I’m involved in a time-consuming research project, the results of which will show up in this space sometime next week, and so there’s no column today. But I’ll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, I want to give you something to read that you might find illuminating, amusing, or perhaps both. It’s the April 30, 1999 edition of my column that preceded this one, which I called “Wartime Diary.” The war in question was the Kosovo war, the conflict that birthed this website. Just to give you a foretaste, here’s a prediction I made in that piece that seems to have stood the test of time:
“In the post-Cold War world, conservatives instinctively look askance at military intervention; as the memory of Communism recedes, what Eliot Cohen calls the ‘ornithological miracle,’ the transformation of hawks into doves and vice versa, is inevitable and inexorable. Sooner or later, the militant interventionism and global do-goodism that attracted the neocons to the ranks of the Right will be totally expunged from the conservative movement, and they will be forced to go back – back to the militant, do-gooding, global-crusading Left from which they first emerged.”
Eighteen years later, we are seeing conservatives rallying around the slogan “America First,” and questioning the utility of America’s endless wars, while the neocons ally with the left-wing of the Democratic party in a crusade to demonize Russia and smear as “Putin’s puppet” anyone who wants to shrink America’s global footprint.
While I’m not claiming Nostradamus-like powers, I think I’d be quite justified in adopting “Tomorrow’s news today” as the official slogan of this space.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
