The American Conservative

Last Thursday's event at the New America Foundation on the “rural brain drain” billed itself as examining a “major policy problem that has largely escaped ...

At this writing, the Gaza crisis continues, exacting a painful toll on the civilian population, hammering Israel’s image in ways unseen since Lebanon in the early 1980s, and relegating talk of peace to the funny pages. The working assumption is that there will be a ceasefire in which Hamas continues to be the governing address for Gaza--a political victory for the Islamic Resistance Movement (the literal translation of the acronym for Hamas).

This group includes some neoconservatives like David Frum and Brooks himself, along with Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors of the domestic- policy ...

An old adage about America's first helmsmen is that "Washington reigned, Hamilton ruled, and Jefferson complained." The contemporary version might say that "Bush reigned, Cheney ruled, and Congress, the nation, and the world complained."

Richard Cheney has sculpted the vice presidency in a way never seen before. He revolutionized an office that has turned many of its occupants into obscure eccentrics--one that Benjamin Franklin referred to as "Your Superfluous Excellency." Cheney refused to do state funerals. Instead, he rerouted the in- and outboxes of power in the… more

As I watched the new hit movie “Iron Man,” starring a guy in a flying armored suit, I asked myself: Why don’t we fight our wars like that? You know, so that we win, using the maximum amount of technology, suffering the minimum amount of bloodshed? After all, the nuclear-powered protagonist, played by Robert Downey Jr., wipes out the bad guys in Afghanistan, yet barely gets a scratch, safe inside his weaponized rocket-man outfit.

So what does Hollywood know that the… more

The Call of Duty -- and Destiny

In one of the great epics of Western literature, the hero, confronted by numerous and powerful enemies, temporarily gives in to weakness and self-pity. “I wish,” he sighs, “none of this had happened.” The hero’s wise adviser responds, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.” The old man continues, “There are other forces at work in this world ... besides the will of evil.”… more

Hidden away, secreted in the dusty stacks of the Machiavellian Library, is the definitive how-to guide, Winning Through Ethnic Manipulation. Observing the immigration and affirmative-action policies favored by the current administration, it’s one book that I am sure George W. Bush -- or at least Karl Rove -- has read.

Start with the chapter entitled “Divide and Conquer,” which instructs power-practitioners to dream up racial hierarchies aimed at keeping potentially powerful groups divided -- too busy fighting over crumbs on the… more

Chuck Hagel has walked the walk. His experience in military service, not to mention his medal-winning heroism in Vietnam four decades ago, distinguishes him from most of those who make American foreign policy these days. But as for talking the talk -- well, his talk about foreign policy isn’t ultimately much different from that of the foreign-policy establishment that got us into Iraq and that wants to keep us imposing martial hegemony in the Middle East forever.

So those who rhapsodize… more

As if the US did not have enough on its plate, the latest strongly anti-American statements of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have suggested the possibility of a new Cold War with Russia. And from the Russian point of view, these statements are only responding to a whole series of bitterly anti-Russian statements and actions by the US administration over the past year, including plans to bring Ukraine into NATO, the speech attacking Russia by Vice President Cheney… more

James Pinkerton

The late Stephen Jay Gould quipped that the intellectual world could be divided between two camps, the “lumpers” and the “splitters.” Lumpers see commonalities, splitters see differences. Can things be sorted into a few broad categories, or do they need to be assigned to more specific and nuanced cubbyholes? Gould was mostly concerned with paleontology, but the same lumpers-splitters argument can be applied to politics: should we collapse all the variations of American thought into just two categories, liberal… more