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...

John McCain is campaigning the way he boxed at Annapolis. In The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg writes that Midshipman McCain would compensate for his lack of athleticism in the ring by throwing punches until his opponent went down. "He won all his fights by knockouts or TKOs."

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Barack Obama's candidacy has got me thinking of Irving Wallace's 1964 novel The Man , which imagines an America led by a black president. But Wallace's hero, Douglas Dillman, isn't elected; he's a Midwestern senator who inherits the White House after the president and the speaker of the House are...