I’d like to mention a few articles. Below, I mentioned Ian Tuttle’s piece on Obama vs. Netanyahu (or Obama vs. Middle East reality). Here are some more.
Christine Sisto has written about “cat-calling.” I’m so glad she has tackled this subject — it’s important. I have witnessed cat-calling my entire life, as we all do. In the main, I have not found it innocent, sweet, and breezy, as in a Warner Bros. cartoon. (“Hey, toots! Nice gams!”) I have found it menacing, disgusting, and semi-assaultive.
Perhaps women at large don’t object as much as I do — I don’t know. People can surprise you, often disappointingly. You can’t be more pro-them than they are. (Well, you can be.)
Michael Barone ought to write sage columns about politics, and he has: Check him out on the Democrats and the present election. Barone at his best.
Speaking of Baronian journalists: Robert Costa, formerly of NR, now of the Washington Post, has interviewed Paul Ryan, here.
Peggy Noonan has written a marvelous column — it’s about Ebola and quarantines (among other things). It is commonsensical, lyrical, novel, personal, impersonal, timely, needed — pretty much perfect.
(As is her appreciation of Oscar de la Renta, here: “He struck me, in perhaps a dozen conversations over many years, as unjudging and yet discerning. That is a hard combination to hold in your head. It’s hard not to be censorious when you can see.”)
Also in the Wall Street Journal, the editors have written about the British prime minister, David Cameron, and his understanding of the moral aspect of taxation. Readers who depend on NRO may not realize that Cameron is not the Leverett Saltonstall of Britain.
Hang on, I’d better rephrase, for younger readers: . . . may not realize that Cameron is not a Brussels-loving, fancy-pants status-quoer. Go ahead and ask Labour, the Guardian, or the BBC about him: They think he’s the tea party.
Mona Charen has written a typically informed, persuasive, and lively column, this one about “lessons” from Election 2014. The column is not harmed — or at least not ruined — by the quotation of me in the first paragraph.
What happened is this: On a recent podcast, Mona was saying that she hoped the GOP would not draw the wrong lessons from victory in 2014. I said I wanted to see victory before faulting the Republicans for drawing wrong lessons from it.
At NR’s editorial meeting on Monday, someone said, “Maybe we should comment on how the ‘war on women’ nonsense isn’t working this year.” I said, “Could I see first that it hasn’t worked? Should we wait till Election Day?”
My “Oslo Journal” continues on the homepage today (Part V). Among other subjects and personalities, I discuss Ti-Anna Wang, a young Chinese democracy advocate whose father has been in prison for twelve years. Born in 1989, she was named for the victims in Tiananmen Square.
Ti-Anna did not ask for the life she is leading: that of daughter campaigning for her father’s freedom, and his very right not to be tortured to death. But she is handling it with almost superhuman grace.