The idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled by the orgy of self-congratulation and rationalization that accompanies the dual anniversaries of Harry Truman's decision to atom bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Want...
It is a symptom of the consensus disease in American politics that veteran Justice Department bureaucrat Robert Mueller was confirmed as head of the FBI without a single dissenting vote in the U.S. Senate. Despite a good deal of posturing in the Judiciary Committee,...
In the Golden Age of the exploring colonists, the trailblazers were anthropologists, botanists, soldiers and, later, benevolent trading companies. These fine gentlemen categorized and conquered, bringing glory, wisdom and riches back to the motherland, but little...
I've always loved needling Bill Kristol and his neoconservative buddies as lefties in conservative drag: their whole "national greatness" agenda is such a dead giveaway that I often wondered how anyone to the right of, say, John McCain, could possibly be taken in by...
AN ECHT LIBERAL IN BISMARCKIAN GERMANY Somehow, in my last column I wandered into 19th-century Germany. I wish to dwell there long enough to say something about perhaps the most echt ("genuine") of all late 19th-century German liberals, Eugen Richter. Anyone who has...
On August 31, the UN will convene a conference on racism that has already caused a storm of controversy here in the United States and abroad. We have only to invoke its formal name, the "World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related...
A recent New York Post editorial deplored the deepening US commitment in the Balkans and wondered why the Bush administration wasn't following through on Dubya's campaign promise to get us out of that particular quagmire. Noting the President's pronouncement that the...
Our political culture – insofar as it is intelligible to speak of such a concept – seems to have a gift for asking the wrong, mostly irrelevant, questions and then obsessing about them at great and usually unhelpful length. Thus in recent weeks we have heard...
