Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

America's belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one's philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you're a cabinet minister or a big time hockey player, you'll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it's up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns.

The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.