May 20, 2017

Third-raters clamor for the camera

The appointment of old FBI hand Robert Mueller to the post of special counsel, to investigate potential White House involvement in alleged Russian active measures in the past U.S. election, is just the sort of asinine behavior H.L. Mencken ...

March 11, 2017

Duke and Sexual Assault

People think of Duke University in Durham, NC as a top-tier school bumping up against the Ivies. Witnessing students on campus or in Cameron Indoor Stadium, home of the school’s vaunted basketball team, you can see why students are nicknamed th...

July 1, 2016

Brexit, Trump, and immigration

British Conservative author Peter Hitchens, brother of the deceased ex-Trotskyite author and raconteur Christopher Hitchens, weighed in with a well thought out piece for the Daily Mail pondering Brexit and what it portends for the U.K. ...

June 21, 2016

Bad blood: Britain, Brexit, and Barack

Having to listen to threats from the worst president in U.S. history is reason enough for Brits to vote to pull out of the European Union in the June 23 national referendum. The murder of Jo Cox, a female member of Parliament who supported remaini...

May 20, 2016

The revolution is being televised: Bathroom wars continue

The bizarre events surrounding the bathroom battle between the state of North Carolina and the United States have the whiff of Sarajevo in 1914.  Who knew Europe would collapse into the first world war in human history o...

May 5, 2016

Here's Who's Controlling the Bathroom Debate

The bathroom wars raging in North Carolina, set off by House Bill 2 passed by the N.C. General Assembly, have attained international attention, partly from a febrile cadre of gay activists, but largely due to the Charlotte Observer that covers the ci...

March 2, 2016

Donald Trump May Not Know The Secret Of His Success

Predicting Donald Trump would prevail over 15 other candidates back in May was perceived to mean I liked and admired him. I did not then. But, now that he has been the victim of unprecedented criticism from all sides -- Democrats, Republicans and med...

February 6, 2016

Jeb finally vindicates brother George

I wrote back in May that Jeb Bush would tumble in the polls for denying his brother George W. three times, as Peter denied Jesus, with equivocations rather than firm answers either way about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Jeb fell like a rock, exac...

November 14, 2015

Polling the plummet of higher education

Polls today are ubiquitous, either old-style or online.  But has there been a survey asking adult Americans how they feel about the recent events at the University of Missouri and Yale? Below are sample questions to ask a random sample of the...

October 6, 2015

Mass murders and the righteous radicals

The fix is in, the conspiracy of progressive left-wingers to coerce public policy.  For example, the homeless issue and mass killings can be directly linked to the implementation of radical theories by the mental health community.  In the 1...

September 28, 2015

Donald Trump: Fighting fire with fire

It was the Atlantic Monthly, not the local media that constantly cover race, who wrote up the recent address by Jeremiah Wright to the liberal congregation of a church in Chapel Hill, NC.  According to writer Clive Brook, Wright may be out of th...

September 21, 2015

Nuclear fallout from the last Republican debate

Mist from a hypothetical mushroom cloud wafted into the Reagan Library during the second presidential debate.  CNN host and interrogator Jake Tapper detonated the 100-megaton question: do the candidates feel comfortable if Donald Trump has his f...

September 12, 2015

The Buckley - Vidal debates all over again

The Buckley - Vidal debates in 1968, captured in the new film Best Of Enemies, could have been staged in 2015. The same issues  -- sexuality, race, law and order, unpopular wars -- dominated the often contentious confrontations between William F...

August 20, 2015

Sex and the senior salute

Turns out the term "senior salute" will no longer apply exclusively to West Point graduates bidding adieu.  St. Paul's, in Concord, New Hampshire, the prestigious and exclusive college preparatory school, is having its venerable...

July 7, 2015

Top ten unintended consequences of progressive rules and laws

Drum roll, please, for the top ten unintended consequences caused by progressive/radical rules and laws: 10. Decline of the bee population due to whirring noises from wind farms created by the urging of environmental activists who do not care if t...

June 21, 2015

Allen Weinstein Obituary Continues Media Cover-up

The death this week of Allen Weinstein, ninth archivist of the United States, garnered a long and well-deserved piece in the Washington Post.  However, Weinstein's role as co-chairman, with CIA Director John Deutch, of the Venona C...

May 31, 2015

How Do Democrats Rank Obama's Presidency?

Highly regarded  presidential scholar William Leuchtenburg told UNC- TV book show host and columnist DG Martin he has been asked more and more lately to  size up Barack Obama's term in office. His tepid opinion of the president...

May 23, 2015

Brotherly Betrayal: Jeb Bush's Fatal Error

Jeb Bush stepped in a cow pie and cannot wipe it off his boots. The more he attempts to explain his contradictory comments about how he feels about brother George W's 2003 invasion of Iraq, the worse he comes across as a potential Republican...

April 16, 2015

'60 Minutes' and the Duke Lacrosse scandal

CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a segment April 12, 2015 following up with former Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler, who was unfairly forced to resign in 2006.  He was a sacrificial lamb to assuage the mob, led by radical professors, screaming for ...

April 7, 2015

Rolling Stone's high crimes: the new status quo

The writer of the fake Rolling Stone magazine 12,000-word feature describing a gang rape at the University of Virginia was not terminated.  Nor was her editor.  This non-action came in the wake of an investigation by the Columbia School of ...

March 29, 2015

Why young people join jihad

People and law enforcement agencies struggle to comprehend how young Americans, Britons, and Europeans repudiate their homes and cultures to join Islamist jihadists.  The number of Americans is estimated in the thousands by CBS News; the number ...

February 20, 2015

Chapel Hill Murders: The Enemy Within

The shooting deaths in Chapel Hill, NC of two married Jordanian Muslim graduate students and the sister of the husband is bad enough without the exploitation and sensationalism surrounding the tragedy. William Barber, the president of the North ...

February 14, 2015

Boys Will Not Be Boys If Feminists Have Their Way

The National Press Club daily newsletter is a rich with nuggets that  end up comprising the biased agenda of the MSM. This week I came across an announcement inviting members to attend the Washington premiere of the film The Mask You Live I...

February 10, 2015

Climate Change and the New Comintern

That climate scientists, the Democratic Party, and the MSM have been cooking up global warming, end-of the-world scenarios comes as no surprise. As far back as 2001, Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist based on his dis...

January 30, 2015

David Cameron does it better

Cameron had no reticence depicting Islamic-related terrorism as “the perversion of one of the world’s major religions,” describing those who attack in the name of Allah as a “death cult.”  Obama’s response to ...

January 7, 2015

Codebreaking Achievement Exploited In New Film

That the magnificent achievement of breaking the German Enigma code has been exploited as a statement for gay rights and women’s equality is emblematic of the influence of the radical repurposing of history to serve the reigning politicall...

December 19, 2014

The <em>New Republic</em>'s Dirty Secret

The demise of the New Republic, a small-circulation weekly magazine with potent political influence far greater than its reach, is emblematic of publishing reality in the age of the internet.  It also represents a case study of how close Soviet ...

December 10, 2014

Feinstein's Last Stand Targets CIA

U.S. Senate Democrats plan to inflict as much harm as they can before the Republicans take over in January 2015.  This explains the timing of the 6,000-page Intelligence Committee report, released by chairman Dianne Feinstein, accusing the ...

November 21, 2014

Decapitating ISIS

“Our thoughts and prayers for the families,” the hackneyed response by officials in reaction to beheadings by ISIS, is cloaking the simmering outrage building in America.  Obama has chosen to ignore the feelings of the people and do ...

September 25, 2014

Ken Burns Makes Room on Rushmore for Eleanor Roosevelt

“Ambitious” is the obvious description of the recently aired 14-hour documentary on Theodore, Franklin, and, disappointingly, Eleanor Roosevelt. Produced by Ken Burns, the video documentarian whose often tedious productions have dominated...

September 8, 2014

New Deal for Insider Spies Could Have Prevented Snowden Case

In the espionage business, uncovering secrets passed on to the enemy by a captured insider spy is critical to resuming normal operations.  Until a thorough damage assessment is completed, intelligence agencies don’t know what data are...

August 21, 2014

Foley's Final Message

In an interview with BBC World Service in 2012, American freelance photojournalist James Foley said  he was motivated to work in Iraq, Libya, and Syria  because he and other journalists are “drawn to the human rights side” of co...

July 24, 2014

We Sent Back Elian

The US government, which has refused to act decisively to control the horde of children entering the US via Mexico from Central America (estimated to be nearly 60,000 from October 2013 to June 2014) certainly had no compunctions about expelling a hel...

July 3, 2014

Bill Ayers Escapes Again

Megyn Kelly, in a recent 2-part interview on Fox News,  encountered the same insouciance I experienced asking Bill Ayers how he justifies the damage and deaths he caused as leader of the Weather Underground domestic terror gang in the 1970s...

December 13, 2013

Duke Lacrosse Case: The Latest Outrage

In a nauseating editorial this week in the Raleigh News and Observer, Duke University president Richard Brodhead is depicted as "used to working at elite levels," which allegedly qualified him to receive one of the four 2013  Academic Leadership...

November 22, 2013

Lee Harvey Oswald's Call Did Not Go Through

The 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination has shaken the conspiracy tree and sent the media into a retrospective feeding frenzy. In this cacophony the truth fades even further. Any new opinion about the events in Dallas November 22, 1963 is besto...

October 30, 2013

CIA's Morell 'Scrubs' His Legacy on 60 Minutes

What to make of Mike Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, spilling his guts on 60 Minutes? To his credit, he did call Edward Snowden a traitor. But to say the stolen NSA documents represented the most serious betrayal in US history is a bit of ...

September 27, 2013

The Debt Ceiling Is a Red Herring

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announced last week the US central bank will continue its "quantitative easing" program, basically printing money like an African dictatorship to buy US debt. The harsh truth behind Bernanke's action makes the up...

September 13, 2013

Putin the Power Player

Former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin told the audience at the Raleigh Spy Conference (which I founded) in 2003 that Putin is a dangerous man and not to be trusted. Obama is a dorm room socialist who prefers platitudes over coherent foreign policy. N...

September 8, 2013

The French Connection in Syria

France appeared on the global stage in the current Syrian imbroglio as if out of whole cloth, the nation's single aircraft carrier steaming to the Mediterranean.  Sadly, most Americans have no clue why. There are obvious reasons, but they ...

August 10, 2013

Reds Under The Beds: Diana West Can't Sleep

Diana West comes charging in at a furious gallop unfurling the banner of treason in her recent book American Betrayal. The Secret Assault on our Nation's Character. She arrives late to the subject of Soviet infiltration of the United States. But she ...

July 8, 2013

The Fall of the Humanities

Duke University president Richard Brodhead, who abandoned his own students and took the word of a prostitute before knowing the facts in the infamous Duke Lacrosse case, has served as co- chairman of an allegedly bipartisan group convened by the Amer...

May 9, 2013

Bike Wars

Driving along at 35 MPH on a 2-lane avenue around 10 PM, a single headlight appeared in my car's path. I swerved onto a side street, shaken and uncomprehending. Leering down at me, astride a high tech bike, I could see in the light of the street lamp...

April 3, 2013

Eerily Authentic: The Americans

The Americans, an eerily authentic television series airing on the FX Channel Wednesday evenings, is about Soviet espionage "illegals," often referred to as sleeper cells during the Cold War. These "Illegals" -- meaning they operate under "no officia...

January 14, 2013

David Coleman, Education Hero

Finally, someone with clout is committed to undoing the damage done to the American educational system by radical scholars. Our hero is David Coleman, president of the College Board, a Rhodes Scholar, and a former McKinsey & Company consultant. ...

December 22, 2012

Psychiatric Community Not Stepping Up

 "Not the simplest crime scene" opined the top cop investigating the Newtown, Ct. school massacre. But what happened is simple indeed:  the dangerously mentally ill have struck again. Instead of being confined where they can be monitored an...

September 20, 2012

Regime Change

Is it going to be another Reagan landslide, with Romney tossing out Obama like Jimmy Carter? Or is there a "shift of values" in Americans like Queen Elizabeth II discerned during the outpouring of emotion at the death of Princess Diana?   I...

September 5, 2012

DOD Should Not Ban Book on Bin Laden Raid

The Department of Defense is only increasing the opportunity for success of the upcoming book by "Mark Owen" about the mission to locate and terminate Osama Bin Laden that contravenes the official account. In an effort to ban publication, the DOD has...

July 28, 2012

Olympic Disaster

God could not save the Queen. And Mitt Romney was right: the Brits were not prepared to host the 2012 Olympiad. Rather than celebrate Great Britain's extraordinary contribution to the world in the Opening Ceremony of the London games, director Danny ...

July 14, 2012

The Seas Are Rising, the Seas Are Rising!

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, cried Chicken Little.  The children's tale resonates today as hundreds of scientists are running around like chickens with their heads cut off (to extend the metaphor) screaming about projected catastrophi...

May 15, 2012

Is Obama Leader Of The Free World?

"Leader of the free world "has been popping up from disparate sources referring to Barack Obama. Michelle Obama used it on the quiz show Jeopardy just last week. No, she was not a contestant. Her husband's re-election campaign purchased categories on...

May 6, 2012

Bill Moyers Sees a Ghost

Bill Moyers saw a ghost: "The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on his stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs...

February 15, 2012

The Abramoff Effect

Would Jack Abramoff be depicted as the arch-villain portrayed in the media if he were a Democrat?  Maybe, but having the Washington Post latch onto you means you are not one of them.  Abramoff was certainly not.  He made his way as the...

January 21, 2012

Why the U.S. Has Troops around the World

Two large elements dominate the debate over Barack Obamas decision to re-deploy the U.S. overseas military forces: the political views of preternatural isolationists and the paucity of perspective by news presenters.  The isolationists  dem...

January 6, 2012

True Spy Story behind Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Most movie-goers do not know the story behind the acclaimed new film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, opening nationally this weekend.  Adapted from the 1974 John Le Carré book, and the 1982 sequel Smiley's People, both were dramatized on BBC TV and P...

December 29, 2011

New Film Reminds Us We Could Use a Dose of Margaret Thatcher Today

Take pride in being British, the Iron Lady said with vehemence.  What a tonic it would be for Americans to believe that today about ourselves.  But we are led by a febrile hologram, not a person of character like Margaret Thatcher, who prev...

December 22, 2011

Iraq War A Great Success

The US withdrawal from Iraq has stimulated the smarmy Left to bash George Bush once again, and in the process denigrate the achievements of our fighting forces and diplomatic infrastructure. While commercial television has created filmed homecomings ...

December 15, 2011

Obama and the Financial Criminals

At least CBS's 60 Minutes is on to the national fury at the fact that the criminals who brought down the American economy have not been identified personally and brought before the bar of justice.  But a week after a broadcast that bored in on t...

November 16, 2011

Joe Paterno and the Act that Dare Not Speak Its Name

The Penn State scandal has several dimensions beyond the disgusting alleged outrages by former defensive coach Jerry Sandusky.  The most newsworthy item to the average person so far has been the termination of football coach Joe Paterno at age 8...

November 9, 2011

J. Edgar The Film Falls For KGB Disinformation

The rumor that J. Edgar Hoover was gay is repeated in the new biopic J. Edgar opening this week. And herein lies a useful lesson worth noting: Hoover's alleged homosexuality was contrived by the KGB in the 1960s. Despite the volumes of revelations ab...

October 23, 2011

How to (Almost) Sympathize with Occupy Wall Street

Has Marx's long-awaited economic determinism actually arrived?  Long ago, in the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Comintern and Soviet "active measures" assured their followers that capitalism would fail in the West.  After all this ti...

October 14, 2011

Fatal Flaw Means Obama Can Win

In the UK,  candidates for office petition the local headquarters of the handful of political parties to submit their desire to run for office. The party apparatus investigates their background and suitability and approves them as an official ca...

September 17, 2011

Avoiding a Predictable Crisis

At 100% of Gross Domestic Product, the U.S. debt, like Abraham's bosom, is so high you can't get over it and so wide you can't get around it.  And by 2020, under current policies, the vigorish on the debt will top $1 trillion, sucking out money ...

July 30, 2011

Give The Post Office A Break

I come to defend the Post Office, the  whipping boy of the Republic, the symbolic repository of all that ails America.  Since anyone can remember, problems with mail delivery pepper political conversations more than defense spending and soc...

July 23, 2011

Give Me A Pint Or Give Me Death

British Open winner Darren Clarke is not simply a golf champion.  He is, unwittingly, a symbol of freedoms lost in the United States.  In 1987 Clarke arrived on the campus of Wake Forest University in North Carolina with a full scholarship ...

June 28, 2011

The Fatal Flaw Crippling Recovery

There is a fatal flaw that occurred early on during the financial meltdown that helps explain why the economy remains in a stall -- or, as one analyst put in quantitative terms: the so-called recovery  is measuring at one-half former post-r...

June 9, 2011

Sex Sex Sex

The observation by Thomas Macaulay that "there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the public in one of its periodical fits of morality" is no longer the case.  Sex rears its ugly head so often in today's human drama that the citizenry is indiffere...

May 26, 2011

Too Big To Punish

The new HBO film of the book Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin omitted several key factors in an otherwise suspenseful true-life drama depicting the near collapse of the American financial system.  By now, most people who care about the cris...

May 16, 2011

Fast Train To Hell

The world's romance with train travel remains ardent. Books and movies and television documentaries rhapsodize. Public sector planners appear to be smitten with rail as the answer to environmentally friendly transport that will reduce automobile use ...

March 16, 2011

Can Niall Ferguson Save Civilization?

Harvard professor Niall Ferguson first  gained mainstream notice for his 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World that dared to present a fair-minded appraisal of imperialism, virtually an act of treason to the curia of radical schola...

February 18, 2011

Google and the Government

That the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog is accusing the Obama administration of a "cozy" relationship with the Internet behemoth Google is hardly a surprise. I remember there were two Google executives on the speaker's platform in Chicago...

January 29, 2011

Long Live the King

What to make of the success of The King's Speech?  In today's cacophony of over-juiced films targeted at juveniles, the movie is an anachronism reminiscent of dramas on Masterpiece Theatre in the 1970s, raising the question: how can a movie with...

January 11, 2011

The Real Cause of the Arizona Killings

One or two commentators got it right, characterizing the shootings in Arizona of a congresswoman, judge, and four other bystanders --  including a 79-year-old woman and a nine-year-old girl, who attended the fateful event due to her interest in ...

November 19, 2010

Lucifer Is Loose in the Land

It was the devil himself who said that the "future is not what it used to be." Lucifer, played by Robert DeNiro, was disguised as Louis Cyphre (get it?) in the edgy and disturbing film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke before he lost...

October 23, 2010

We Need Tom Lehrer for Honest Mosque Discussion

National Brotherhood Week was one of those touchy-feely ideas from the 1960s satirized brilliantly by comedian songster Tom Lehrer. And, like almost all of the Ivy League math professor's oeuvre, the song remains relevant today as the ruling elite av...

June 19, 2010

Net Loss of Knowledge Now the Norm

There are dangerous trade-offs associated with new media. The influence of television -- popularized in the 1950s and in full swing in the 1960s -- reshaped the political and cultural landscape.The computer revolution hummed along quietly until the i...

May 15, 2010

Hell in the Pacific

The war in Europe was an unpleasant sideshow to most Americans until Japan launched a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet harbored at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The U.S. declared war on Japan -- and Hitler, responding to treaty obligations ...

April 23, 2010

Fix Is On by Obama and Congress in Union Fight

President Obama is setting a record for proclamations to alter the shape of American society. Every few weeks there is another edict, beginning after his victory with moving the Census from Commerce to the White House in order to jigger the figures t...

March 14, 2010

What's Wrong with the Brits?

Across the pond, the British are subjected to an Iraq War Inquiry -- sort of a South African-style reconciliation auto-de-fe seeking political and cultural vengeance for former Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to join with America in the invasion...

February 13, 2010

Why Tenure Harms Education

As Ohio State University President Gordon Gee realizes in his recent call to study whether or not tenure should be modified or abolished, a guaranteed job for life for academics annoys most people. This negative feeling has been exacerbated in the la...

December 12, 2009

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson Are Gay?

Jeopardy sometimes offers insights into American culture, if simply by eliminating the really dumb from the contestants who make the cut and provide a clear look at the more educated in our society. But there is a problem. I remember an excellent exa...

December 1, 2009

The hidden truth

Cover-up is the mot du jour every day in the era of air-brushed reality. I am convinced the Tiger Woods episode of Thanksgiving weekend 2009 will be downsized to an "unfortunate incident", whether or not it's true the famous golfer was esca...

November 25, 2009

Steve Forbes for president?

There is a huge demand for health services and health insurance. Whenever demand is high, democratic capitalism stokes into gear and provides product. And customers receive the best bang for the buck as providers compete.So why are we allowing govern...

November 21, 2009

The Killers Within

A time bomb began ticking in the mid-1970s, when the psychiatric and mental health professions went politically correct and identified the mentally ill as "victims" who required advocates. While patients in general do need assistance, the a...

November 1, 2009

Why English Is Not the "Official Language" of the United States

Language is a mystery that has baffled science and religion since the first recorded utterance of upright man. The Bible makes much mention of the cacophony of languages in the Tower of Babel story, and modern-day anthropologists and linguists still ...

October 11, 2009

Nazis And Commies

Is the fascination with Nazis in Western culture a product of natural interest, or is it an unspoken pact by novelists and filmmakers to obscure the greater atrocities committed by the Soviets -- most notably under Stalin, who ruled in the same era a...

September 14, 2009

Attack of The Green Meanies

Saving the planet has grabbed the imagination of the naïve in the same grip as the old worker's paradise promised by the Bolsheviks.These two manifestoes share the common elements of absurdity, dogmatic conviction and the predictable dimension t...

August 17, 2009

The Big Lie About Health Care

We already have national health care in the United States. It is disingenuous and meretricious for the Left and the media to insinuate that we are a cruel and heartless people by incessantly bellowing that 40 million citizens do not have health insur...