Free Republic

Wildavsky, a sophisticated and pathbreaking political scientist, thought the matter quite simple: The contempt hurled at President Reagan over the principles nearly agreed to at Reykjavik reveal the intellectual bankruptcy of his critics. . . One cannot but feel that much of the violent reaction to Reykjavik had no more substantial basis than the extreme pique felt by arms control intellectuals at not being consulted in advance. That was Ronald Reagan’s real sin in Iceland. For what, after all, was wrong with Reykjavik except that it lacked the imprimatur of the foreign policy establishment? I tend to think the “deep...

The title is, of course, an ancient joke from the vaudeville circuit. It’s an appropriate way to praise, rather than attack, one particular article – and in the process to attack ten thousand others. Here is the lede from “Show Me the Risk!” by Deroy Murdock in NRO (National Review Online) on 19 October 2005: “According to The Archives of Internal Medicine, pharmaceutical companies market a drug that kills some 7,000 Americans annually. These people don’t die instantly, but instead expire after slowly suffering gastrointestinal bleeding. Oddly enough, TV-news producers are ho-hum about this deadly medicine. The Food and Drug...