In May, I wrote about what I thought was the political significance of the Enron convictions and of the Ken Lay saga. It turns out that the end of the story happened this morning when Ken Lay died of a massive heart attack. R.I.P.“Enron Founder Ken Lay Dead of Heart Attack†– Washington Post
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July 4th and Jimmy Stewart Populism
Well, I guess I’m still a Populist. At least I felt like one as my family and I spent our July 4th evening watching Jimmy Stewart stick it to the man in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. There’s nothing like a little Jimmy Stewart to get you fired up about July 4th. Take a listen to a snippet from this speech from Mr. Smith. It’s almost as good as when Jimmy Stewart told off Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.Enjoy and happy 4th!
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James Taranto on Media Bias
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal compiles a summary of left-leaning media bias in reports on last week’s Hamdan decision. I think the summary deserves our attention: “The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law. . . . The decision was . . . a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration.“–New York Times “The Supreme Court yesterday struck down the military commissions President Bush established to try suspected members of al-Qaeda, emphatically rejecting a signature Bush anti-terrorism measure and the broad assertion of…
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Where Atrocity Is Normal
Patrick Stone’s essay in Christianity Today is powerful and poignant. In “Where Atrocity Is Normal: Understanding Christian soldiers who have seen the horrors of war,†Stone recounts his own experience in Vietnam and reminds us of the atrocities of war and the impossible moral choices that face Christians who participate in them.Not only are the war stories tragic, but so also is his description of what his experience has been since coming home from Vietnam: Following my return from Vietnam I spent most Sunday mornings in a church pew wondering, “What does this have to do with what I saw and did in Vietnam?†. . . Since leaving Vietnam…
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Don’t Get in Peggy Noonan’s Doghouse!
Readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of Peggy Noonan’s weekly column in the Wall Street Journal (previous posts). I look forward to it every Thursday.Her piece this morning is a wry, free-wheeling commentary on sundry topics in the news and pop culture. One thing I take away from this article is that I never want to be in Noonan’s doghouse. She takes a whack at several personalities who she thinks are attempting to “spin†and manipulate Americans. Here’s a sampling: On Hillary Clinton: “Hillary . . . doesn’t have to prove she’s a man, she has to prove she’s a woman. No one in America…
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WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN IRAQ
If you were wondering whether the Mainstream Media (MSM) are biased in their coverage of the Iraq War, wonder no more. The MSM have been largely silent on the biggest Iraq War story since the capture of Saddam Hussein.On Wednesday John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, provided “an unclassified overview of chemical munitions recovered in Iraq since May 2004.†The following is direct quotation from the overview: –Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. –Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.…
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It’s a Baptist Thing, and E. J. Dionne Doesn’t Get It
Actually, it’s not just E. J. Dionne who’s offering an incorrect analysis of Frank Page’s election to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Dionne and others are mistaking the dark horse for a trojan horse that would signal the beginning of the end of the conservative movement in the SBC. In a Washington Post editorial today, Dionne writes: Page’s upset victory could be very significant, both to the nation’s religious life and to politics. He defeated candidates supported by the convention’s staunchly conservative establishment, which has dominated the organization since the mid-1980s. His triumph is one of many signs that new breezes are blowing through the broader evangelical…
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Epilogue of a Non-Scandal
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has the best analysis of yesterday’s news about Karl Rove and the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation. I recommend that you read the entire piece, but here’s the gist of it. The tragedy of this episode is that a political fight over the war in Iraq was allowed to become a criminal matter. Mr. Wilson spun his false tale in an effort to discredit the war and deny Mr. Bush a second term. The liberal media put partisanship above their own interests in demanding a special counsel probe of “leaksâ€â€“until that probe turned on their own sources. The Attorney General at the time, John Ashcroft, passed…
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“Turd Blossom†Will Not Be Indicted
There are new developments in a story that I began covering on this blog last year (see two previous posts).The news that Karl Rove (a.k.a. “Turd Blossom,†a nickname given to him by President Bush) will not be indicted in connection with the CIA leak case is probably the biggest political news of 2006. It’s big news because it puts a damper on Democrat efforts to use the 2006 mid-term elections as an occasion to accuse the Republicans of being the party of corruption. That effort did not work in the recent special congressional election in California, and the success of such a strategy in November looks even more unlikely…
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Ann Coulter Needs to Repent
I haven’t read the context of Ann Coulter’s remarks; her book won’t be released until tomorrow. So all I have seen so far are the excerpts in the Associated Press.According to the AP, Coulter’s new book has some pretty nasty things to say about a certain group of liberal-leaning 9-11 widows. The AP contains the following description of Coulter’s remarks: Coulter writes in a new book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,†that a group of New Jersey widows whose husbands perished in the World Trade Center act “as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them.â€She also wrote, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much†(source). Like…