Maureen Dowd and her Critics

. A couple of interesting comments from Noga and David on my post, “A Political Hall of Mirrors,” prompts these further considerations on the reaction to Maureen Dowd’s neocon puppet master column. I don’t think this is a subject in which people need necessarily hold hard positions unwaveringly and completely opposed to differing views. Of […]

A Political Hall of Mirrors

. Bob from Brockley writes (from Brockley, I presume) to offer compliment and commentary to my last post on Maureen Dowd. Bob and I are usually in close alignment on such issues as have arisen from Dowd’s recent column on the neocons. In this case not. Bob (whom, if you don’t, you really should be […]

Male Genital Enhancement

. This essay originally appeared in The Times of Israel, July 3, 2012. Is it too fanciful to imagine that Germany  might wait, say, a thousand years, the length of an eponymously termedTausendjähriges Reich, before any governmental body in that country could feel sufficiently conscientiously liberated as to actually restrict a Jewish religious rite, i.e. […]

“How the Left Turned Against the Jews”

. Nick Cohen at Standpoint writing, in “How the Left Turned Against the Jews,” about Colin Shindler’s new book, Israel and the European Left: But in a strange manner few discuss, the death of Communism has freed far-Left ideas from the cage of the Cold War. When the far Left was a global force, the […]

The Unsound Judgment of Peter Beinart

. Just over two years ago, I wrote a post titled “The Unsound Judgment of Andrew Sullivan.” Sullivan, for all his true virtues, is a man of strikingly unsound judgment. He swings, he swings frequently, he swings with emotion from one impassioned response to another, a kind of journalistic Thaïs transforming regularly from the life of […]