Tuesday, January 5, 2010 Creatures from the Conservative Id Out of office, but still in play: The modern Torture State is Dick Cheney’s legacy. Shall I tell you what true evil is? It is to submit to you. It is when we surrender our freedom, our dignity, instead of defying you. –Captain Jean-Luc Picard confronts […]

Thursday, January 14, 2010 All the Reich Moves Either fight it now, or get used to this kind of thing: Pennsylvania State Troopers — one with a drawn assault rifle, his trigger-finger ready — bracket a terrified driver during a roadblock set up near Pittsburgh following the death of a “comrade” in a domestic shooting. […]

Monday, January 18, 2010 Hurting People For a Living Pure, distilled badness : Unlike agents of state coercion, Hawk never preyed on the weak and helpless.I don’t like him. He hurts people for a living.Only people who’ve hurt others, or who haven’t kept a promise.Spenser explains Hawk’s code of ethics to his inamorata, Susan SilvermanFor […]

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 Killing the Commissar: The Limits of Submission Sic semper Tyrannis: Israelite liberator Ehud slays the tyrant-king Eglon. “… Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh. And he brought [a] present unto Eglon, the king of Moab…. And […]

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 This Is A Man: The Defiance of Omar Deghayes Blinded, bloodied, but unbowed: Libyan-born British citizen Omar Deghayes, imprisoned and tortured for years at Gitmo, seen here shortly before his release. “What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in […]

Friday, February 5, 2010 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Think Things Through During the so-called McCarthy Era, Frank Chodorov — an Old Right individualist of the Jeffersonian school — offered a simple and effective solution to the problem presented by Communist infiltration of various federal agencies: “The only thing to do, if you want to […]

Friday, February 12, 2010 The Most Liberating Word “Let your `yes’ be `yes,’ and your `no’ be `no’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”Jesus of Nazareth, as quoted in Matthew 5:37Years ago, somebody coined the aphorism, “`No’ is a complete sentence.” While some grammarians might disagree with that conclusion, “no” is incontrovertibly […]

Thursday, February 18, 2010 Who’s Afraid of “Interposition”? Those who are mystified by the political concept called “interposition” can find a very compelling tutorial in a vignette from Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove.Led by former Texas Rangers Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, the men of the Hat Creek Cattle Company left their village of Lonesome […]