Entries

Legal Fairness: No. Poetic Justice: Yes

As the media revel in all the lurid details of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, ask yourself this question: How is it that we know any of this stuff? The short answer: U.S. federal prosecutors leaked it. The court documents referred only to a mysterious "Client Number Nine" -- reflecting the usual …

Written by David Frum on Saturday March 15, 2008

Nobody's Fault But Obama's

Is it the responsibility of the government of Canada to assist Democratic presidential candidates in telling lies? Apparently the answer is "yes" -- at least according to the opposition parties in Ottawa. The opposition parties are slamming the Harper government for inadvertently …

Written by David Frum on Saturday March 8, 2008

Friends With Those He Fought

Of all the writings of Bill Buckley, none were finer than his short obituaries. He wrote nearly 500 of them -- for world rulers, political opponents and intimate friends; and, in many cases, for people who combined all three roles into one. Here, for example, is an extract from his obituary for …

Written by David Frum on Saturday March 1, 2008

Hillary Has A Point

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is collapsing, a victim of this one unsolveable problem: Hillary's opponents hate her -- but her supporters do not much like her. As the Democratic primaries have stretched, former Hillary supporting constituencies have one by one dropped away. …

Written by David Frum on Saturday February 23, 2008

Right Man, Wrong Time

It's been a long time since there was a Republican presidential candidate like Mitt Romney. In recent years, Republican presidential candidates have dealt in soaring rhetoric and heroic themes. The grubby details of policy they left to the Democrats. Mr. Romney was made of very different …

Written by David Frum on Friday February 8, 2008

Economy Could Yet Cast The Final Vote

The first (and maybe most decisive) news of the day came not from New York or California, not from Georgia or West Virginia, but from the Institute for Supply Management. The Institute tracks business purchasing of everything from toilet paper to laptop computers. On Super-Duper Tuesday, it …

Written by David Frum on Wednesday February 6, 2008

Gop's Last Best Hope

Tuesday was a bad day for supporters of Rudy Giuliani. It wasn't so great for fans of Mitt Romney, either. The Republican presidential race seems to be returning to the place where it started 18 months ago: with John McCain as the presumptive front-runner --despite his low standing among the …

Written by David Frum on Thursday January 31, 2008

Ancient Holy Books, Modern Dilemmas

Holy books are like mirrors that reflect us back to ourselves. The loving hear calls to love more deeply; the hateful are confirmed in their hate. It is not the text that makes the religion what it is; it is the reader. I find few religious scenes more inspiring than a synagogue on a morning …

Written by David Frum on Wednesday January 30, 2008

What's At Stake At Durban Ii

To call anything the United Nations does a "new low" does an injustice to all the previous "old lows." How do you do worse than pass a resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism on the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht, as the UN did in 1974? Still, even by the sordid standards …

Written by David Frum on Saturday January 26, 2008

Turning The Triple Play

Why is the Republicans' three-legged stool wobbling? Why aren't economic, social and political conservatives pulling together during this primary season the way they have in the past? To understand, let's imagine that we had three conservatives in the room with us--and that they said exactly …

Written by David Frum on Friday January 25, 2008

The Day Humanity Became Cheap

On January 28, Canada marks the 20th anniversary of what may be the most astounding decision in the nationÕs legal history: R. v. Morgentaler, the case that struck down CanadaÕs abortion laws. The Morgentaler case was followed the next year by Daigle v. Tremblay, which clarified and …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday January 22, 2008

Bush's Impossible Task

fully and personally to the Palestinian cause than any previous president. At a press conference earlier that same day, standing alongside Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Bush said: "I'm confident that two democratic states living side by side in peace is in the interests not …

Written by David Frum on Saturday January 12, 2008

Advantage: Rudy

My man Rudy Giuliani--for whom I act as an unpaid foreign-policy advisor--got smoked in the Republican Iowa caucuses: 4% of the vote. Yet as the smoke clears, it's going to become apparent that Rudy was the night's big winner. Here's why. The actual Republican winner, Mike Huckabee, cannot …

Written by David Frum on Saturday January 5, 2008

Dangerous Indifference

For weeks, the U.S. presidential campaign has been unfolding with truly disturbing indifference to the outside world and its dangers. That changed with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been wrestling to determine …

Written by David Frum on Saturday December 29, 2007

Truth Among The Fiction

A decade ago, Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pittman proposed an arresting explanation of the story of Noah's flood: Eight thousand years ago, what is now the Black Sea was a freshwater lake, much smaller and much shallower than today's inland ocean. Early farming …

Written by David Frum on Saturday December 22, 2007

Killing Ourselves With Food

Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control released some rare good news in the struggle against obesity: For the first time in a generation, things are not getting worse. One-third of all American men--and more than one-third of American women--are obese. Not just a little large, but …

Written by David Frum on Saturday December 1, 2007

Catching The Cfl Spirit

"The war has not progressed altogether as we would have wished." With those words, the Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan in August, 1945. They also neatly describe this season's performance by the Toronto Argonauts: a stunning come-from-behind surge culminating in an embarrassing …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 24, 2007

L'affaire Al-dura

I want to tell you about a forgery. The forgers intended to incite hatred against Jews and the state of Israel and to a great extent, they have succeeded. The forgery is a 55-second film clip that purports to show the shooting death of a 12-year-old boy at a Gaza crossroads after a Palestinian …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 17, 2007

Remembering A Great War For Democracy

It's just one exhibit at the Canadian War Museum: an interactive display that allows you to punch in a name of a First World War soldier and see his enlistment papers. It does not sound very dramatic. Until you try it. I entered the name of my wife's grandfather, a veteran of the Western front. …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 10, 2007

Losing The Battle Against Anti-americanism

In the movie "Wag the Dog," an embattled president hires a Hollywood producer to retrieve his image. The producer presents the president with a speech. Top aides read it over and pronounce it "corny." The producer explodes in rage. "Corny? Corny? Of course itÕs corny!" Nobody except extreme …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 3, 2007