Politics

The War for the Constitution

Wall Street Opinion Journal | Gary L. McDowell | October 23, 2007

The anniversary of Robert Bork’s failed nomination reminds us what’s at stake in the coming election.

Twenty years ago today the United States Senate voted to reject President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. The senators may have had every reason to believe that was the end of the story. However ugly it had been, however much time it had taken, Mr. Bork’s defeat was only one more routine sacrifice to partisan politics. But time would prove wrong anyone who actually thought that. The battle over Mr. Bork was politically transformative, its constitutional lessons enduring.

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The US is a great place to be anti-American

The Time Online | Gerard Baker | October 17, 2007

Anti-Americanism is on the wane at last. All over the world, Americans are being feted once again as farsighted, liberating heroes.

Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy, the triple crown of recognition from the self-adoring keepers of bien-pensant, elite liberal, global orthodoxy. Michael Moore is treated like a prophet in Cannes and Venice, as he peddles his tales of an America that poisons its poor, sends its blacks off to war and shoots itself. Whenever a loquacious Dixie Chick or a contumacious Sean Penn utters some excoriating remark about the depravity of his or her own country, audiences around the world nod their heads in sympathetic agreement. Bill Clinton, of course, is a god. Though protocol dictates that he may not say things that are too unkind about the country he once led, a nod and a wink will suffice.

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Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way

Free Congress Foundation |Ralph Hostetter | August 09, 2007

The much vaunted leadership of the 110th Congress arrived last January in Washington amid much fanfare about the first 100 hours of Congressional action, leading on through the first 100 days of major legislative accomplishments.

Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was installed as the first woman Speaker of the House. Finding a new use for her broom, she immediately began sweeping the cobwebs of corruption, untruths and incompetence left by the former Republican occupants of her newly draped offices. She would make her influence felt in Washington.

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Time to Rethink the Defense of Reason

Real Clear Politics | David Warren | Julu 15, 2007

For the great atheist-socialist ideologies of the 20th century worked against the grain of the societies upon which they preyed, and were for that reason easier to throw off. The deep Christian traditions of e.g. Germany, Italy, and Russia were against them from the beginning, and the claims they made on behalf of a new moral order — inverted from the old — struck the European mind as false and finally, uninspiring.

Lee Harris is among the few living writers who do not, as the saying goes, “subtract from the sum total of human knowledge” with each new essay. I’ve puffed him before, and will puff him again, the more shamelessly in the knowledge that his new book, The Suicide of Reason, is probably not even available in Canada.

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Give Us DDT

The Wall Street Journal (subscription) | Sam Zaramba | June 12, 2007

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The United States and Europe eradicated malaria by 1960, largely with the use of DDT. At the time, Uganda tested the pesticide in the Kanungu district and reduced malaria by 98%. Despite this success, we lacked the resources to sustain the program. Rather than partner with us to improve our public health infrastructure, however, foreign donors blanched. They used Africa’s lack of infrastructure to justify not investing in it. Today, every single Ugandan still remains at risk. Over 10 million Ugandans are infected each year, and up to 100,000 of our mothers and children die from the disease. Recently Ugandan country music star Job Paul Kafeero died of the disease, a reminder that no one is beyond its reach. Yet, many still argue that Africa’s poor infrastructure makes indoor spraying too costly and complex a means of fighting malaria.

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The Case for Conservatism

Washington Post | George Will | May 31, 2007

Conservatism’s recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today’s political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals — freedom and equality.

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