Kendrick Macdowell

The launch of No Labels (Not Left, Not Right, Forward) is a welcome existential insistence: moderates, centrists, and civil civilians exist (in large numbers) and wish to be recognized. Sincere partisans on the left and right have long held that moderates don't really exist; they just take longer to make up their minds. Or, as a right-wing friend of mine characterizes them, "some say this and some say that, and I tend to agree." (more)

With the tax compromise, and the open revolt of the president's base, the White House is again unsecretly pleased with a conflict of its own making. Triangulation. (more)

Helen Thomas, ninety and nutty, just can't stop.  But now she's taking the anti-Semitic bigotry to a new level. (more)

Most Americans don’t delve deeply into the details of global conflicts.  They rely instead on a hierarchy of common sense.  I will kill you, for example, trumps I will be mean to you.  Their preferences are governed by certain basic narratives.  The competing details are inconsequential if one side loses a basic narrative. (more)

Some years ago, I had a conversation with my teenage son Daniel about the latest Grand Theft Auto release.  So, you understand that this stuff is disgusting, right?  Yes, Dad.  You're not impressed in any respect with what these cartoon people do, right?  No, Dad.  Okay. (more)

Evan Bayh, the honorable centrist Democrat from Indiana, will retire from the United States Senate in January, replaced on election night by Republican Dan Coats in what has become the most Republican Great Lakes state.  Bayh's election-day column in the New York Times anticipates precisely how Democrats and Republicans will square off for the great American center, which is both despised and urgently desired by ideologues of both parties. (more)

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2010 elections.  May they serve honorably and well. (more)

It's here!  Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, DC!  It's for those, says the website, "who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles."  Indeed. (more)

A new report called Tea Party Nationalism, backed by the NAACP, links the Tea Party with racists and extremists.  Amazing.  How pre-post-racial could we possibly be?  And when will liberals cease this preposterously lame narrative about right-wing racists? (more)

Ever since the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, when Clarence Darrow cross-examined William Jennings Bryan, and H.L. Mencken ridiculed the good people of Rhea County as "babbits," "morons," "peasants," "hillbillies," "yaps," and "yokels," describing conservatives as "anti-science" has been a staple of the leftist narrative. (more)

Michael Kinsley's latest modest proposal in Atlantic magazine -- that the Baby Boomer generation give something back to America because of all its profligate lifestyle and debt -- is well-argued, and being a Boomer (1959), I'm susceptible to the guilt-tripping.  But I have some quibbles. (more)

Democratic Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam.  His challenger, Republican Linda McMahon, in this new ad, reminds Connecticut voters about Blumenthal's self-aggrandizement. (more)

It's a wonderful time to be a Sanchez and racist.  First, California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez trashed her Vietnamese-American Republican challenger, Van Tran, by insisting on Spanish-language television that "the Vietnamese and the Republicans are trying to take away this seat" -- and adding, without a particle of support, that Tran is "very anti-immigrant and very anti-Latino."  (Not to worry, though; she supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, which means that Bill Clinton will campaign for her.) (more)

Law students encounter early the Holmesian Bad Man — the reason a legal system cannot be based on the fact that most people do the right thing. A legal system must account for the Bad Man, the unusual one who will exploit the system. A legal system must therefore not simply exhort the Good Man to keep doing good but make the Bad Man afraid to do bad. A legal system that fails to make the Bad Man afraid to do bad is doomed. (more)

I had resolved not to weigh in on the Pastor Terry Jones' Koran-burning controversy because, notwithstanding its utterly unrepresentative insignificance to our culture, (a) virtually every Democrat and Republican of consequence, the White House, the Department of Defense, and the FBI, did weigh in; (b) it never actually happened; and (c) it was such a silly idea that to give it any further notoriety seemed unproductive. (more)

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (more)

I am officially old enough, barely, to remember when television was going to convert Americans into zombies, when our surrender to the nefarious entertainments of a machine was supposed to strip our capacity to relate to actual human beings.  And every successive technology paradigm shift -- cable television, computers, the internet, electronic mail, instant messaging, cell phones, video games, twitter -- has occasioned the same apocalyptic warning, that we are a culture in decline if we succumb to this new titillation. (more)

Democrats now eagerly pose as moderates, though nothing in recent Democratic Party voting history warrants the label.  Republicans, at their great peril, eschew moderates and imagine that the tremendous dissatisfaction with the Obama administration is a mandate for immoderation. (more)

Much of my recent focus on Muslim-American dialogue concerns the concept of civil reciprocity: Muslims are not "victims" in America, Americans do not hate Muslims, Muslims thrive in America -- and as Americans are repeatedly pounded into sensitivity regarding Muslims, Americans wish to see a measure of corresponding Muslim sensitivity.  That is, in a nutshell, the current cultural tension, writ large by the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. (more)

If hyper-inflation applied to political philosophy, "human rights," like Deutsch Marks in the early Weimar Republic, would be piled into wheelbarrows by the billions for a loaf of bread.  The latest profligate printing of "human rights" currency is the Obama administration's American self-assessment submitted to the UN Council on Human Rights. (more)