PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Mess They Made of 2023
Abroad and at home, ideology ruled the U.S. Let us consider together the year gone past and arrive at some conclusions as to where it leaves us as we enter upon another. We can begin with two recent events that,…
Patrick Lawrence: What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War?
The Narrative Turns. Now What? “Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling.” This was the headline atop a Dec.9 commentary in The Telegraph, the farthest right of the major London dailies. The subhead elaborated the theme in…
Patrick Lawrence: That New Hunter Biden Indictment
It’s a Limited Hangout. Before wading through the latest indictment of Hunter Biden, this one for nine counts of assorted tax violations, we must consider briefly the record of David Weiss, the special counsel who signed the 56–page document made…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Gaza & Confronting Power
The American state, broadly defined, is well on its way toward a form of apple-pie absolutism, forcing distorted meanings not merely on three university administrators but on all of us. The events of the past seven days are sobering no…
Patrick Lawrence: Gaza Divides the World, Again
Strong Nations and the Merely Powerful. My award for courageous elocution of the week goes hands-down to Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, who addressed the General Assembly last Tuesday on the topic of Israel and its barbaric…
Patrick Lawrence: Undivided Loyalties
To What Do We Dedicate Ourselves? There is a story about Walter Lippmann it seems useful to relate as much of humanity lapses into misapprehension, sudden animosities and ferocious divisions along who knows how many lines—political, ideological, religious, partisan, “identitarian.”…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Media’s Fatal Compromises
It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses. The…
“An open letter to Joe Biden.”
Complicit in ‘the crime of crimes.’ Peter Dimock, the distinguished novelist, previously graced our pages two years ago this week, when Deep Vellum, the Dallas publisher, brought out Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson, the most recent of his innovative…
Patrick Lawrence: What Died 60 Years Ago?
A President and a Nation’s Promise On January 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all these years later as a murmur amid a long silence. “Choice or Chance” was a blunt worry about what the…
IMPEACHMENT: Biden Under Formal Investigation
Patrick Lawrence writes that Joe Biden, a.k.a. “the Big Guy,” will be formally investigated on accumulating evidence he participated and benefited from his son Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving. It is now two and a half months since the…