Home


Formerly Ad Orientem


"Irish Elk is original, entertaining, eclectic, odd, truly one-of-a-kind. And more than mostly interesting."
Amy Kane


"Puts the 'ent' in 'eccentric.'"
Callimachus


"The Gatling Gun of Courteous Debate."
Unitarian Jihad


"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

News & Ideas
Real Clear Politics
Politico
Daily Telegraph
Washington Post
Pajamas Media
American Digest
Little Green Footballs
National Review
The New Republic
The Corner
Opinion Journal
Best of the Web Today
Lileks: The Bleat
Instapundit
Mark Steyn
Midwest Conservative Journal
The Spectator
Atlantic Monthly
Front Page Magazine
Israpundit
Critical Mass
Weekly Standard
Power Line
Llama Butchers
ScrappleFace
The Onion
Conservative Home
Tory Diary
Henry Jackson Society
Naked Villainy
Obscurorant
Fear & Loathing in Georgetown
Commentary: Contentions
The People's Cube



Culture & the Arts
Times Archive Blog
Spectator Book Club
Zajrzyj tu
Terry Teachout
Elliott Banfield
Today in History
Telegraph Obits
Maureen Mullarkey
ArtsJournal.com
City Journal
The Historical Society
The New Criterion
American Memory
Armavirumque
Wodehouse Society
Hat Sharpening
Doubting Hall
Random Pensées
Hatemonger's Quarterly
Patum Peperium
Forgotten NY
NYPL Digital Gallery
Mid-Manhattan Library
BPL Online Prints
Cliopatria
Cigar Store Figures
Scuffulans Hirsutus
Mirabilis.ca
Poetry Hut
Spinning Clio
Ooops
Ye Olde Evening Telegraph
Shorpy
Atlantic Ave.
The Monarchist
Panabasis
Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine
The Port Stands At Your Elbow
Sven in Colorado
Dickens Blog
Feast of Nemesis




Music
Red Hot Jazz Archive 'Perfessor' Bill's Ragtime
Arhoolie Records
Sinner's Crossroads
Dismuke
Riverwalk Jazz
WICN
Steamboat Calliopes
Cajun Music mp3
Old Hat Records
Pandora
Virtual Victrola

Sport
UniWatch
Touching All the Bases
SABR Baseball Bios
Baseball Fever: Teams of Yesteryear
Boston Sports Temples
LostHockey.com
"Tessie"
Philadelphia A's
Elysian Fields Quarterly
Mudville Magazine
US College Hockey Online
Baseball Reliquary
Sons of Sam Horn
Smoky Joe Wood & More
WaPo DC Baseball
Royal Rooters
Baseball Library
H-Y Football Gallery
Soxaholix
Shoeless Joe

Hibernia
Cops in Kilts
Irish Eagle
Slugger O'Toole
Tallrite Blog
Irish Echo
Edmund Burke Society
Wild Geese Today

Pantheon
Theodore Roosevelt
TR II
TR III
Winston Churchill
Louis Armstrong
H.L. Mencken
Chesterton
Belloc

St. Blog's Sampling
New Liturgical Movement
Damian Thompson
First Things
Mere Comments
Andrew Cusack
The Revealer
E. L. Core
Catholic Light
Thomas Fitzpatrick
Inn at the End of the World
Dale Price
Curt Jester
Domenico Bettinelli
Erik's Rants and Recipes
Shrine of the Holy Whapping
Todd Flowerday
Some Have Hats
Daniel Mitsui
Roman Miscellany
Against the Grain
Summa Minutiae
Digital Hairshirt

[SMMMHDH]

Blogosphere
Technorati
Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem



He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
Chesterton

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Burke

Irish Elk - Blogged

Archives

05/01/2002 - 06/01/2002 06/01/2002 - 07/01/2002 07/01/2002 - 08/01/2002 08/01/2002 - 09/01/2002 09/01/2002 - 10/01/2002 10/01/2002 - 11/01/2002 11/01/2002 - 12/01/2002 12/01/2002 - 01/01/2003 01/01/2003 - 02/01/2003 02/01/2003 - 03/01/2003 03/01/2003 - 04/01/2003 04/01/2003 - 05/01/2003 05/01/2003 - 06/01/2003 06/01/2003 - 07/01/2003 07/01/2003 - 08/01/2003 08/01/2003 - 09/01/2003 09/01/2003 - 10/01/2003 10/01/2003 - 11/01/2003 11/01/2003 - 12/01/2003 12/01/2003 - 01/01/2004 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004 02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004 03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004 04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004 05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004 07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004 08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004 09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004 10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005 03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005 04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006 01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006 05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006 06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006 07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006 12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007 02/01/2007 - 03/01/2007 03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007 07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007 08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007 09/01/2007 - 10/01/2007 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007 11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007 12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008 02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008 03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008 04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008 05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008 06/01/2008 - 07/01/2008 07/01/2008 - 08/01/2008 08/01/2008 - 09/01/2008 09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008 10/01/2008 - 11/01/2008 11/01/2008 - 12/01/2008 12/01/2008 - 01/01/2009 01/01/2009 - 02/01/2009 02/01/2009 - 03/01/2009 03/01/2009 - 04/01/2009 04/01/2009 - 05/01/2009 05/01/2009 - 06/01/2009 06/01/2009 - 07/01/2009 07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009 08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009 09/01/2009 - 10/01/2009 10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009 11/01/2009 - 12/01/2009 12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010 01/01/2010 - 02/01/2010





























Irish Elk
 
Thursday, January 20, 2005  



"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.

"Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now” — they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.

"When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, “It rang as if it meant something.” In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof."


President Bush's eloquent Inaugural Address committing America to the advance of freedom around the world had definite Kennedy-esque overtones. Deacon at Power Line agrees:

The MSM, I expect, will rip this uncompromising and single-minded assertion of our values and ideals. But that's because it won't acknowledge that we're at war. Those who know that we are will welcome the echoes of Churchill and Kennedy as just the kind of rhetoric demanded by the times.

Victor Davis Hanson comments:

[T]he president has formally declared that we at least will be on the right side of history and thus we have to let his critics sort...their own moral calculus.

A just-married colleague and I stopped at a smoke shop over lunch for celebratory cigars. Inspired by the morning's oratory, we bought Churchills.

The address is said to have been crafted mainly by Bush's outgoing chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, a proponent of presidential use of religious rhetoric.

* * *

The Reuters photo above taken this morning recalls a Life cover photo from 40 years ago (only jollier), saying something of the grandeur as well as the orderliness of American democracy.

* * *

The Washington Post takes a look at the best and worst of presidential inauguration speeches. (Via Fr Tucker)

Warren G. Harding's is counted among the Worst. Here's an excerpt:

We would not have an America living within and for herself alone, but we would have her self-reliant, independent, and ever nobler, stronger, and richer. Believing in our higher standards, reared through constitutional liberty and maintained opportunity, we invite the world to the same heights. But pride in things wrought is no reflex of a completed task. Common welfare is the goal of our national endeavor. … We want the cradle of American childhood rocked under conditions so wholesome and so hopeful that no blight may touch it in its development …

H. L. Mencken famously wrote of Harding's prose:

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle.

* * *

The Post's special section also has a photo gallery devoted to inaugurations past.

* * *

For his 1905 swearing-in, President Theodore Roosevelt wore a ring containing a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair. More than 35,000 celebrants marched in the ensuing parade, from coal miners, cowboys, Native Americans, and African-American cavalry troops, to Roosevelt’s old Spanish-American War regiment, the Rough Riders.

The Library of Congress' Theodore Roosevelt on Film site has footage of TR's inaugural festivities, while Bartleby offers his Inaugural Address.

* * *

Listen to a vintage recording of the "Powhatan's Daughter March" by John Philip Sousa.


#


 
This page is powered by Blogger.