Blue v. Red
One is justifiably reluctant to declare Michael Novak flat wrong on matters of religion and culture, but I’m compelled to do just that in response to his writing: Being a liberal means having a right to do anything that you want sexually anywhere, anytime, and with anybody. Thus, there is no way for liberals to…
I was so perplexed by Froma Harrop’s column about the Democrat Party’s 50-State Strategy that I thought for a moment that I’d missed something that would be, politically, on the order of magnitude of the Earth’s poles moving to the equator: Imagine Democrats in Washington who don’t all sound like Henry Waxman, Charlie Rangel or…
This week, “Kos” (Markos Moulitsas), uber-blogger of the left-blogosphere, argued in a Cato Institute’s monthly electronic journal that the Democratic party is the natural home for voters who believe in individual liberty…It was my fealty to the notion of personal liberty that made me a Republican when I came of age in the 1980s. It…
Via a predictably political RI Future post, I came across this even more predictably political DailyKos post: You do not abuse the trust of children. If you find out about the possible abuse of children, you have a duty to stop it. A duty. An imperative. An oath. All those words that men say, and…
PROEM: I wrote the following piece for publication in the closing months of 2004. As these things happen, it was never published, but never actually rejected. In the intervening months, I’ve periodically looked for it online — as if I’d posted it somewhere — so it seemed prudent to go ahead and do so now.…
The Projo welcomes Rhode Islanders back to the first work-day of the new year with a bit of regional jingoism that is equal parts inaccurate and ugly. The gist of a Tuesday unsigned editorial is that New England and the Pacific Northwest are so superior to the rest of the country, they need not care…
Ross Douthat, guestblogging over at AndrewSullivan.com, provides a fresh (at least to me) perspective on the fundamental problem with contemporary liberalism…The original aim of the liberal philosophers was to remove the “high” questions, the important-but-unresolvable questions – what is virtue? is Jesus Christ the Son of God? where do we go when we die? etc.…
The Providence Journal’s Bob Kerr slipped a curious few paragraphs in the midst of a 600-word piece of derision: Brown students are not enjoying their unintended celebrity. But then they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory on the social front lately. For a while now, neighbors of the university have been complaining that student parties…
My latest FactIs column, “The Premises of the Culture of Death,” ponders a theme upon which I can’t quite land my finger. Something about things not meaning what they mean in pulsing cultural conversation that lacks substance. This, by the way, is my final FactIs column. I’m very grateful to the folks who produce the…
Right.
