Norman Mailer on the GOP victory in 2000

The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Floridan in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up reed to foreclose on many a widow's home or farm. Nor did those lawyers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls.

Norman Mailer on the Iraqi war

Bin Laden and Hussain were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world - bin Laden, conceivably for the greater glory of Allah, and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the nineteenth century, when the British had their Empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other.

H L Mencken on Los Angeles

A 1926 piece explaining why Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who has been caught in a love-nest that year, needed Los Angeles to succeed in her holy calling.

...Los Angeles was a pasture fore-ordained for evangelists, and she was the first one to give it anything low enough for its taste and comprehension. The osteopaths, the chiropracters, and other suck quacks, had long marked and occupied it. It swarmed with swamis, spiritualists, Christian scientists, crystal-gazers and the allied necromancers. It offered brilliant pickings for real-estate speculators, oil stock brokers, wire-tappers and so on. But the town pastors were not up to its opportunities. They ranged from melancholy High Church Episcopalians, laboriously trying to interest retired Iowa alfafa kings in ritualism, down to struggling Methodists and Baptists, as earnestly seeking to inflame the wives of the same monarchs with the crimes of the Pope. All this was over the heads of their trade. The Iowans longed for something they could get their teeth into. They wanted magic and noise. They wanted an excuse to whoop.

Bernard Goldberg on Dan Rather

If CBS news were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three quarters of the producers and a hundred percent of the vice-presidents would be Dan's bitches.

Terry Jones on the War on Terror

How can you wage war on an abstract noun?

Joan Didion on 9-11

With the flames still visible over Lower Manhattan, the words "bi-partisanship" and "national unity" came to mean acquiescence to the administration's existing agenda.

Avishai Margalit on Suicide Bombers

Vengeance through suicide bombing has, as I understand it, an additional value: that of making yourself a victim of your own act and thereby putting your tormentors to moral shame. The idea of the suicide bombing, unlike that of an ordinary attack, is perversely a moral idea in which the killers, in acting out the drama of the ultimate victim, claim for their own cause the moral high ground.

On Michael Mann

In Micheal Mann's world of existential working class drama, a man stripped of his profession is nothing. That is what The Insider is all about.

Trollope on Literary Reviews

Of all the reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed - been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body may be a mere amorphous mass - then a real success has been achieved.

Alfonso X of Spain

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful advice for the better ordering of the Universe.

On Trent Lott

Trent Lott is as stupid as Europeans think George Bush is.

From Rubin to Rove

This was the Rubin doctrine - the conviction that, whatever the short term costs, in the end good economic policy will produce its own political reward - whether it was painful measures to reduce the fiscal deficit or unpopular support for countries in financial crisis.

Now we have the Rove doctrine. Karl Rove's prescription that if it feels food electorally, do it. This is why the administration pressed ahead last year with an inappropriate tax cut devised at the peak of the 1990s expansion. This is why tariffs were imposed on imported steel this year, why Mr Bush gleefully signed a corporate reform bill that his economists feared would do more harm than good.