"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Meantime, re the dying -- or perhaps already dead - murderous rag-head, Jonah Goldberg:
THE ARAFAT EXCEPTION
I am generally sympathetic to the notion that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead. The recently dead, that is. I don't think there's anything wrong with speaking ill of the long dead. Woodrow Wilson was a terrible man, for example. But when political opponents go, the temptation is to score points. Most liberals behaved admirably when Ronald Reagan passed away and I would like to think that conservatives would do the same when various stars of the liberal pantheon depart.
But all that goes out the window with murderers and terrorists. This tradition is predicated on the assumption that ones opponents are not ones enemies. A political opponent shares a bedrock faith in political norms and (small L) liberal rules.
None of this applies to Yasser Arafat in my opinion. He's a bad man who's been terrible for his people and if there's any justice, when he dies he will receive 72 virgins who look exactly like him.
Claudia Rosett sent me a note saying: "If he's dead, how fitting that he died in France."
To which I responded: Yes, but how ironic that he dies in bed.
She rejoined: "Or maybe how perfectly hypocritical and corrupt, to the very end.
"Symbolically, it's sort of hideously beautiful. It would have delighted Balzac. A killer billionaire dies in a Paris bed ...having abandoned in his final hours the nest he fouled so thoroughly that he himself, in his final hours, instead of choosing to die in the place he said he'd give his life for, went off to France to croak in comfort."
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