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MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan will release his campaign finance jeremiad Greedy Bastards tomorrow, decrying the excesses of “Auction 2012.” In the meantime, the financial-journalist-turned-activist-pundit has a nice round 10 reasons why individuals and legally recognized groups of individuals shouldn’t have the right to financially support their candidate of choice. Most of his reasons have nothing to do with campaign [...]
Daniel Flynn expounds on Ray Bradbury’s retrofuturism and outcast persona in an article posted today. A science fiction writer that railed against technology’s dehumanizing effects, an intellectual dismissed by the literary elite as the “poet of the pulps,” and a futurist whose utopia was small-town life circa 1920, Bradbury’s life was a mess of contradictions [...]
Christopher Hitchens was, as Tom Piatak once wrote in our pages, “the purest neocon.” He was also, as George Scialabba has assayed, “an ornament of Anglo-American literary journalism.” I had read more polemic against Hitchens than of Hitchens himself until I picked up a copy of his Thomas Jefferson: Author of America and found myself [...]
Filed under: Books
The world is rapidly changing, says Andrew Bacevich, and Americans need to change with it. The “Freedom Agenda” of neoconservatives is unraveling as America is gripped by recession, the Middle East faces an uncertain future, and Europe looks for a lifeline from financial chaos. All the while, Bacevich says, American politicians continue to fiddle obliviously, [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Religion, War, World
Evelyn Waugh is on to something in his discussion of P.G. Wodehouse (as part of a review of George Orwell’s 1946 Critical Essays): It is, of course, insane to speak of Mr. Wodehouse as a “fascist,” and Mr. Orwell finely exposes the motives and methods of the Bracken-sponsored abuse of this simple artist, but I [...]
NPR’s Tom Ashbrook interviewed Israeli novelist Amos Oz this week. Besides Oz’s outspoken calls for a two-state solution, it was intriguing to hear about Oz’s new book Scenes From a Village Life, and how he was influenced by the American writer Sherwood Anderson, author of the Winesburg, Ohio series. Oz eschews the “world of CNN,” [...]
You can get a taste of Pat Buchanan’s new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? — which shot up the Amazon.com sales charts on Friday after a link from Matt Drudge — from The American Conservative‘s exclusive excerpt here. You can also hear a clip of Mr. Buchanan reading the audiobook [...]
Filed under: Books
The Imaginative Conservative has been running an insightful series on books that showcase what it means to be human, with an emphasis on texts that show what we should stand for. (See John Willson’s recommendations, for example.) To avoid duplicating what others have already said, I’ve submitted a list with some offbeat choices, some of [...]
Filed under: Books
English poet, novelist and short story writer Rudyard Kipling has remained peculiarly popular among American conservatives, and his poems and prose are repeatedly unearthed to lend some ruddy Victorian good sense to present day issues. In 2010, former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck used the last two stanzas of the poem “The Gods of the [...]
America’s custodian of the virtues, William J. Bennett, is as prolific as ever. The former secretary of education and drug czar will soon release another chapter of his magisterial history of the United States, the multi-volume series entitled America: The Last Best Hope. Used as a textbook by right-leaning schools and homeschooling families across the country, [...]