The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.
That is the crux of modern conservatism – government taking strong measures to foster the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence.
The case for democracy is not esthetic.
Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.
The accusation that President Clinton cares deeply about nothing is refuted by his tenacious and guileful battle to prevent any meaningful limits on the form of infanticide known as partial-birth abortion.
Overcriminalization has become a national plague.
Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson – one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job – about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.
Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.
Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions.
Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
Few things are as stimulating as other people’s calamities observed from a safe distance.
Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.
A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco’s architects acknowledge that fact.
Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a “nondairy” product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it?
On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it’s runny.
I think if you’d had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We’d have elected McClellan in 1864.
Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America’s national honor.
When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.
Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.