Joseph Bottum

In the Wall Street Journal today, My friend Peter Berkowitz offers a defense of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to ban the full veiling of Muslim women in France. “Restrictions on liberty in a free society are always suspect and in need of justification,” Peter wisely . . . . Continue Reading »

Remember all the outrage about the claim that health-care reform would result in diminished medicine and death panels to decide what care to withhold? Comes now the New York Times to tell us that, well, actually, yes— that’s what the reform needs : health reform will fail if we . . . . Continue Reading »

A good sign that a party is headed for an electoral wipe-out? The absence of candidates down toward the bottom of the ticket, which leaves uncontested elections for minor offices. Comes now, however, the news from South Dakota that the Democrats have decided not to field a candidate to oppose John . . . . Continue Reading »

The general reader of literature can now walk most of the poetic battlefields of the last hundred years with little more emotion than the tourist’s usual wonder that so much blood was spilled to gain so little ground. There”over there, along that low wall”the Georgians made their . . . . Continue Reading »

The talk-show story of the year: Nine arrests after a teen’s suicide . This strikes me as a dangerous precedent. The psychology of a suicide often includes a feeling of “I’ll make them all pay.” The thought that you could have your persecutors arrested by killing . . . . Continue Reading »

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the press has been attempting for over a week now to find something—anything—that mentions the pope in the context of the bishops’ deplorable and disgusting failure to act, for decades, on sexual-abuse charges. The attempt to draw the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Daily News reports this morning : “A Queens man—enraged because his wife refused to have an abortion—slashed her throat and then stabbed her sister in the stomach Monday night in front of a room full of children.” Ain’t you glad that legalized abortion set women free . . . . Continue Reading »

My review of Ian McEwan’s latest novel , Solar , is available online at the Wall Street Journal , for those who’ve followed the interesting British writer’s career: You ever see those old film clips of the early days of airplane flight? Wild contraptions of mismatched parts, . . . . Continue Reading »

A solid and interesting report , in the Times of London, on the walking disaster of Human Rights Watch. How does an organization that began as “Helsinki Watch,” dedicated to revealing human-rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain, turn into an institution so ragingly anti-Western that the . . . . Continue Reading »

Raymond de Souza demolishes the awful New York Times story attacking Pope Benedict: The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism. Read the whole . . . . Continue Reading »