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We suffer most not when the White House is a peaceful dormitory, but when it is a jitney Mars Hill, with a tin-pot Paul bawling from the roof. Discounting Harding as a cipher, Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant?" — from H.L. Mencken's obituary for Calvin Coolidge There is something I want to say to my NR/NRO colleagues. Also, come to think of it, to the president of the United States and his Cabinet. Have you...

YEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAA! At the time of writing — 1:45 A.M. Wednesday morning — George W. Bush needs just one Electoral College vote to get him over the top. I'm going to take this as a done deal, and start gloating. Now, gloating is of course bad — coarse, heartless, insensitive, and ill-mannered. Magnanimity in victory, that's the thing. Humility, grace, gentlemanly forbearance, there but for the grace of God... YEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAA! Sorry, sorry. I was saying... Yes, gloating. Definitely uncouth, undoubtedly bad manners. Still, the fact that the good Lord gave us the capacity for bad manners suggest to me that He...

Anniversaries are, of course, of merely numerological significance. If God in His wisdom had given us six fingers on each hand instead of five, then we should have to wait 144 years to celebrate the centenary of a great man, and there would be 1,728 years in a millennium. As it is, we nod in perfunctory recognition as the tenth, 25th, 50th, or 100th anniversary of some momentous event passes by. There is no harm in this. It is good to cast a backward glance once in a while, and these numbers, though arbitrary, are convenient pegs on which to...

Anybody remember Eurocommunism? It was a fad of the 1970s, in which the Communist parties of Italy, Spain, and (though with much internal dissent) France sought to overhaul their images to appeal to a middle-class electorate. There were breaks with the USSR, reconciliations with the Catholic Church, and much talk of partnerships and coalitions. It all came to nothing in the end, but while it lasted the Eurocommunism phenomenon illustrated an irresistible tendency in the political life of democracies: the endless search for a middle path between perceived extremes, for a Third Way. Capitalism? Communism? No, no, we don't...

President Bush's remarks about Taiwan last week, following his meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, have set off a spate of hyperventilating in both Taipei and Washington. Typical was The Weekly Standard: The government of Taiwan proceeded about its democratic business in a legal and appropriate manner that threatened no one. The government of China decided to throw a fit to see if it could take advantage of U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and North Korea to tilt U.S. policy against Taiwan. And the U.S. government decided to at least partly appease Beijing.... This needs a little deconstruction. Taiwan is...

Affronts and Provocations Christians in America. You have to excuse me. I'm a new American, not yet quite up to speed on national attitudes and approaches to things like, oh, Constitutional jurisprudence. Any time one of these church-state controversies blows up, I read the arguments pro and con, scratch my head a bit, then pull out my handy Cato Institute pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, and try to figure out what all the fuss is about. In that noble document, I read the following: Article VI: "...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office...

COO COO CA-CHOO BISHOP ROBINSON [John Derbyshire] This is a dreadful event, a triumph for the forces of death over the forces of life. Robinson cheerfully acknowledges that he is an active homosexual. The Bible is perfectly clear that homosexual acts are sinful. Our Lord gave sinners strict and clear instructions: stop sinning, and repent your past sins. Robinson is in brazen violation of fundamental Christian doctrine. Nobody has to be a Christian; but if you are going to call yourself one, you should follow the rules. Further, Robinson abandoned two little girls in order to indulge his sexual urges....

So now the Episcopal church has an "openly gay" (i.e. proselytizing homosexual) bishop. The Rev. V. Gene Robinson, 56, was elected bishop of New Hampshire on June 7, in a vote by clergy and church activists. Robinson abandoned his wife and two infant daughters in 1986 to pursue his "lifestyle."

As NRO's designated pessimist, I feel it is incumbent on me to seek out news items, points of view, books and movies that will make your flesh crawl. Well, I have found a real doozy: Sir Martin Rees's new book Our Final Hour. In Britain the book sells under the title Our Final Century, which expresses its theme a bit more precisely. Sir Martin doesn't think that we — the human race — are going to make it alive through to 12/31/2099, and he has given a bookful of reasons for his opinion. Sir Martin's two strongest points are: In...

o, at any rate, I have always believed. The Jayson Blair flap at the New York Times therefore left me neither shaken nor stirred. What do you expect from newspaper hacks? What surprised me about the whole thing was not that a smooth-talking charlatan should have risen so high in the Times's reporting hierarchy, but that so many of my fellow citizens apparently take the Times as absurdly seriously as it takes itself. The journalists-are-scum assumption has a long pedigree in the land of my birth. It is almost as if, since show business became respectable, British journalists have inherited...

Ah, authenticity! You can't buy it, you can't fake it, and you can't help but wish you had it.This all started with a lady across from me at a dinner party, a lady visiting from Virginia. We had established in some opening exchanges that she was a keen reader of my web columns. But how was it, she wanted to know, that I had not thrown in my five cents worth on the Rick Santorum business? Well, I said, I did actually pass some remarks of a general kind about it in my April diary. Pshaw, said the lady,...

Twenty years ago I had a conversation with a Chinese friend in London. I had mentioned the fine collections of Chinese art and ceramics that can be seen in that city, at places like the Percival David Foundation and the British Museum. Pooh! said my friend, that stuff was all looted from China by foreigners during the Imperialist period. “Well,” I replied, “we should be thankful that it was. If it had stayed in China, it would have been smashed up by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution!”** This conversation came to mind when I read last week’s newspaper articles...

There were big demonstrations in Northern Ireland on Tuesday. Around 2,000 people, from both the South and the North of the divided island, converged on the fine old 18th-century manor house, rather misleadingly called a "castle," at Hillsborough in County Down. Ten miles away in Belfast city center, several hundred more took part in a prayer vigil outside the city hall. A casual observer might have thought that the old civil-rights movement of the late 1960s had come back to life, an impression that would have been fortified by the presence, at the first of those demonstrations, of an old...

The bottom line in the current geostrategic situation is the one set out by blogger Noah Millman and our own Stanley Kurtz. In the Cold War, we (not much at risk thanks to Mutual Assured Destruction Doctrine) defended states like Germany, Turkey, and South Korea (threatened with invasion). In the terror war, we (highly at risk from smuggled WMD) depend on states like Germany, Turkey, and South Korea (not much at risk because nobody thinks they are the Great Satan) to help us deal with al Qaeda and that organization's potential suppliers. Cold War — Uncle Sam: Say, do you...

The bottom line in the current geostrategic situation is the one set out by blogger Noah Millman and our own Stanley Kurtz. In the Cold War, we (not much at risk thanks to Mutual Assured Destruction Doctrine) defended states like Germany, Turkey, and South Korea (threatened with invasion). In the terror war, we (highly at risk from smuggled WMD) depend on states like Germany, Turkey, and South Korea (not much at risk because nobody thinks they are the Great Satan) to help us deal with al Qaeda and that organization's potential suppliers. Cold War — Uncle Sam: Say, do you...

January 8, 2003 9:00 a.m. What a peculiar thing human intelligence is! I spent the first half of 2002 hobnobbing with professional mathematicians — academic researchers in (I believe) the most-intellectually challenging of all scholarly disciplines, people who dwell way out in the skinny-furthest right-hand tail of the bell curve. These folk are smart. I had to keep asking them to repeat themselves. Even trying very hard, and with a decent background in their subject, I simply could not follow their thought processes much of the time. I used to get the same feeling on Wall Street, where I had...