We live by our opinions. While other people’s opinions are called illusions, if they pose no threat to our interests, and prejudices if they do, we call our own opinions “truth” or fundamental principles, if we are fools; if we are more cautious we prefer to speak of theories and hypotheses
Many years ago, to test the gullibility of colleagues and readers, I started the rumor that I was being considered as a possible Presidential candidate. No one I know could be that gullible? Think again, one prominent libertarian-leaning conservative called to find out if it was true. Obviously, he was sounding me out for a cabinet appointment. A few years later, I printed a piece, which I explicitly attributed to a dream, in which I was being dragged to the Hague to be put on trial for complicity in Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal policies in Kosovo. Again, who would believe it?...
If Donald Trump is doomed to endure a second ordeal of impeachment proceedings, what are we to expect?
Part two in the podcast series in which Dr. Fleming, with Rex Scott and Jim Easton, grapple with the literal meaning of every word in the prayer we are given as the model by Jesus Christ.
Jessica Powers was born less than three hours from our house, in Mauston, Wisconsin, in 1905. In 1941 she entered a Carmelite convent in Pewaukee, where she received the name Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit.
Doubtless the gentle reader appreciates that in two hundred or more posts published in this space during the term of the outgoing administration I hardly ever mentioned President Trump. Instead I sat on my hands, which kept me from biting my nails, and watched the spectacle unfold. Yet kicking a man when he’s down is hardly comme il faut…
Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such a heavy mind!
America zooms – or Zooms – into 2021 the laughingstock of the world. The global Guarantor of Democracy, bombing foreign lands with allegedly faulty elections at the drop of a parasol, continues limping toward a January 5 dual election for U.S. Senators from Georgia, a January 6 possible validation or invalidation of the presidential election by Congress and a January 20 inauguration of somebody who might have won the November 3 election.
Coming out of his seclusion, Mickey announced a monster meeting in a field outside of Chequamegon. He did not have time to build a stage, but there was a nice little stream flowing through the field. One side of the ground was flat with room for hundreds of people to stand or spread out picnic blankets, and on the other side, there was a steep bank, which Mickey mounted, to make his pitch, which is why his speech has gone down in history as the “Sermon of the Mountebank.”
This review of David Donald’s Lincoln ( New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1996) was commissioned and published by the Spectator (London), for which I wrote with some frequency, once upon a time before the world ceased pretending to exist.
