Blue v. Red
This thought, from a review of a posthumous book by Jean-Francois Revel by David Pryce-Jones (subscription required), strikes me as particularly timely, today: A couple of years after Furet’s book, six equally reputable scholars published The Black Book of Communism, detailing how the experiment of Communism had cost about a hundred million helpless people their…
It’s interesting to see the political shifts of Catholic college students assessed on a scale of agreement with Catholic doctrine: On pro-life issues, the results indicated a “mixed pattern,” it said. A majority of Catholic students leave college disagreeing that abortion should be legal but they number fewer than those who entered with that opinion,…
Cassy Fiano is right to lambaste the callousness and selfishness of Courtney Cook, who took to the pages of Salon to explain how ideal a circumstance is presented to the military wife to initiate a separation and divorce from the deployed father of her children. By her own telling, Cook took to Marxism and cowardly…
I’ve got writing forthcoming on the matter locally, but for now, I’ll remark that, somehow, I’m continually surprised by the extent to which people think we can run the world as if it were as we want it to be, not as it is. There’s a point, in such discussions, at which we run off…
Commenting to my “That Anti-Republican Feeling,” Dan writes: Most people in this country self-identify as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. When people have to constantly choose between what they consider two evils (the socially authoritarian R’s or the economically authoritarian D’s), they either become utterly confused and vote for familiarity like this caller, or they…
An interesting call to the Dan Yorke Show as I was nearing home on my commute. The caller started out complaining about the corrupt, one-party political system in Rhode Island and then suggested that he simply couldn’t vote for Republicans because, while he’s fiscally conservative, he’s socially liberal. He included opposition to the welfare state…
The Providence Journal ran this story on the front page, Saturday, with the headline “Stealth GOP effort helped Brown win.” The first paragraphs surely give comfort to those who continue to prefer that the upset not be proof of real grassroots unrest and voter discontent with the Democrats’ policies: The stunning Republican come-from-behind victory in…
I’ve been meaning to point out a problem with Lefteris Pavlides’s objection to a recent report that Rhode Island is among the unhappiest states in the country. Declares Pavlides: Year after year the so-called “happy” states are on the top of broken homes and children in single families. For my money whole, two-parent families have…
It’s a curious standard, that which Edward Fitzpatrick applies to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s objectionable remarks on the Senate floor: No doubt, those lines gave voice to the Democratic anger and frustration that mounts every time Sarah Palin posts more nonsense on Facebook. … Perhaps it’s good for Rhode Island to have a fiery, outspoken senator…
One further observation of interest with respect to Sen. Whitehouse’s stridency is the target of his claims: However much he actually believes that Republicans are obstructing process and feeding off fear, he’s surely comfortable assuming that he’s safe from personal attack and that the nation is safe from the actual atrocities of which he warns.…