December 2002

Lott’s Revival of Anti-Republican Hysteria — My mostly a priori analysis of the midterm elections is that the Democrats had a hard time mobilizing their minority base, and the reason why is that Bush has made inflammatory scare-the-shit-and-thus-votes-out-of-black-people tactics less effective. How? Colin Powell and Condi Rice. That’s how. When blacks see that Bush has [...]

Language Mavens Blow – Linda Hall, in this Hudson Review essay, laments the degradation and trivialization of English. This sort of thing is boring. One gathers mostly that the author is pleased with herself for the excellence of her diction, the range and precision of her vocabulary, and her intimacy with literary greatness. It’s also [...]

My Man, Trotsky — I found myself amazed to be nodding in agreement at the end of Mick Hume’s New Statesman piece on Trotsky (via A&L Daily). He writes:
The left-right debates or class divides of Trotsky’s time mean little in politics now. New divisions are taking shape, perhaps most importantly between those who champion progress [...]

Jonah Goldberg: Egalitarian — Jonah Goldberg sounds a dissonant egalitarian note in his reply to Nick Gillespie in the Tech Central Station debate. Now, we can expect Jonah to be vehemently opposed to the redistribution of wealth in domestic policy, or for the purposes of foreign aid. Yet he appears to find it plain commonsense [...]