May 18, 2016

Liberalism's Descent into Madness

One of the most fruitful observations about politics is that it flows downhill from culture, which launches a variety of speculations about how examining specific cultural products enables us better to understand current political developments. Durin...

April 15, 2016

The Fascist Persuasion in American Politics

One of the most notable lines in film history, for those of us old enough to remember and appreciate, is found in John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre. The plot takes place in Mexico and involves some gold hunters including Fred...

January 25, 2016

A Liberal Version of the Ten Commandments

Characterizing modern liberalism as secular religion is commonplace today, although such a comparison amounts to a gross insult to Christianity, which has been the most frequent target of liberal assaults against religion, while Islam and other faith...

November 25, 2015

The Strange Case of the Secular Progressive-Islamist Alliance

One of the frequently cited quips in the halls of Congress is that politics makes for strange bedfellows, meaning that some alliances between Democrats and Republicans, especially given today's toxic environment in Washington, are hard to fathom....

May 17, 2014

American academia and echoes of the Third Reich

American academia and echoes of the Third Reich Considering the furrow-browed uproar raised by campus radicals over the course of the past month, one might have guessed that several university presidents had invited Joseph Goebbels to impart his wisd...

December 5, 2012

American Politics as a Confidence Game

Reading post-2012 election news reports can be hazardous to one's mental health, particularly for the sanity-challenged among us.  But perhaps the singularly most prescient comments come from long ago -- from the pen of America's most profound n...

September 20, 2012

The Fall of the House of Obama

"Madman!" screeched Roderick Usher to the narrator as they both recoiled in terror at the wraithlike apparition that faced them at the door in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." "Madman!" he screamed again at the narrator of this tal...

December 6, 2011

America's Bureaucracy of Truth

Americans who are exasperated by the low level of professionalism in the mainstream media would do well to take a glance at the mother of all media lunacies, the Soviet Union.  For instance, readers of the 1 October 1979 edition of Pravda, a Sov...

November 7, 2011

America's Bureaucracy of Truth

Americans who are exasperated by the low level of professionalism in the mainstream media would do well to take a glance at the mother of all media lunacies, the Soviet Union. For instance, readers of the 1 October 1979 edition of Pravda, a Soviet ne...

October 15, 2011

America's Orwellian Liberalism

The ink was barely dry on the asterisk in Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.'s rant about taking out those "son-of-a-b*tches" -- referring to Tea Party members -- when the vice president made his own contribution at a Labor Day rally.  "This is a fight for the ex...

May 5, 2011

Pelosi and Progressive Neo-Leninism

Nancy Pelosi's ascension to the speakership in 2006 launched exuberant encomiums to the democratic process, inspiring her further to shout to her vote-challenged opponents in a tone somewhere between a chortle and a boast, "We won the election!...

April 21, 2011

America's Vichy Regime?

For the French, revisiting the time period when the Vichy Regime ruled what was left of the country after its humiliating defeat by the Germans in 1940 involves trauma.  But the lessons imparted by those dark years of Nazi occupation transcend h...

February 23, 2011

The American Pharisees of Madison

Americans looking for entertainment need only to observe controversies surrounding the fiscal follies of February, which have metastasized from the budget proposals of the nation's capital to a dozen or so state capitals. At the center of the most in...