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected […]

Rock and Roll, and Other Subjects About Which Dan Collins Knows Nothing

Granted, this could be a very long post, but I just happened to notice Dan blathering on about some artsy New Wave poseurs and felt a need to point out the Neutral Objective Fact that no genuinely great rock and roll music was recorded after Sept. 25, 1980, the day John Bonham died. How awesome was Led Zeppelin? For the […]

The Year I Was Born: 1959

Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, Fidel Castro staged a communist revolution in Cuba, Marilyn Monroe starred in Some Like it Hot, and the British embassy was worried about Kenyan students: A memo from a British diplomat in Washington to Whitehall — released today by the National Archives in West London — sets out their […]

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