Campaign 2004 is in its final frantic hours as these words are being written, but deadlines being what they arethe bane of the bellowing pontificatoryou’ll be reading this after the results are known. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you’re as clueless as I am as I write, although that would

What do you call a politician who supports incentives to buy and drive fuel-efficient vehicles, even if they happen to be made in Japan? One can easily imagine Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California curling his lips and referring to such a goody-goody colleague as, well, a girlie man. Schwarze

Every election cycle, it seems, brings new evidence that politics is an ignoble profession not worthy of the average citizens active participation. This years voter turnoff is breathtaking in its audacity and downright cruelty. John Kerry, a man who volunteered for a war he could have evadedas so ma

As the Roman world began to disintegrate and the emperor was far from home fighting wars on the Rhine, a group known as the Alemanni advanced from Germany to the very outskirts of the great global city. In this emergency, wrote Edward Gibbon in his masterful tale of Rome’s decline and fall, th

While the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore hardly speaks for most of those who believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, his efforts to portray Iraqi insurgents as heroic freedom-fighters heralds an intellectual crisis on the left. Do opponents of the war in Iraq also believe that the United St

On a mid-winter’s night in April, I parked myself in front of a television set to watch the Boston Red Sox begin their annual exercise in bitter frustration, only to find myself thinking about Colin Powell. The connection will become clear in a moment.The Boston Red Sox began the 2004 baseball