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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Imitation of Life

Chronicles of Culture | Thomas Fleming | May 24m 2007

Today, in Washington, D.C., Mary Cheney gave birth to Samuel David Cheney. The baby, the product, apparently, of artificial insemination has no known father, apart from Ms Cheney’s girlfriend Heather Poe. Up the road from Washington, in Hackensack, N.J., 60-year-old Frieda Birnbaum, described as a “mid-life counsellor,” gave birth to twins. Ms Birnbaum does have a husband and three children, but the twins are the product of in vitro fertilization arranged in South Africa.

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The American Liberal Liberties Union

Wall Street Opinion Journal | Wndy Kaminer | May 23, 2007

The ACLU is becoming very selective about what it considers “free” speech.

“ACLU Defends Nazi’s Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters,” the humor magazine The Onion announced in 1999. Those of us who loved the ACLU, and celebrated its willingness to defend the rights of Nazis and others who had no regard for our rights, considered the joke a compliment. Today it’s more like a reproach. Once the nation’s leading civil liberties group and a reliable defender of everyone’s speech rights, the ACLU is being transformed into just another liberal human-rights group that reliably defends the rights of liberal speakers.

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Democratic progress is slow. Promoting liberty and freedom may be more fruitful

Christian Science Monitor | John Hughes | May 16, 2007

Provo, Utah

When the Bush administration took the United States to war in Iraq, a primary motivation was to neutralize Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They turned out not to exist.

But another ambition of the president was to spread democracy in the Middle East, which somehow seemed to have been bypassed in the global march to liberty during the past four decades. Iraq after Mr. Hussein was supposed to become a democratic touchstone for other Arab lands.

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Was Osama Right?

Wall Street Journal | Bernard Lewis | May 16, 200
Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends won’t change their view.

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: “What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?”

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The Subjection of Islamic Women

THe Weekly Standard
|Christina Hoff Sommers | May 14, 2007

The subjection of women in Muslim societies–especially in Arab nations and in Iran–is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.

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