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The big news out of the report was, as the Washington Post headline had it, "Al-Qaida-Hussein Link Is Dismissed." As it happens, the report didn't "dismiss" anything, but you can't blame the media for rushing out special commemorative editions and sending out 11-year old newsboys to shout, "Uxtry! Uxtry! New Bush Lie! Vote Kerry!" The actual report put it this way: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States." That means what it says: As intelligence types always say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. And, insofar as...

Mr Liam Quaide of Co Limerick has complained on this newspaper’s letters page that my “second eulogy in a week to Ronald Reagan addresses none of the main charges against the former president.” There then follows a somewhat lengthy list of charges he wishes me to address, and, alas, a columnist can’t write about everything. But for the sake of argument let’s take the first of my omissions from the Reagan record: “the oppression and poverty inflicted on Central America as a direct result of his foreign policies”. A few months before 9/11, I went to the Summit of the...

Business as usual among the Europhiles. "The flurry of weekend opinion polling," quoth the Guardian, "has revealed a British nation that is strongly opposed to the European Union constitution and also deeply ignorant about it." Alas, the stupidity of the people is an abiding problem of democracy. Fortunately, the EU has come up with a set of institutions all but entirely insulated from it. At least for the moment.But for the purposes of argument, assume the Guardian is right, and the people are idiots. The paper argues that the electorate's concerns - "Many also fear that the British passport will...

There was a photograph in The New York Post a few weeks ago of Bill Clinton and some other fellow entering a room. Seven-eighths of the picture was Clinton with a big broad smile and his arms outstretched, like a cheesy Vegas lounge act acknowledging the applause of the crowd before launching into his opening number ("I Get a Kick Out of Me"). The gaunt, cadaverous fellow wedged into the left-hand sliver of the photograph proved on closer inspection to be Senator John Kerry, looking like a gloomy, aged retainer trying to remind the big guy that he's running late....

I've always found that a little of Mae West goes a long way, which sounds like the sort of thing she should have said about Errol Flynn. But quite a lot of Mae West is going quite a long way on the New York stage these days. It's been twenty years since her death, almost seventy since her career peaked, and, on a random sample, I find most people today have no very clear idea who she was. Yet she's out there, the phrases she planted in the language still in common currency-"Come up and see me ... ," "A...

For all his greatness, George W. Bush cannot match the romantic eloquence of Ronald Reagan, says Mark Steyn New Hampshire I feel a bit like a guy who’s been dating a pleasant lady in the office for a couple of years and suddenly bumps into the gal he always adored in high school. As readers will know, I’m very supportive of George W. Bush, especially on the foreign policy front. But it was unfortunate that a week of 24/7 Ronald Reagan greatest hits on the cable networks should have had to stop once or twice a day to cross to...

I see that English nurses are protesting against the movie The Snake Pit, because it represents nurses as hard and unsympathetic. The curse of today is the Pressure Group, especially in America. You can't take a step without getting picketed by someone. One odd aspect of it is that you can no longer put a negro on the stage unless you make him very dignified. Owing to the activities of the negro pressure group, comic negro characters are absolutely taboo. The result is that all the negro actors are out of work, because the playwrights won't write parts for them....

The debates are over, thank God, and you can find much useful analysis pus a soupcon of hooey from my old friends  Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells, and my new friends at The Western Standard. I have nothing much to add, except to say that any Canadian who still believes in the inherent superiority of his more civilized articulate politics over the debased “negative” American kind must be on crack. Both the French and English debates were embarrassments.  In part, it’s the format, designed by third-rate TV producers to get the politicians to “mix things up”. This rapidly becomes very boring....

Well, they may be Little Englanders, but they're getting bigger, and the big parties are getting littler. In Sunday's results, the only two governing parties most Britons have ever known couldn't muster 50 per cent of the vote between them. In a functioning party system, you're never going to agree with your party on everything. You might, for example, be opposed to wind farms or in favour of toppling Robert Mugabe. But, even if you are, it's unlikely to be the big political priority in your life. So you vote on the economy and Iraq and healthcare, and accept there'll...

"Wow!" said Bono, the elderly rock star turned Zelig-like emissary to prime ministers and potentates. He was standing next to Paul Martin at the time, which made the "Wow!" all the more remarkable. "A politician who doesn't break his promises. This is real leadership."Paul looked pleased. It wasn't quite as fulsome an endorsement as the night U2 played Stockholm, when Benny and Bjorn from Abba joined them on stage for a rendition of "Dancing Queen" and Bono bowed before the two legendary Swedes and declared, "We are not worthy."On the other hand, it was a lot better than the night...

"It's so American," Margaret Thatcher is said to have remarked, watching from Bill Frist's Senate office as Ronald Reagan's casket was brought to the Capitol and 21 jets flew overhead in missing-man formation. She's right. Serious nations have serious ritual, but each in its own way. From this last extraordinary week, the memorable images have been spare and simple — the overhead shot of the caisson in the Rotunda — or small and human: Nancy Reagan running her finger along the broad stripes of the flag-draped coffin. Two years ago in London, when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died, the...

<p>All weekend long across the networks, media grandees who had voted for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was "The Great Communicator." He had a wonderful sense of humor, he had a charming smile. Self-deprecating. The tilt of his head. Twinkle in his eye.</p>

If I understand correctly the left’s dismissal of Ronald Reagan, it’s that he was a third-rate B-movie ham of no consequence and simultaneously such an accomplished actor he was able to fool the American people into believing he was a real President rather than a mere cue-card reader for the military-industrial complex. These would appear at first glance to be somewhat inconsistent characterisations, but they can be reconciled if you have as exquisitely condescending a view of the American people as, say, Gore Vidal. Phrases like “bit player” and “B-movie” get bandied about a lot by the Reagan disparagers, especially...

'We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." Of all the marvellous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that's my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad. I like it because too often we "small government" conservatives can sound small ourselves - pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea. I always think of him in those broad-shouldered suits, arms outstretched, an inch of cuff: he was awfully expansive about shrinking government. In the speech, he meant...

The good news is that George Tenet has resigned as CIA Director. The bad news is he's two-and-three-quarter years late getting around to it. Tenet is the second longest-serving director, after the 1950s spymaster Allen Dulles, but Dulles's longevity availed him nought after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. By any measure, September 11 was a much bigger fiasco, and Tenet should have gone on Carringtonian grounds: "There has been a British humiliation," said Lord Carrington after the Argies seized the Falklands. "I ought to take responsibility for it." Instead, he lingered on. Unlike the acres of floundering, speculative "analysis" in...

I bought a Glenn Miller CD the other day. Impulse purchase. I'd careered off the highway and into the mall to grab a big geopolitical analysis book I suddenly needed and, as I dashed in the store, I ran straight into a new best-of-Miller compilation they had on display. I had a long drive till past midnight ahead of me and it seemed just the thing. They'd had a lot of it on the TV last weekend: featurettes about Washington's new World War II memorial, plenty of interviews with veterans and plenty of period music in the background. Though, of...

It’s the crude sado-masochistic elements that bother me. Not in the photos, but in the ensuing ballyhoo. To witness an entire culture — media and political — toss all other business aside for a non-stop ritual self-flagellation session is a remarkable privilege. I use the term “self-flagellation” because, though many Democrats and pundits fancy themselves in the sado-dominant role and clearly enjoy flaying Bush, Rumsfeld and co, it is in the objective sense an act of masocho-submission, at least for America. Take, for example, Senator Edward M Kennedy: On March 19 2004, President Bush asked, ‘Who would prefer that Saddam’s...

Mark Steyn says the so-called realists are wrong about the war on terror, and suggests that ‘creative destruction’ is the best way to deal with Saudi Arabia New Hampshire Here’s a headline from Tuesday’s Glasgow Herald: ‘Saudi Security Forces “Allowed the Killers to Escape”’. Hold that thought for a moment. For two-and-three-quarter years now, there’s been a continuing debate between, loosely, the ‘neoconservatives’ and the ‘realists’. The old realpolitik crowd dispute that the war on terror is a war at all, except in the debased sense of the ‘war on drugs’. That’s to say, terror, like drugs, will always be...

IN January, Diane Alexis Whipple, a good-looking, tanned lacrosse coach, was killed in the hallway of her San Francisco apartment house when her neighbours' two Presa Canario dogs lunged at her and tore out her throat. Since then, everything has proceeded like a TV movie whose rewrite guys can't quite get a handle on the theme. First, Miss Whipple's partner, Sharon Smith, filed a wrongful-death suit, a privilege California law somewhat surprisingly reserves only for spouses - i. e., heterosexuals. Miss Smith is very attractive, as is almost everyone involved in this case; not least the chief prosecutor, a boyishly...

Just for a change in the old columnar diet, I thought I'd weigh in on Britain's obesity epidemic. But, on closer inspection, the war on blubber seems to be the war on terror by other means. In the Guardian, for example, Polly Toynbee had no hesitation in deciding on the root cause: "America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest," she wrote. "Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems...