'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Where are we now in this morass of Obama administration scandals? We have The Associated Press imbroglio. We have the Benghazi imbroglio. We have the Internal Revenue Service imbroglio.
It has happened again. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, referred to by Paul Krugman the other day as "a longtime conservative," has essayed in the New Republic the modern conservative movement and traced us all back to John C. Calhoun.
SANTO TOMAS DE CASTILLA, GUATEMALA
At this Democratic National Convention I am particularly interested in the crowds on the floor. Who cares about what Bill Clinton says? He does not mean it anyway. In the 1990s, he governed like a Republican after saying that "the age of big government is over." Incidentally, he governed pretty well.
It has been a very rough patch for Our President, and I do believe it is going to get rougher still. Do not be surprised as the month goes on and August runs into September, that his campaign budget becomes tighter. President Obama is spending more money than he is raising. It will get worse.
Published with the speed of a Revolutionary War-era pamphlet, "No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom" bangs the drum loudly about the "change" authors Phyllis Schlafly and George Neumayr assert President Obama and his administration are bringing to America's faith-based institutions.
I see that the stalwarts of reform politics throughout the city of New York have been given reason for hope and change. It is reported that former Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (pronounced as you might expect) is testing the waters for a return to public life.
WHITEFISH POINT, MICH.
Conrad Black is back in Canada. He controlled the third-largest string of English-language newspapers in the world before he became embroiled with the U.S. Justice Department. For his friends, it was a terrible loss. We missed him, and we have missed his newspapers.
I was innocently making my way through the weekend newspapers when I came upon a "think" piece in The Washington Post by a dreamer named Chris Mooney, a self-confessed "liberal." Yes, he actually admitted to it.
For a couple of years now, I have been talking about the Kultursmog, the utterly polluted state of our political culture. Those who pollute it are liberals. Kultursmog is the only form of pollution they approve of, but they approve of it mightily, and, of course, they are the chief contributors to its noxious fumes. Now they are using it to kill off an American value prized by millions of Americans down through the centuries: free speech. As I say in another context, we are watching the death of liberalism.
We lost a big-hearted prodigy on Sunday morning: Teddy Forstmann, financier, political player, philanthropist (especially for the young and in education) and a bit of an adventurer. I know. I accompanied him on some of his adventures and feared for my life. He was a member of the board of directors of the American Spectator in the 1980s and early 1990. He died of brain cancer, and we shall miss him.
A presidential election looms on the horizon and already the nation's great organs of opinion - and occasionally of fact - are gearing up to serve the commonweal and ever so quietly, their own biases.
Who on Aug. 18, 2010 - almost one year ago - said, "I now think it is clear even to official Washington that President Obama is the worst president of modern times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed"? Yes, it was I, and I threw the entire weight of the American Spectator behind that asseveration, putting both Jimmy and Barry on the cover.
Followers of this column have noticed that something is amiss. They have looked to it every week for months with increased frustration. Many have gone back to the March, April, May, and June issues of the American Spectator and pored over every page, but all was for naught. They have not been able to find a trace of the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year, and they know that there were many promising candidates in 2010 for this hallowed recognition. The New York Review of Books was full of them.
