I was one of many who sighed with relief when Conrad Black was convicted in U.S. District Court July 13. He is exceedingly litigious, and word had gone out that anyone who had suggested anything untoward in Black’s management of his newspaper empire could expect writs should the great man be found not guilty. But...
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It’s a Wonderful Racket
Q magazine once regularly asked rock musicians the question, “How do you react when you see a nun?” Bryan Adams replied that he had the highest respect for nuns and thus reacted accordingly. He added that he had recently learned that nuns no longer wore their traditional habits, and that he was distressed by this change. ...
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Just Win, Baby
In 1968, George Wallace said that there wasn’t a “dime worth’s of difference” between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Implicit there was the suggestion that Americans were not satisfied with echoes and preferred choices. As it happens, Wallace was the last third-party presidential candidate to win Electoral College votes. Besides 14 percent of the popular...
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The Global Pharmacy
Asked when he became so obsessed with voting, the antediluvian Professor Farnsworth on Futurama replied, “The very instant I became old.” Politicians know only too well that Americans 65 and over vote at twice the rate of 18- to 34-year-olds. So what “senior citizens” want, they usually get. What they want now are cheap drugs...
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Strictly From Hunger
In his autobiography, A Season For Justice, Morris Dees describes his 1967 epiphany in snowbound Cincinnati. Dees was, at the time, a millionaire 31-year-old lawyer, salesman, and publisher. While he had “sympathized with the Civil Rights Movement,” he “had not become actively involved.” By the time he arrived in Chicago, however, he was determined to...
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The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik)
Mark Steyn once told me a revealing story about Conrad Black’s “conservative” Canadian national newspaper, the National Post. It seems star columnist David Frum had ventured this evaluation: “The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.” Ah, the authentic voice of the Canadian neoconservative! Or, as English...
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The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik)
Mark Steyn once told me a revealing story about Conrad Black’s “conservative” Canadian national newspaper, the National Post. It seems star columnist David Frum had ventured this evaluation: “The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.” Ah, the authentic voice of the Canadian neoconservative! Or, as English...
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Auberon Waugh, R.I.P.
The death in January of the British journalist (and Chronicles contributor) occasioned a startling outpouring of grief. The Daily Telegraph of London weighed in with five pages, and that was just on the next day. Every one of Waugh’s many admirers was permitted a remembrance—even in newspapers he had ridiculed, such as the Observer and...
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The Canadian Alliance
Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day, I asserted a few months ago in Chronicles (“Taking Stock,” Views, November 2000), would “seek to persuade Middle Canadian voters that the [governing] Liberals are their enemies, not their friends.” I also argued that he didn’t “play by his enemies’ rules,” and that his party was “a viable alternative to...
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Taking Stock
Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, was a Conservative. He is remembered chiefly for his love of alcohol and his hatred of free trade. Brian Mulroney, the last elected Conservative prime minister, foreswore alcohol when he reckoned (correctly) that he could surmount the greasy pole (just like George W. Bush) and...