Sol W. Sanders There is another parallel shadowy election tomorrow – no candidates, no poll counting, and no definitive victory or defeat. It’s the little acknowledged cultural war playing out, a fierce contest hardly talked about publicly – at least not identifying it with each candidate. Using labels of another day, the presidential contestants […]
Sol W. Sanders Maybe it’s because you can fly faster from America to Europe than westward to the U.S.? But for whatever reason, a standard politically correct mantra these days is how if we would just imitate the Europeans, everything would be better. Which of the accepted five categories of propaganda this argument falls […]
Sol W. Sanders Americans have always liked to think that one of the remarkable achievements of U.S. society — differentiating it from the Old Country — was our social mobility. Our “aristocrats,” whether moneyed or “stars,” were mostly only a generation away from obscurity. And chances were their progeny wouldn’t hang on to their […]
Sol W. Sanders Only Lewis Carroll could have done justice to the Obama administration’s fall down the dark hole into the U.S.’ latest Middle East misadventures. Beginning with his Cairo and Istanbul speeches in the spring of 2009, President Obama attempted, indeed, “a new beginning,” as speechwriter Thomas E. Donilon, now, significantly, national security […]
Sol W. Sanders “Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses.” – Juvenal, circa 100 B.C. Thus a Roman satirist […]
Sol W. Sanders Stolid Mitt Romney has come up with an energy plan with a stinger in its tail. The mainstream media, fixated on distractions of the Democratic matador’s cape, virtually ignored it. Energy aficionados gave it a ho-hum reception since it calls on hoary common-sense arguments. But the plan contains a magnificent hidden […]
Sol W. Sanders Jack Garner, a Texan whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose as his first vice president for “balance,” put it succinctly: The vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm p–” (later cleaned up to “spit”). But Garner, ironically enough, helped block FDR’s power grab when that most charismatic of presidents tried […]
Sol W. Sanders Paying a visit to my phlegmatic Punjabi physician in New Delhi in the early 1960s, I found him uncharacteristically upset. Amniocentesis had come to India and some of his patients were asking him to abort fetuses if they were female. Out of moral scruple, he was refusing, losing patients — and […]
Sol W. Sanders Poor ol’ Mitt Romney. He forgot politicians are supposed to cater to the media. And when he spoke truth to power of the left-wing comme il faut Anglo-American journalist mob, they came down on him like the proverbial ton of bricks. And so what were all those uncommon observations labeled “gaffes” […]
Sol W. Sanders Settling in with a drink and interesting talk a few years ago — it would be the last session we had, unhappily — with Ed Seidenstecker, the best of the WWII American Japan scholars, the conversation took a serious turn. As we dissolved in that witlessness that overtakes one in Hawaii, […]
