Edward Cline's Blog, page 37

Islam is the Enemy

I read an interesting Spiked column on the current "offensive" in Afghanistan. The author makes several valid points. He all but says that if the war is fought, not to achieve victory, but to attain some altruistic "hearts and minds" goal, then it is pointless to even wage the war.

As the NATO forces prepared to launch their latest doomed offensive to defeat an invisible enemy while winning over hostile hearts and minds, a British lieutenant colonel was quoted as saying, somewhat tactlessly...

Obama the Pseudo-Narcissist

Near the end of her September 1960 article in Human Events, "J.F.K. — High Class Beatnik?" about the keynote speech presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy delivered at the Democratic National Convention, Ayn Rand warns:

When a man extols "leadership"—leadership without direction—leadership without any stated purpose, program or ideal—leadership for the sake of leadership—you may be sure that you are hearing the voice of a man motivated by power-lust. It is specifically the power-lust o...

Defending Ayn Rand

Defending Ayn Rand

An interesting and important cultural development -- in the way of two critical skirmishes in the conflict between Objectivism and its mainstream critics, left, right, and fringe -- was the Objectivist and general reader response to a "review" of Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made by noted conservative critic Anthony Daniels, who also writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple, in The New Criterion, and to another "review," ostensively of Atlas Shrugged, by a...

The Renewed War Against Freedom of Speech

No sooner had the Supreme Court upheld the right of corporations to exercise their freedom of speech, than the ruling was attacked, first by newspapers, pundits, and finally by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address.

Various newspapers and blogsites, including the White House, carry this version of what Obama said:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including...

The State of His Audacity

Watching a video the other evening of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address (and later reading the transcript of it), I was struck by two things: the yawn-inducing banality of everything he said, because he has said it all before; and the blatantly collectivist nature of the speech, one barely disguised by its sugary "progressive" coating. Throughout his speech, it was " I am disappointed with the lack of progress by Congress in implementing a socialist agenda, and so we must sto...

Three Horsemen of the Recent Apocalypse

Democrats, welfare statists, ambitious censors, and People for the Un-American Way were dealt a triple whammy of telling defeats in a matter of two days. Air America, the liberal, anemic, and unlistened-to talk radio station that was intended to compete with Rush Limbaugh and other forthright and outspoken conservative talk show hosts, filed for bankruptcy (for the second time; the first in 2006). It was not a total loss. Al Franken, failed comedian and its most notable host, won a Senate sea...

Mencken, Islam, and Political Correctness

Two months after the John Scopes "monkey" trial of July 1925, H.L. Mencken, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun, took to task two prominent publications, the New York World and the New Republic, for castigating Clarence Darrow, chief defense counsel of Scopes, over his conduct during the trial. The World was infuriated by Darrow's brutal cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan, the state's star counsel against Scopes, an experience which humiliated Bryan and is thought to have contribut...

Hollywood vs. America

"When's the movie coming out?"

I have been asked that question repeatedly over the course of seven years of book-signings for Sparrowhawk at Colonial Williamsburg's Booksellers by eager patrons who have read the series and wish to see it on the big screen.

"Not any time soon," I usually answer. "If it is ever produced, it won't be by Hollywood. And if Hollywood in some episode of hubris thought it could tackle it, it would attempt to maul and dismember it, just out of sheer, doctrinaire meanne...

Hearts of Darkness

The moral sewers that are the minds of the likes of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and Senate majority leader, were revealed this week with the report that Reid has apologized to President Barack Obama (and to other black civil rights leaders) for having said privately in 2008 that Obama was "light-skinned" and had "no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one."

Reid's remark was made public in a new book, Game Change, by political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The book chronicle...

States' Rights: Dumb Show and Noise

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out , out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. -- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

The Republican Party has reached deep into its armory of political arguments and come up with its best shot against federally-mandated health care "reform." Citing the Tenth Amendment, they are ...