Israel is no more. Its cities lay in ruins, its people wallow in oppression. All signs of Jewish presence in the Holy Land are being eradicated: synagogues closed, cemeteries desecrated, libraries burned. Dissidents disappear into "special" camps in the Sinai Peninsula. Arab leaders convene in Jerusalem to divvy up the...

If Marco Rubio wins the Florida Senate seat, he'll instantly become a frontrunner for the Republican vice presidential nomination in 2012. Whoever is at the top of the ticket -- Palin, Romney, Gingrich -- will find it hard to deny him the nod. Several factors will work in Rubio's favor:...

"Fascinating Fascism" is a 1975 essay by Susan Sontag, which appeared in The New York Review of Books. Ostensibly a critique of an African photo journal by Leni Riefenstahl, it attempts to scrape off the whitewash the German filmmaker had succeeded in applying to her reputation after World War II....

Does the thought of preemptive war still give Christopher Hitchens erections? He said it did in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. (Actually, he joked that the mere mention of the word "preemptive" would initiate tumescence.) Once, during a debate with Rabbi Harold Kushner, he chided the rabbi for...

Barack Obama is not my commander-in-chief. No president has been or ever will be, for I'm a lifelong civilian. The Constitution is unambiguous on this: the president is commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces -- not the United States. But many of my noncombatant brethren believe otherwise. They insist...

Dear BHL:

May I call you B? You probably don't remember me, but we met a few years ago, when you were in Miami to promote your travelogue, American Vertigo. I interviewed you for a local NPR program. It went well, I thought, although I was perplexed by...

My provocative (and partially self-censored) title is indebted to J.G. Ballard's story, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, which was published in 1968, the year Reagan was touted as an alternative to frontrunner Richard Nixon in the contest for the Republican nomination. This alarmed Ballard, who had perceived the...

With all this talk of death panels, it seems fitting that liberals have gone through the five stages of grief over the past several months. But with the health care bill poised to become law, there is mounting resistance to the final stage, acceptance. Before I continue, let me...

Right-minded souls who reject claims of mitigating circumstances in the case of Roman Polanski should follow the example of Fred Goldman. He's the father of Ron Goldman, the waiter who was butchered along with Nicole Simpson, O.J. Simpson's ex-wife. Since Simpson's acquittal in 1995, Mr. Goldman has refused to utter...

A column commemorating the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II has raised, for the umpteenth time, the question of whether or not Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite. The column, "Did Hitler Want War?", is a misleading and distasteful exercise in revisionism which paints the Fuhrer as...

Like the U.S. army major who "saved" a Vietnamese village by destroying it, the patriotic traitor seeks to preserve his country by bringing it down. Recently I watched Seven Days in May . In this political thriller, an American president has negotiated a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets...

Dear Sen. Franken:

First, congratulations. After eight months, our long Midwestern nightmare is over. What a photo finish! Three hundred and twelve votes out of almost three million cast. If anybody gives you a hard time, bring up Lyndon Johnson. In 1948, he won a U.S. Senate seat...

In his article on the Quitta from Wasilla, Todd Purdum asks, "What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?" Is the intrepid Vanity Fair reporter shocked,...

I first read Rebecca West's Meaning of Treason in the 1990s. At the time I was more interested in the looping grace of West's sentences than in her moral observations. Content trumped style after 9/11. My parents knew what it was like to be cowered into silence; they had...

After having finished Netherland, I can see why President Obama added it to his reading list. Aside from being extraordinarily well-written, it's a paean to multiculturalism, something that might interest a biracial liberal Democrat with a foreign-sounding name. A literary tonic for the juvenile chauvinism of the Bush years,...

Do not be surprised if Barack Obama thanks George W. Bush for his service to the nation at the start of his inaugural address. Since Jimmy Carter, every incoming president has given a shout-out from the podium to his predecessor. But if one looks at history, one finds that this...

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is all well and good, but he still has a way to go before the ignominious stain on his carefully cultivated reputation is washed off. He dirtied himself on February 5, 2003, when he presented a bogus argument for the Iraq war to...

Last week marked the 107th anniversary of a symbolically important event in the history of race relations in this country. On October 16, 1901, Booker T. Washington went to the White House to have dinner with Theodore Roosevelt. It now seems like a minor footnote, a black man breaking...

As everybody who follows this stuff knows, Barack Obama will accept the Democratic presidential nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. King's vision of a color-blind America is universally quoted, but as Drew D. Hansen points out in his book, The Dream:...

A surprising footnote to the Edwards affair is that Rielle Hunter turns out to be the prototype of the heroine of Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. Published in 1988, this was McInerney's third novel. His first was the bestseller Bright Lights, Big City, which follows a troubled young...