The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction – that ‘Europe’ has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.
Baseball’s best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.
It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.
The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.
We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.
The English language is not always the President’s friend.
The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.
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.