Joseph Bottum

Over at National Review , they’ve got a list of the top ten conservative novels written by Americans since 1950: 1. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury 2. Midcentury by John Dos Passos 3. Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow 4. The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton 5. The Thanatos . . . . Continue Reading »

No wonder the White House was surprisingly nice in its first public statements about Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts campaign. After all, Brown’s victory just handed Obama what he needs to win his own campaign for reelection as president in 2012… . Continue Reading »

What is the deal with Massachusetts electoral returns? If the Boston Globe ’s figures are accurate, last night Coakley won handily in the most populous towns: 62 percent of the vote in the top ten, and 54 percent in the second ten. What’s more, she won in the least populous towns, gaining . . . . Continue Reading »

“Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era,” says Mark McGwire, admitting at last what everyone already knew—that he drugged himself silly in the era of his greatest success in baseball. Over at the Washington Post , Tracee Hamilton has the right response : The . . . . Continue Reading »

It is a curious formula, that phrase “American exceptionalism.” As commonly used, the phrase suggets that the United States somehow escaped the typical patterns of history”the patterns that seemed almost inviolable and iron-clad historical laws, precisely because they appeared in . . . . Continue Reading »

A fun and interesting blogger named Ellen Painter Dollar takes up the seasonal reminiscence we reposted here on the First Things website, ” Dakota Christmas .” She likes my writing—”so gorgeously, lucidly written that I wanted to lay my hands on my laptop screen, hoping I . . . . Continue Reading »

“They think I shouldn’t be expressing my views on this bill until they get a chance to try to sell me the language,” Congressman Stupak said yesterday in an interview . Somehow that verb, sell , seems appropriate when speaking about the monstrosity of the Senate’s version of . . . . Continue Reading »

Ambassador Douglas Kmiec—the Catholic law professor who parlayed his campaign book in support of Obama into an ambassadorship to Malta—has signed a statement of “Christian Leaders” in support of the abortion provisions in the Senate’s health-care bill. Of this, Ed Whelan . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a woman screaming on Park Avenue, flecks of saliva spraying from her mouth as she raged into her cell phone, “It’s not my fault.” Over and over, like the high-pitched squeal of a power saw cutting bricks: It’s not my fault and a run of foul names, It’s not my fault and another run of names, It’s not my fault, you (blank)ing (blank). It’s not my fault, you evil (blank). It’s … not … my … fault… . Continue Reading »

From David Aaronovitch’s column about conspiracy theories in the Wall Street Journal : These cyber-driven days, each new U.S. president has attracted theories of his own, assiduously spread mostly by partisans of the other side. So the saturnine Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster and a whole . . . . Continue Reading »