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LONDON, July 7, 2005 -- Boy, are AmSpec readers loyal! Half a dozen have already e-mailed to me knowing I am in London for the Spectator of London's annual party. They want to be sure I am all right. I am. Moreover British spirits are undaunted. An Islamofascist website howls that the bombs in London filled "the British with terror and fear and panic." Claptrap! The Islamofascists are curiously like our earlier enemies the Nazis and the Communists. Almost every claim they make is a lie. I had breakfast at a cafe this morning, a mere 20 minutes from where...

Drat. The battle royal I predicted last week is off in the U.S. Senate. The battle was to be fought between Democrats and Republicans over what conservatives call "the constitutional option" and liberals call "the nuclear option." That it was reported throughout the media as the "nuclear option" is still more evidence the media are liberal. Obviously the argument over whether the media are liberal or not is another of America's unnecessary debates. So too is the argument over whether the president's judicial nominees are "activist" an unnecessary debate. What distinguishes the president's nominees from what in the recent past...

WASHINGTON -- The new year dawns dank and melancholy, at least for me. Shuffling off the nation's center stage are my favorite sanctimonious hinds, Dan Rather and Bill Moyers. Both have been burning incense before their own graven mugs for years. Soon both will exalt themselves in solitude. Moyers was a gifted understudy of his old boss, Lyndon Johnson, and though he affected piety wherever he went, there was always a whiff of the thug about his person. How well I recall the revelations of the journalist, Andrew Ferguson, demonstrating that while an independent contractor of PBS the Rev. Moyers...

WASHINGTON -- Oh, this vexatious season is almost over. How to greet my fellows Americans amid statues of Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rangifer tarandus? Merry Christmas? Happy Hanukkah? Something about Kwanzaa? Happy Holiday? Have A Good One? There are so many choices and so many possibilities of giving offense. Loath as I am to give offense (unintentionally!) I have been avoiding the whole subject. Then along came Charles Krauthammer who is surely the most sensible pundit in the land, as well as one of the best informed and most agreeable -- though the burden of good sense...

WASHINGTON -- Justice never sleeps. Or rather the free-floating moralism that is the left never sleeps. The other day a Chilean judge, Juan Guzman Tapia, decided that an 89-year-old man was competent to stand trial for human rights abuses, though it has been fourteen years since he left office, and when he did he handed his thitherto troubled country over to democrats and eventual prosperity. The 89-year-old man is, of course, General Augusto Pinochet, and his human rights abuses are not even reported in the newspapers as "alleged" human rights abuses. For the New York Times on Tuesday Guzman's decision...

Do you know who Harry M. Reid might be? Frankly I did not know either until he was quoted in the newspapers as having said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Justice Clarence Thomas is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court." He also asseverated that Justice Thomas' opinions "are poorly written." As he made these utterances recently on "Meet the Press," I concluded the man must have some stature, unless, of course, the issue being treated on the show was small-town bigotry. Well, it turns out this fellow Mr. Reid is a U.S. senator. In fact, he is the...

WASHINGTON -- Do you know who Harry M. Reid might be? Frankly I did not know either until he was quoted in the newspapers as having said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Justice Clarence Thomas is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court." He also asseverated that Justice Thomas's opinions "are poorly written." As he made these utterances recently on "Meet the Press" I concluded that the man must have some stature, unless, of course, the issue being treated on the show was small-town bigotry. Well, it turns out that this fellow Reid is a United States senator. In fact,...

WASHINGTON -- Tom Wolfe has done it again. He has written a novel full of the blood and gore, the preposterosity and pomposity of the age. I Am Charlotte Simmons is about the excesses of college life. It is particularly good on the imbecility of college sports, specifically basketball. Wolfe depicts fans that are witlessly agog about the players. And he depicts players teetering on the brink of megalomaniacal madness. It is a vastly amusing book and highly instructive. Now out of nowhere the National Basketball Association has come forward to give Wolfe's book a tremendous boost. Last week's...

History takes time. To understand the historic decline of the Democratic Party I have found it useful to reach back to a book I wrote in 1984, The Liberal Crack-Up. It is a diagnosis of what was then the core philosophy of the Democratic Party, liberalism, and a prognosis of its future. Doctor Tyrrell was not optimistic, but history takes time. . . . . The conservatism of President George W. Bush, a conservatism that has been governing America for most of the past 24 years, remains to these liberals shocking, dangerous, or "extremist," as they say. The liberalism of...

WASHINGTON -- For the most perceptive insight into George W. Bush and the Republicans' robust victory over Senator Jean-François Kerry and the Democrats, look to Tom Wolfe. As usual America's finest living writer sees America with limpid clarity. In a pre-election interview with the British newspaper The Guardian Wolfe observes that the eastern media elite "do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election." Well, a record 59 million voters did support Bush. "I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled,"...

WASHINGTON -- I see that the convalescing Bill Clinton is about to leave his Chappaqua infirmary to hit the campaign trail for Democratic presidential candidate, Jean-François Kerry. Reportedly the reinforcements will arrive next week. Most likely the ex-Boy President will not hit the campaign trail too thunderously. Having recently undergone quadruple bypass surgery, he remains a bit tender. But he will put in a good word for the whole Democratic ticket that now strains to save America from the Bush Madness. You know the Democrats' line: an economy reminiscent of Herbert Hoover's, the Bible Belt threatening our easy-going hedonism, Bush's...

WASHINGTON -- In observing the violence in Iraq it is helpful to have a grasp of history. There is a reason for the increased random violence. Our enemies -- free Iraq's enemies -- want to influence the American elections. Thus they make it appear that things are going more badly than they are. There is nothing new about this. History abounds with examples of a democracy's enemies trying to influence an election. It happened just months ago in Spain. History also abounds with lessons on how to deal with brutes whether the brutes are trying to influence an election or...

Print Article         Close Window     Judgment Day Published 8/27/2004 12:01:17 AM IN CHARACTER;Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s Judgment and Character: Bob Tyrrell's takedown of Kerry is, of course, spot on. However, I believe he is firing small caliber rounds, easily deflected, when he has a Hellfire available at the push of a button. Nobody disputes that John Kerry, an officer, left Vietnam at the earliest possible moment permitted by the regs. This is the most damning evidence of his utter unfitness to command. Or lead. Or, for that matter, dine in the company of decent folk. A leader...

WASHINGTON -- Is it not curious that in major media there is not a trace of humor or even irony perceptible in the hullabaloo over Senator John Kerry's latest self-inflicted wound, to wit: the controversy over his Vietnam record? Oh, one fellow has shown a proper sense of the absurdity of it all...snip For that matter there has not been all that much talk about Kerry's mendacity, though he has been caught in petty lies since the primaries, lies that contribute to the perception that Kerry is a man of very poor judgment. There was his early lie that he...

Is it not curious that in major media there is not a trace of humor or even irony perceptible in the hullabaloo over Senator John Kerry's latest self-inflicted wound, to wit: the controversy over his Vietnam record? Oh, one fellow has shown a proper sense of the absurdity of it all. James Taranto, editor of the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today," has for months made a running joke of Kerry's reckless boasts about his service in Vietnam. Whenever he introduces this insufferable braggart into his column Taranto is wont to write "who by the way served in...

WASHINGTON -- I share the estimable Rush Limbaugh's assessment of the soi-disant Independent Vote (IV). It is delusional and unconvincing. Usually it is composed of voters who do not weld character to intellect to arrive at an intellectually sustainable conclusion. The conclusions they usually arrive at are consequently superficial and wrong. Yet there are times when I find myself in sympathy with them. There are times when the election debate is so abundant with repellent sophistries and canards that sensible citizens would rather avert their gaze from the undignified proceedings. For observers of the Kerry campaign, it has come to...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Reflections of scandals pastBy R. Emmett Tyrrell JrPublished August 13, 2004 A brilliant article by Jonathan Aitken in London's Sunday Times, of Aug. 1 prepared me for the torrent that would surely hit America a week later with the 30th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation, Aug. 9.     Mr. Aitken, a distinguished writer and biographer of the 37th president, reminded readers of the incomparable drama fevering the last days of the Watergate president. "End career as a fighter," Nixon had scrawled on one of his yellow legal pads hours before he planned to bow out on Aug. 1,...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com CIA's futureBy R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.Published July 16, 2004 When Bill Casey, my old friend and once my lawyer, was CIA director during the Reagan administration, he often confided his was "the best job in Washington." He thought he headed the finest government agency in town.     Alas, over the next decade it lost a lot of steam, as the Senate report on its ineptitude made clear last week. It is overly bureaucratized, hidebound, and lacking in the capacity for human intelligence. Some of this started in the 1970s when liberals such as Stansfield Turner thought they could...

<p>Pondering the Clintons' many scrapes with the law and with public convention over the last dozen years of the Clinton Glory, we can ascertain one weird quirk shared by both eminences that explains their unprecedented string of scandals.</p> <p>Having reviewed both their autobiographies, I see this one weird quirk standing out ever more starkly. The Clintons land in the soup most frequently because they lie when they do not have to, and they tell a whopper when a little white lie would be perfectly understandable. Whether this gratuitous mendacity is a profound moral defect, I leave to the theologians. What is unconscionable and cruelly exploitive is that after being caught in their lies so many times they continue manipulating the passions of the more gullible sort of Democrat who has joined the Clintons in transforming their soap opera into one of the Democratic Party's national issues.</p>

WASHINGTON -- Pondering the many scrapes with the law and with public convention that the Clintons have suffered over the past dozen years of the Clinton Glory, we can ascertain one weird quirk shared by both eminences that explains their unprecedented string of scandals. Having reviewed both their autobiographies now, I see this one weird quirk standing out ever more starkly. The Clintons land in the soup most frequently because they lie when they do not have to, and they tell a whopper when a little white lie would be perfectly understandable. Whether this gratuitous mendacity is a profound moral...