I only have one question to put to conservatives who are waxing wroth about the media coverage of the Trump Administration: Why are you reading Time and the New York Times? Why are you watching ABC, CNN, and FOX?
To Taine’s great credit, he was not taken in by the myth of two revolutions: the British-style reformist revolution of 1789, followed by the Jacobin Terror caused by a few bad men who betrayed the spirit of 1789. This pernicious myth–like the myth of the good Kerensky in 1917 or of England’s Glorious Revolution–blinds us to the realities of our own times, when socialists and Trotskyists complain that 60’s radicals betrayed the dream.
Some of my own childhood favorites from A Child’s Garden of Verses, plus a modernist poem possibly inspired by Stevenson.
Welcome to the first installment of this new feature, available to all registered subscribers. Thomas Fleming and Rex Scott give 300 seconds on a big news story.
Christian pastors and leaders throughout history have often been stupid, ignorant, and corrupt, always eager to twist the Faith to fit whatever opinions are fashionable, but the current generation of vipers is really the limit.
These poems of Henry Timrod, the finest poet of the War Between the States, are posted courtesy of Vince Cornell:
I genuinely pity most of the rich and/or famous people I have known. It is as if the savages were right to fear the black box that would take their soul. People who spend their lives on screen seem to end up drained of all reality, hollow shells.
I never liked Robert de Niro as an actor–it’s all just mugging for the camera. I’d rather watch Jerry Lewis. But you gotta admit he’s right on Trump. I mean there is nothing too low for this charlatan, including sucking up to the world’s meanest dictator. And for what? Getting a declaration that the funny little fat guy is going to denuclearize Korea. Who cares. Bring it on. Now, Obama, there was a real negotiator. He knew how to give billions of dollars of paybacks and benefits to Iran and Korea, and so far we haven’t had a war. If...
In the early years of the new millennium I wrote a series of short columns on the political and ethical distortions of language. This bit of fluff, trifling as it is, should be enough to debunk the nonsense of democracy The People, No! Nobody can define democracy–probably nobody wants to–and if any honest man succeeded in defining it, the liars (always in the vast majority of mankind) would stone him to death for his pains. Democracy means, literally, rule by the people or rather, As Roger Scruton puts it (in his very useful Dictionary of Political Thought), “by the people...
Many libertarians and classical liberals regard St. Thomas Aquinas as one of the enemies of liberty, of economic liberty in particular. According to these critics (and to some self-described Thomists), Thomas is supposed to have devised an abstract and systematic theory of an ideal state, which would have the power to regulate the marketplace by establishing a quasi-Marxian “just price” for all goods and by prohibiting all interest on investments. This opinion of Thomas’s economic views is substantially wrong, both in the details and in its overall point of view. Although Thomas was far from being a classical liberal, his moral and political philosophy, once properly understood, gives no support to statism in any form.
