Archive | March, 2002

A recent e-mail from a reader said that he could not find the word “shibboleth” in his desk dictionary, even though he had seen this word in my column. That was an unfortunate omission in his dictionary because shibboleths explain a lot about what is said and done in politics today. Back in Biblical times, [...]

President George W. Bush — despite his post-Sept. 11 performance — remains dumb, says “West Wing” producer Aaron Sorkin. Bush’s stratospheric popularity, claims Sorkin, results from our collective refusal to admit Bush’s stupidity: “That illusion (of a fully-engaged Bush) may be what we need right now, but the truth is we’re simply pretending to believe [...]

The never-ending battle of the left to keep people from being held responsible for the consequences of their own actions is now in the Supreme Court of the United States, where the justices are being urged to exempt murderers from the death penalty if they score below some number on the IQ scale. Many of [...]

When a supporter of Tonya Harding attacked Olympic skating rival Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994, clubbing Kerrigan’s right knee and leaving her writhing in pain, the legal system sprang to the victim’s defense. The attacker was caught and punished for his disgraceful attempt to eliminate a superior competitor through brute force. But now, seven years [...]

Given the warmth that’s emanating from the North Pacific as George W. Bush visits Beijing this week, it’s hard to believe that the United States’ leading foreign-policy concerns before Sept. 11 were China’s downing of a U.S. military surveillance plane, its opposition to missile defense, and its opposition to the U.S. selling Taiwan a major [...]

‘We are in a war,” Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said last week, referring to his country’s fight with the Palestinians. The Palestinians agree: “This is war,” responded Al-Fatah’s commander on the West Bank, Husayn Shaykh. In fact, Israelis and Palestinians have already been at war for over a year, but their leaders finally acknowledging [...]

In 1996, California’s voters passed Proposition 209, which outlawed racial quotas for college admission. That didn’t mean the end of the quest for racial quotas and the euphemisms for it: affirmative action, diversity and multiculturalism. The diversity lobby has rigged up a new and devious way around the law and court decisions in order to [...]

Patrick J. Buchanan calls it La Reconquista — the steady takeover of the American Southwest by the Mexican culture from which it was wrested in the first place. He marshalls his argument at length in a new book, *The Death of the West,* and in the the March issue of The American Enterprise, where a [...]