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There is furtive glee in the eyes of such as Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. The reason for it is that she calculates that the effrontery of South Dakota's legislature will bring on massive retaliation by the Supreme Court. Chinese vigilantes rejoiced a few weeks ago when a group of dissenters published a call for diminished censorship. They were confident about what would happen, and it did: Beijing brought on reinvigorated party-line censorship. Ms. Keenan and some of her followers in NARAL Pro-Choice America figure that what South Dakota has done will compel the Supreme Court to act...

1. Khamenei: Iran Will Have Bomb in April April 8, 2006 could turn out to be an ominous date in history - that's the day Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says that Iran will have a nuclear weapon. Late last year Khamenei gathered his top advisers for a strategy meeting and told them "it has been promised that by April 8, we will be in a position to show the entire world that we are members of the club." This presumably refers to nuclear weapons, according to National Review Online Contributing Editor Michael Ledeen, who offered an inside look at...

Those who hold hands with the future at night and relay their divinations tell us that Judge Alito will be OK'd by the Senate Judiciary Committee by a party vote. Some reach even further and predict that he will be confirmed by a party vote, but that there might be a little maneuvering on the floor in the matter of a filibuster.One is told not to expect a filibuster because it is a weapon of last resort, and weapons of last resort should be kept for last-resort use. Several times, in the recent past, the question has been raised whether...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 03, 2006, 2:52 p.m. Questioning Alito Here is a coincidence which we would term providential, except that one doesn’t use that language. At least, if one does use it, it is shrouded in mystery. There is a great deal of swirl in the upcoming examination of Judge Samuel Alito, and some of it does a pretty complete circle. In 1985, Judge Alito wrote to President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, applying for a job. Quick ideological self-identification was in order, and Alito wrote, “The greatest influence on my...

 If a high government official pleaded the authority of the Bible as reverentially as is now routine in citing the authority of the Constitution, he'd be had up for idolatry. One way to vest mystique into the Constitution is to plead its inscrutability, or else suggest that only the high priests of the legal profession are equipped to interpret it.The secretary of state informed Tim Russert no fewer than four times on "Meet the Press" that she was not a lawyer. The clear purpose of making that point, in that way, was to suggest that the non-anointed can't responsibly interpret...

Sergeant Clay: Afghanistan Vet and Adopt-A-Soldier Adoptee in the UK November 22, 2005: A Fourth Hour Phone Call Download Windows Media PlayerListen to Rush Conduct Broadcast Excellence BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is Sergeant Clay calling from the UK, the United Kingdom. Welcome, sergeant, to the program. It's an honor to have you with us. CALLER: Oh, my gosh! Hey, Rush. Professor Limbaugh, mega-mega-megadittos if ever such a thing there could be. We owe it all to you, brother. I just wanted to call and to let you know I've been listening to you since 1989, and I've been a...

John Kerry’s America What he said about us. By William F. Buckley Jr. EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the text of William F. Buckley Jr.'s June 8, 1971, commencement address to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The speech appears here as it is in Let Us Talk of Many Things : The Collected Speeches. The morale in the armed services was low, reflecting the impasse and progressive demoralization in Vietnam, and especially the trial of Lieutenant William Calley for the massacre at Mylai. A drastic charge, flamboyantly made by decorated veteran John Kerry (now a United States senator...

The French turmoil is explained, by many who have trained their eyes on it, as a reaction to continued French discrimination. To give evidence of this, the critics cite preferences shown by employers to applicants whose names are indisputably French, with no Algerian or Muslim overtones. One story cited resumes with straightforward French names receiving 50 times the presumptive hospitality shown to applicants with Muslim surnames. And every third or fourth story cites what continues to be thought the matrix of French political life, which is the revolution. There are those who hoped, hopelessly, that Charles de Gaulle would take...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version October 28, 2005, 1:48 p.m. Unbridled Critics These are indeed rough days for the Bush administration, but critics have a difficult time harmonizing their arguments with history and common sense. The central question for Mr. Bush — more so even than the fate of Harriet Miers — has of course to do with Iraq, and the debate seems to be hardening on the underlying question: Can one country reasonably set out to democratize another country? Critics of the Iraq operation are leaning hard on theoretical arguments, as for instance General...

The rhetorical blur decalcifies straight thought. William Bennett thought he was being asked about crime rates. Well, he was being asked about crime rates, but the blur took over and the world found itself deliberating whether he wished to abort all children of black mothers. So he had to begin not with the point he had set out to make, but by affirming that not only was he against aborting black babies, he was against aborting any babies. Ah, but that statement bumps squarely into Roe v. Wade, which, invoking the right to privacy, entitles mothers to abort their children...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version October 06, 2005, 7:55 a.m. Publisher’s Statement Standing athwart history, yelling Stop. By William F. Buckley Jr. EDITOR'S NOTE:National Review is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. Throughout the week, NRO will be running pieces from the archives to help take a trip down memory lane. This piece appeared in the November 19, 1955, issue of National Review. There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject...

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the text, as released by the White House, of remarks the president made today in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in tribute to National Review on our 50th anniversary and William F. Buckley Jr., NR’s founder.I'm here to escort William F. Buckley, Jr., to lunch. (Laughter.) But first I've got some things I want to say. It's a honor to celebrate the 50th anniversary of National Review, and soon to be the 80th birthday of our honoree. You probably think this is a — the Yale Scholars Association meeting. (Laughter.) Actually, Bill Buckley did have an...

Inevitably, President Bush’s itemization of means by which to diminish fuel consumption led to derision. The single most common rhetorical device in all argumentation is the invocation of Alternative Uses. I became starkly conscious of this thought-burr in vivid circumstances. I was with James Dickey in Florida. We were guests of the United States government, invited to ogle the capsule with astronauts headed for the moon. It was very cold and still dark when the moon-bound streak of fire shot up from the launch pad. Dickey the poet was frozen in awe and admiration. At breakfast he threatened to break...

The whole business of whether public schools can permit “intelligent design” to be acknowledged as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in explanation of human life will begin democratic exercises in a courtroom in Pennsylvania this week. There are regular flashpoints on this matter of the separation of church and state. Some of them test out constitutional questions, others merely modi vivendi. A week ago Noah Riner, the president of the Dartmouth Student Assembly, ran into the wrath of orthodox hardliners.What happened was a convocation welcoming the freshman class to Dartmouth College. The student president traditionally speaks at these convocations, and...

THE ROBERTS DISRUPTION By William F. Buckley Jr. Fri Sep 23, 8:49 PM ET A few years ago, checking in with the office, I was told I had a telephone call from Norman Lear. I immediately returned it, and probably my voice quavered. The very thought of being in personal touch with the producer of "All in the Family" -- my all-time favorite television program! "What," I asked unctuously, "can I do for you?" "Well," he said, "I would like you to be the keynote speaker at the annual banquet of People for the American Way." I wondered how Archie...

September 23, 2005, 10:55 a.m. The Roberts Disruption A few years ago, checking in with the office, I was told I had a telephone call from Norman Lear. I immediately returned it, and probably my voice quavered. The very thought of being in personal touch with the producer of All in the Family! My all-time favorite television program. "What," I asked unctuously, "can I do for you?" "Well," he said, "I would like you to be the keynote speaker at the annual banquet of People for the American Way." I wondered how Archie Bunker would have responded to such a...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version September 06, 2005, 6:10 p.m. Fighting Back Sometimes there is no ready explanation. A joke I laughed at 50 years ago features a man who at the end of the first race was up 200. At the end of the fifth race, up $20,000. At the end of the eighth, he is — wiped out. He makes his disconsolate, infuriated way to the parking lot and on the walkway passes by a stranger who is bent over, fastening a shoelace. The hapless bettor aims a furious roundhouse kick, sprawling his...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version August 26, 2005, 3:33 p.m. Robertson’s Death Wishes The blurt by Pat Robertson on the matter of Hugo Chavez received the kind of spastic disavowal it deserved, and also warranted. It would not be sensible to undertake the assassination of Hugo Chavez. Diplomatically it was a mistake even to use the language of assassination. And the greatest damage was to increase the odds against any assassination of Chavez. If he was going to be shot, or yanked from office, this could be done, and would best be done, by Venezuelans....

...If liberals think that such flirtations with fanaticism had nothing to do with their 2004 defeat, they probably have nothing to learn from what conservatives did four decades earlier. But for the record: In the 1960s, just as conservatism was beginning to grow from a fringe tendency into what it has become — the nation's most potent persuasion — it was threatened by a boarding party of people not much, if any, loonier than Sheehan. The John Birch Society, whose catechism included the novel tenet that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Kremlin, was not numerous — its membership...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version August 23, 2005, 1:26 p.m. Curbing God’s Laws On religion, science, church, and state. Much time (and space) are being given to the question of religion and science. There is continuing preoccupation with it, and the question is parsed week after week in different theaters: Is God admissible in purposive thought? Some say that the rejection of religion is a primary step in intelligent thought. Contenders on both sides of the issue will sometimes find themselves retreating into caricature. They will say, for instance, that belief in God and belief...