The template for codifying same-sex marriage comes straight from the abortion movement's playbook: disregard the will of the people and transform lawbook and custom through judicial legislation. It's a recipe for division and emnity. Following a court ruling, New York Governor David Patterson has all-too gladly directed state agencies to officially recognize homosexual unions sanctioned by other states and nations. One need not have seen bottom to know where this slippery slope leads.

George W. Bush has been loyal to a fault with those who have served him poorly (see, George "slam dunk" Tenet's Medal of Freedom). But to former insiders who have uttered criticism from the outside, the president has been particularly vengeful. Paul O'Neill, John Dilulio, and now former White House spokesman Scott McClellan have become objects of opprobrium for their former comrades. Bush lackeys dubbed McClellan "disgruntled," said that he "sounds like a left-wing blogger," and labelled his charges "total crap." But the main criticism issued by McClellan--Bush "signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest"--seems so uncontroversial that one wonders what the fuss is all about.

"Democratic societies tend to become more concerned with what people believe than with what is true, to become more concerned with credibility than truth."
--Daniel Boorstin, "Democracy and Its Discontents," 1971

One of the criticisms of A Conservative History of the American Left involves my inclusion of the populists, a problematic bunch to be sure. The Left Conservative blog states, "Flynn repeats the popular myth that the Progressives were the natural offspring of the Populists.... the Populists were actually about taking power away from the state and putting it in the hands of the citizenry in order to slow down 'progress.'" Similarly, Bill Kauffman, author of Ain't My America, wrote in his First Principles review, "For the populists were old American types who took seriously their Jefferson and picked up any weapon at hand to fight off the plutocrats and predators who were dispossessing rural America and making a go at oligarchy."

Understanding that populists and Populists, i.e., members of the People's Party, were not synonymous, it is nevertheless worth noting that a political party arose to express the political wishes of populists. They left a record, and, however much current writers might be taken by a mythologized view of populists as the last gasp of Jefferson's gentleman farmer, the record they left was far left. Among the first to effectively demand an activist state, the self-interested populists bequeathed a political legacy to the do-gooder progressives that resulted in a larger, more centralized, and instrusive federal government.

Read the party's 1892 platform. It calls for a graduated income tax, an inflated currency, banks operated by the post office, expropriation of lands from railroads and foreigners, political mechanisms that shift from republicanism to democracy, and the nationalization of the railroad, telegraph, and telephone industries. They failed to enact their program. The unfinished business of the Populists was taken up by the progressives. The progressives nationalized the railroads, established a graduated income tax, inflated the currency through the Federal Resere, and instituted the Australian ballot, initiative, and referendum.

There are several reasons why the populists continue to confuse writers and defy labels. They appealed to faith and flag. Their golden age existed in the experienced past rather than the imagined future. They wanted to preserve the state, not overthrow it. They didn't want to divide the land, but instead wanted to own it. And when the sun had set on their day in the sun, many populists shunned radicalism as heartily as they had once embraced it.

But as Ignatius Donnelly, the most colorful of that most colorful pitchfork-mob known as the populists, demanded, "We have to expand the powers of government to solve the enigma of the world." This is not the cry of one interested in "taking power away from the state" or of an old-stock American "who took seriously...Jefferson." It's the familar cry of the Left, even if those making that cry in the 1880s and '90s would soon rue the day that they had made it.

In a Republican debate leading up to the 2000 presidential nomination, George W. Bush was asked of his favorite thinker. He famously answered, "Jesus Christ." This weekend, on the road to capturing the Libertarian Party nomination, Bob Barr was asked during the LP presidential debate of the philosopher whose views most closely resembled his own. Barr answered, "Ayn Rand." You learn a lot about the differences between Republicans and Libertarians from these two too "correct" answers.

In an obituary of Colombian terrorist Manuel Marulanda Valez of FARC, CNN concedes that "nations including the United States consider it a terrorist organization." But does CNN? "A Marxist devotee, he was feared by some but viewed as a revolutionary leader by freedom fighters, who revered him." Every man's terrorist is CNN's freedom fighter.

Who is in the mood for some synchronized lead guitars, crunching bass and drums, and operatic, banshee-screaming vocals? It's a special Memorial Day weekend edition of FlynnFiles radio, celebrating me-tal music.

Iron Maiden--The Trooper
Black Sabbath--War Pigs
Queensryche--I Don't Believe in Love
AC/DC--Hells Bells
Metallica--One

As we celebrate mediocrity all the boys upstairs want to see
How much you'll pay for what you used to get for free
--Tom Petty, The Last DJ

In Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, Eric Hoffer reflected that twenty years earlier shopkeepers who advertised products by ending the price in "9" rather than rounding off would have been uniformly regarded as shysters. By 1959, he lamented the universality of the practice. Hoffer saw this as a reflection of the declining ethical standards. Were Hoffer alive today, he would certainly see evidence of further decline in $29.99 gizmos hawked through 1-800 numbers on late-night television and especially upon gas stations billboard who go decimal on consumers. More troubling would be the curiosity with which anyone born after 1959 would greet his peeve. Practice so effectively normalizes the abnormal that much that we do not even think of objecting to our grandfathers would not have tolerated. And much that we currently object to our grandchildren will obliviously endure.

American Airlines will begin charging travelers $15 for checking in a bag. Unbeknownst to me, American and other airlines have already been charging customers $25 for the second checked bag. The good news is that most people aren't dumb enough to entrust the airlines with one of their bags, let alone two. Airlines generally issue a service fee for selling you a ticket. On a recent six-hour flight, I almost fell out of my chair when the stewardess announced that a half a turkey sandwich with a bag of chips would be made available for only $10. I didn't ask if mayo came complimentary.

Bars without live entertainment, or a DJ, have the nerve to charge covers. At my public high school, instead of cutting administrative costs or curbing the annual increases in teacher pay, the school district started charging money to participate in sports. Play two sports, get the third one free (I'm serious). Ticketmaster charges mightily for the privilege of buying a concert ticket. When will movie theaters and museums get in on the scam of making you pay twice for entry? We now pay the bank to hold our money when they used to pay us through interest for the privilege. My bank charges me for deposit slips.

I don't think this greed is exclusive to our outpost of capitalism. In Europe, for instance, several train stations charged to use their dirty bathrooms and restaurants charged for ketchup that has a particularly strange aftertaste. I've been informed that elsewhere on the continent they make shoppers pay for the carts and the bags.

I blame the greed of the seller. I also marvel at the stupidity of the buyer. Water is free, but some people would rather pay for it. Maybe they like the plastic bottle, which you don't get when you turn on the tap. Buying water, paying the airlines to transport your bag after you have already paid them to transport you, and paying to use a public bathroom instead of creatively protesting inside the establishment only encourages these legalized rackets. People market what was once free because there is, sadly, a market for it.

Republicans appointed six of the seven judges that found in California's constitution a right to same-sex marriage. Roe, Kelo, and so many other outrageous U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the last forty years were authored by Republican appointees. Read my article in TakiMag that wonders if automatically rewarding the GOP with votes to curb the judicial activism of the courts they have shaped does not in fact invite such courthouse affronts against the people and the constitution.

"So today we leave men free to question the religious, but not the political, faith of their fathers; and political heresy is punished by social ostracism as theological heresy was punished by excommunication in the Age of Faith; now that the policeman labors to take the place of God, it becomes more dangerous to question the state than to doubt the Church. No system smiles upon the challenging of its axioms."
--Will Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950

I'm a sucker for articles on the state of the conservative movement, even ones written by people who always believe it's a step away from falling off the cliff. That is the template for articles by liberals on conservatives for as long as I can remember. Such premature post mortems, always betraying the anthropologist-among-the-primitives vibe, are nearly as old as the conservative movement itself. Yet in proclaiming the conservative movement a step away from falling off the cliff, George Packer's The Fall of Conservatism in The New Yorker perhaps errs by failing to realize that conservatives were two steps ahead of him.

There is no conservative movement. It is one of the many casualties of the George W. Bush presidency. The arcane phrase reflects a world of YAFers, "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton" buttons, and debates over the Bricker Amendment. That does not exist anymore. The issues that once united, initially anti-Communism and limited government, don't. Eurocommunism is gone and party conservatives now openly question the utility of even limited government rhetoric in 21st-century America. The Bush presidency has made a mockery of the idea of a "conservative" movement. Do I belong to the same "movement" as those calling for a big-government conservatism? Should Pat Buchanan, who opposes the democratizing project, fall under the same label as David Frum, who names numerous countries besides Iraq that he thinks the U.S. should invade? What values do televangelist Pat Robertson and radio lesbian Tammy Bruce share? Yet, this same word, "conservative," is applied to all of the above.

Conservatism the label became more popular than conservatism the outlook. Thus, people who mistake Russell Kirk for the captain of the Starship Enterprise jumped on the bandwagon, hijacked the driver's seat, and sent it off course. The more that people called themselves "conservative," the less "conservative" resembled conservatism. Fairly recently--perhaps when conservatives mistook Clinton bashing for a positive articulation of their ideas, perhaps when movement leaders conflated the Republican Party with the conservative movement during George W. Bush's presidency--the conservative movement ceased being a vehicle advancing conservatism and started being an impediment to it.

The New Yorker piece infers the conservative movement's main influence upon America was to cynically divide it for electoral gain, as if conservatives invented abortion, racial preferences, and gun control. Packer caustically notes that conservatives "had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality," a line that appears to conservatives as inane as if I were to complain to liberals that they had done nothing to cut government or outlaw abortion. In other words, it is by the standards of liberal success that Packer judges conservatives. If arresting the advance of socialized medicine and resisting economic leveling is failure, I don't want to succeed.

For all its faults, the piece accurately details the conflicting positions on the Right about where conservatives should go from here. "One is the purist version: Bush expanded the size of government and created huge deficits; allowed Republicans in Congress to fatten lobbyists and stuff budgets full of earmarks; tried to foist democracy on a Muslim country; failed to secure the border; and thus won the justified wrath of the American people. This account--shared by Pat Buchanan, the columnist George F. Will, and many Republicans in Congress--has the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives. They need only to repent of their sins, rid themselves of the neoconservatives who had agitated for the Iraq invasion, and return to first principles."

"The second version--call it reformist--is more painful, because it's based on the recognition that, though Bush's fatal incompetence and Rove's shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement's demise, they didn't cause it," Packer writes. "In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems."

It is interesting that the solutions liberals offer for revitalizing conservatism is always to make it more like liberalism. Judging from the piece, more than a few conservatives subscribe to this notion. What happened to standing athwart history yelling stop? Conservatives who balk at conserving conservatism are not worthy of the label. If they don't adopt a new label, perhaps actual conservatives should. Who wants to be confused for people holding views diametrically opposed to their own?

Sure, the world changes. And sure, it's stale for conservatives to refight the Cold War or imagine every favored presidential candidate as the next Ronald Reagan. The new challenge of conservatism is to conserve itself. A prejudice for tradition, the protection of private property, skepticism of schemes and ideologies, respect for the rule of law and contempt for the rule of caprice, deference to the authority of God--these are timeless principles. The conservative movement is dead. But conservatism lives. It is the former's passing that gives hope for the latter's future.

What is xenophobia? The Left labels Americans frustrated that foreigners don't abide by immigration laws as "xenophobes." But if Lou Dobbs or Pat Buchanan is your idea of a xenophobe, you probably don't know what one is. To get a look at what xenophobia really looks like, avert your gaze to South Africa, where more than 22 Zimbabweans were murdered in the past week. One foreigner was burnt alive. Several thousand have been displaced from their homes. Ironically, one of the causes of xenophobia in South Africa is past xenophobia in Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe embarked upon a program of expropriation against the descendants of English settlers about a decade ago. In 2004, a chilling government document entitled "Solution to the White Problem" outlined ways in which Zimbabwe could rid itself of the pale menace. In an effort to spread the wealth, Mugabe destroyed wealth by driving wealth creators from Zimbabwe. Now, he's stuck with 80 percent unemployment and his southern neighbors are stuck with providing a social safety net to Zimbabweans unable to earn a living in their homeland because of the basketcase economy. Xenophobia begets xenophobia.

John Nance Garner reminded us that the vice presidency wasn't worth a bucket of warm, well, let's just use the word "spit." A later FDR running mate, Harry Truman, probably thought otherwise. A piece by Albert Hunt on Bloomberg.com that hilariously suggests the site's namesake as a serious VP candidate, nevertheless provides perspective in correctly noting that running mates almost never have any discernable effect on the outcome of the race. Hunt offers Virginia Senator James Webb, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, and former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn as possible Obama running mates who might provide balance to Obama's inexperience and liberalism. (Is Lee Hamilton too old?) For John McCain, Hunt suggests he move away from Bush and toward youth. Washington outsiders Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and, strangely enough, Joe Lieberman are names thrown out. (If Lieberman's in, then I'm out!). Do you have any suggestions on VP candiates that might improve the prospects of Obama or McCain? And might Hillary pull a Reagan circa '76 and name a running mate despite trailing in the delegate count?

Larry Thornberry reviews A Conservative History of the American Left in the Washington Times, finding it "exhaustively-researched, thoroughly-detailed and clearly-written. Readers will gain an understanding of the core differences between the various leftist approaches to life and governance, which stand in stark contrast to those of the conservative side, which are based less on theory than on tradition and rely more on personal initiative than on government micro-management."

I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left in part to conserve the history the Left would rather discard. With that in mind, I produced for FrontPageMag.com the Top Ten Skeletons in the Left's Closet. From the assassination of three U.S. presidents by communists to leading Democrats fawning over the pre-Jonestown Jim Jones, the list details the history that the American Left wants you to forget.

Boxers' waistbands generally expand as their careers progress. James Toney, for instance, started as a middleweight, fighting in the 160-pound range. He now fights at around 230 pounds. Blame Mother Nature and Father Time, and, in Toney's case, Ronald McDonald too. But also blame Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Benjamin Franklin. Heavyweights have heavy wallets. Chasing the Benjamins as much as chasing the cheeseburgers contributes to blown-up boxers.

This is why I find Chris Byrd's story so interesting. After fighting as a heavyweight for more than a decade--using quickness and defensive skills to defeat such larger men as Evander Holyfield, Vitali Klitschko, and David Tua--Byrd has reinvented himself as a light heavyweight. The 37-year-old has dropped not one but two weight classes. This evening, on ESPN2, a svelte 175-pound Byrd will make his ironic return to the light-heavyweight division. I will be travelling to a television set and tuning in.

Byrd, who won the silver medal at the 1992 Olympics in the 165-pound weight class, launched his professional career in 1993 in the light heavyweight division. But after two fights he fled to the greener pastures--as in greenbacks--of the heavyweight division. He transformed his body, but he was still a David among Goliaths. But as this Christian Christopher certainly knows, David slew Goliath. But this David didn't always beat the Goliaths. Seeing Byrd get pounded by Wladimir Klitschko two years ago, I wondered why he didn't just fight as a cruiserweight. Byrd was one step ahead of me. Seeing no money fights in the under 200-pound division, Byrd dropped down another division to be in the mix with fellow old guys Roy Jones, Bernard Hopkins, Joe Calzaghe, and Antonio Tarver. There are some interesting match-ups to be made. So after gorging himself for the big bucks, Byrd now starves himself for the big bucks.

Here is Byrd as a heavyweight. Here he is now as a light-heavyweight. Byrd told ESPN, "People look at me now and the first thing they say is, 'Who is that guy?' The next thing they say is, 'How did you lose the weight?'"

UPDATE: After eating like a bird, Chris Byrd was hit like a heavyweight by Shaun George. Withstanding the blows of the likes of Vitali Klitschko, Ike Ibeabuchi, and David Tua, a lethargic Byrd tasted the canvass three times in this fight before referee Jay Nady mercifully ended it.

By the power not vested in them, four judges yesterday pronounced California and gay marriage a couple. There are 38,000,000 people living in California. Their disapproval of officially recognizing so-called same-sex marriage, expressed at the ballot box in 2000, apparently has no bearing on state law. Only the votes of seven people, rather than those 38,000,000, matter. By a margin of 4-3, the California Supreme Court has decided that the state's refusal to officially recognize gay marriages violates the state's constitution. The part in California's constitution that references homosexual unions eluded my notice. I did, however, see various redundant provisions explicitly outlining the right of Californians to self government. "All political power is inherent in the people." "A voter who casts a vote in an election in accordance with the laws of this State shall have that vote counted." "The people find and declare that the Founding Fathers established a system of representative government based upon free, fair, and competitive elections."

There is something inherently conservative in George W. Bush's skepticism of the value of reasoning with the unreasonable. Bush told the Israeli Knesset: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." This may be my favorite line of his presidency. It's not that I oppose talks between the United States and any country, but I just think one of the delusions of modern liberalism is the idea that any conflict can be solved merely by talking. Parties have conflicting interests. Deception leads to a false sense of security among the deceived. And reasoning with the unreasonable is itself a form of unreason. With regard to terrorists, action not words.

Do you think Bill and Hillary understand the liberal bias in the news media now? Following Senator Clinton's absolute thrashing of Senator Obama in West Virginia, headlines curiously read: "Clinton Win Leads to Obama Boost," "This Is an Ex-Candidate," "Obama Faces Racism in West Virginia." I haven't seen such cheerleading disguised as journalism since, well, Bill Clinton first ran for president in 1992.

It's May, 15, the traditional holiday I've just invented that celebrates the best rock album ever, The Who's Quadrophenia. Just as it's obligatory to go to church on Christmas, blow off your thumb lighting fireworks on the Fourth of July, and egg a liberal's house on Halloween, on May 15 it's good form to listen to the song 5:15. The truly devoted listen to 5:15 on 5/15 at 5:15. Others celebrate 5/15 by riding around on scooters, beating up people they perceive as "rockers," and proclaiming themselves the "ace face." Here's wishing you a fabulous 5/15 with five choice cuts from Quadrophenia:

The Real Me
The Punk and the Godfather
Sea and Sand
Love Reign O'er Me
Cut My Hair

Most Americans are on drugs. I realize there is a difference between drug users who obtain their fix from street-corner pharmacists and those prescribed them from licensed physicians. I'm not sure that other people realize how insignificant that difference can be.

"Flynn has written this book in as fair a spirit as his enemies could ask," the American Spectator review of my book explains. If Dan McCarthy's piece on A Conservative History of the American Left doesn't motivate you to pick up a copy of the book, I don't know what will. "There are conservative journalists who write for a mass audience and conservative scholars who write for a narrow one," McCarthy writes. "But Flynn writes for both: his books combine original research--on the streets interviewing leftist protestors as well as in libraries combing through archives--with stylistic flair and common sense. A Conservative History of the American Left is his best book yet."

Why should Hillary Clinton drop out of the presidential race when she just beat the bag out of Barack Obama in West Virginia by greater than a 2-1 margin? It's not like West Virginia is one of her home states, or even borders one of her home states. With all that media pressure to conform to the Obamania, West Virginians did what they failed to do a century-and-a-half ago: rebel.

That the presumptive Democratic nominee can only muster a quarter of the vote in the Democratic primary in a state that Democrats must win in November speaks volumes, even if the media has muted the sound, about the trouble Barack Obama faces. Yes, it's a Democratic year--but so was 2000 and 2004. The Democrats then found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This is a talent, as their candidate selection shows, that they haven't lost.

Obama is a left-winger in an increasingly left-wing party. America, even if frustrated with George Bush and Iraq, is a fundamentally conservative nation. As much as liberal primary voters wish to believe that politicians who believe what they believe should be president, the fact is that Americans have not voted for a true liberal for president in my lifetime. From Mondale to Dukakis to Kerry, Americans have rejected quite a few. Liberal primary voters don't get the hint.

Here's my simplistic lay of the land: a third of the country votes Democrat, a third votes Republican, and a third could go either way. Envision that continuum, with the Democrat third taking up the left side of the line. Within that third, Obama and Clinton fight over the left half that disproportionately vote in Democratic primaries. Within that half of that third, Barack Obama's supporters occupy the left half and Hillary Clinton's supporters occupy the right half. In other words, it's basically the most leftward tenth of the electorate that is propelling Obama's candidacy. Leaving all these confusing fractions aside, the presumptive Democratic nominee represents the Far Left. This is why he gets clubbed in places like West Virginia but wins overwhelmingly in Madison, Berkeley, and Amherst.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have nominated a candidate with the general election in mind. John McCain appeals to independents and even some Democrats. He infuriates conservative Republicans, who, McCain correctly reasons, will probably have no place to go in November. The prospect of a liberal boogeyman is an even greater motivation for Republicans to rush to the polls than a conservative standard bearer would be. Rather than pick a candidate way to the right on that imaginary continuum, Republicans selected a candidate in the middle.

Of course, where one sits on the ideological spectrum is but one factor in handicapping a presidential race. Aside from Democrats benefitting from Bush fatigue, they benefit from a charismatic nominee whose youth juxtaposes nicely with the Republican candidate's elderly status. Republicans can perpetually hope that Democratic primaries continue to reward the McGovernite-Dukakoid wing of the party, otherwise known as the loser wing. But one of these elections that out-of-the-mainstream liberal will slip into the White House. Republicans, be careful what you wish for.

Bob Barr is running for president. "To the extent that people have a choice," Barr reasons, "it's the choice of voting for the party of big government or the party of bigger government." He wants troops home from Iraq. He is for the repeal of McCain-Feingold. He seeks deep cuts in government and taxes. I'm for all that and I vote in the bluest of the blue states, so putting a check mark next to such a maverick candidate is enticing. Voting--entering that partitioned booth, drawing that curtain, marking that Australian ballot, anonymously dropping it into a box--is ostensibly a private affair. But the voter feels the eyes of all his friends and family glaring at him. The peer pressure allows for a vote next to "D" or a vote next to "R," but as soon as your pencil drifts to fill in the circle next to a candidate without one of those magic letters next to his name the peer pressure moves your pencil back to "D" or "R" as if the ballot were a Oujia board and your pencil possessed. People vote with the crowd and not with their hearts. The Oujia board phenomenon, perhaps as much as any systemic handicap, makes Barr's undertaking doomed from the get-go. But there's honor in lost causes, especially when the cause they push is your own.

One of the themes of A Conservative History of the American Left is the inability of leftists to learn from their own mistakes, an amnesia that at once propels an ideology that by virtue of natural selection should have long been extinct and dooms the Left to repeating its own history. But the Left doesn't just forget its own mistakes, it fails to learn from the mistakes of adversaries as well.

Case in point: after the nation-building debacle in Iraq, Time magazine hubristically asks: "Is It Time to Invade Burma?" Time's Romesh Ratnesar writes, "The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through.... That's why it's time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma." In other words, take our gifts or we will kill you. Hurricane Katrina was a mess, but I didn't hear anyone suggest that foreign soldiers should invade New Orleans because of the mishandling of relief measures.

I have no doubt that the military officers who rule Burma are deplorable in the same way that the tyrant who ruined Iraq, the clerics who ran Afghanistan, and the warlords who ruled Somalia were deplorable. And certainly the U.S. military could overthrow them with alacrity. But what next? If leftists believe things can get better, perfect even, conservatives know they can get worse. True conservatives know overthrowing a stable government is an endeavor fraught with danger, particularly when done by outsiders who don't stand to be harmed much by the havoc they unleash. Though the American military is excellent at wiping out bad guys, it's not very good at social work, nation building, regional policing, or any of the traditionally periphrial missions that have somehow become central.

If righting wrongs becomes the threshold by which to conduct military action, America will forever be at war. Only someone ignorant of history and human nature would make the eradication of non-threatening evil doers a priority of foreign policy. A better standard for interventions, universally accepted by conservatives until very recently, is whether the military action serves America's interests and justice. The Sharon Statement, for instance, concluded with the line: "That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?" Ignoring this bit of wisdom, as Iraq shows and Burma would undoubtedly demonstrate too, comes at great cost in blood, treasure, and power.

America is not, and should not be, a superhero state--crusading against evil throughout the globe. Elements of the Right and Left, unfortunately, think that we should be. On the Right, proponents of a Superhero America want their crusader to act alone, a la Christian Bale's Batman. On the Left, they think Superhero America should work with the Justice League (the United Nations). The only thing the interventionist Left learned from Iraq apparently is the idea that interventionist catastrophes-waiting-to-happen should involve as many countries as possible. Here's a novel idea: if the Burmese want new leaders, they, not the UN or the US, should do something about it.

Mal Kline posts a nice review of A Conservative History of the American Left at AIM.org. "It's a testament to Flynn's talent that reading A Conservative History of the American Left is as enervating as it is entertaining," writes Kathy Shaidle in her review at Pajamas Media. Shaidle has a knack for clever names, as her blog, FiveFeetofFury, and her book, "Acoustic Ladyland," attest.

Rather than ask, "Why doesn't Hillary Clinton just drop out?," isn't the more apt question, "Why can't Barack Obama finish off Hillary Clinton?" The race is supposedly over, but Hillary Clinton keeps winning primaries. She will win in West Virginia and Kentucky. Had Florida and Michigan not violated Democratic Party rules, it's likely that she would be in the position Obama is in now. Obama backers incessantly remind that Clinton cannot win the nomination without the help of superdelegates. They omit the inconvenient fact that neither can Obama. Ironically, what's fueling Obama is what fueled Hillary before the primaries started: the inevitability factor. Voters are asked to back not the candidate they prefer, but the candidate who will win. If Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, can't win Democratic primaries, then he has nobody to blame but himself for Hillary Clinton continuing her campaign until the convention chooses a nominee.

Blogging will be light this weekend. I got summoned to central Texas to dance at a bachelorette party on Friday night. It got wild--Girls Gone Wild to be precise. To make a long story short, I don't think the wedding is going to happen. Some dudes, perhaps the groom's friends, were none too happy about this. Dressed in dark suits and darker shades, and all sporting those annoying communications devices on their lapels (and in their ears), they took several shots at me. This is crazy. I'm now trying to evade them. I'm in some one-stop-light town called Crawford. If you're in the area, and see a guy in a purple g-string, a Lone Ranger mask, and a cowboy hat, please pick him up.

UPDATE: The wedding proceeded as planned. The bride's father is apparently a very powerful man, and those well-dressed men wearing sunglasses and sporting very powerful automatic weapons were his praetorian guard or something.

Hillary Clinton, by all accounts, is a bitter, vindictive, self-righteous lesbian with a castration fetish. Okay. Okay. By some accounts--actually just the ones I heard while working within the VRWC. Way back in the 1990s, when you wore flannels and sported a goatee, Hillary Clinton blamed her husband's, uh, problems on that VRWC--the "vast, right-wing conspiracy." With the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton battle a family affair--save for Rush Limbaugh's hilarious "operation chaos"--Hillary can't blame the VRWC for her current misfortune. So, my question, dear readers, is: who will be the target of presidential loser Hillary Clinton's venom? Who, within the vast left-wing conspiracy was out to get Hillary Clinton? Who will be seen as Villain Number One? There's no G. Gordon Liddy, R. Emmitt Tyrrell, Richard Mellon Scaife, or Reed Irvine to kick around, and, of course, Hillary Clinton isn't to blame for her choke job. So, sleuths, whodunnit? Who from the vast left-wing conspiracy tops Hillary's updated enemies list?

Those clamoring to shut down the Guantanamo Bay facility housing jihadists clothe their rhetoric in the language of "human rights." Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, who spent four years at Gitmo after trying to enter Pakistan from Afghanistan after U.S. forces dispersed the Taliban, blew up six people in a suicide-bomb attack in Iraq last month. It's a crime against humanity to let such people out, not to keep them in.

Bad timing, Arianna. Revealing that John McCain didn't vote for George W. Bush in 2000 is about as damaging to the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign as exposing him for loving his mother. Not only are the Republican primaries over, but the man the McCains supposedly refrained from casting ballots for now stretches to grasp a 30 percent approval rating. If Arianna Huffington really wanted to damage McCain's presidential chances, she might have remained mute and let the rest of us go on thinking that McCain had pulled the lever for Bush. But has Arianna ever been one to keep quiet about anything?

"The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency," Huffington contends. "By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush--both literally and metaphorically--he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000." The ostensibly scandalized Arianna doth protest too much. It's not as if John McCain is the New-Age-futurist-turned-Gingrich-Republican-turned-Bill-Maher-camp-follower.

I don't know whether Arianna Huffington tells the truth about John McCain. But I hope so. I didn't vote for George W. Bush in 2000, either.

Author Bill Kauffman finds A Conservative History of the American Left "a well-written, pugnaciously argued, and consistently interesting account of the American Left." Former Reader's Digest editor Christopher Willcox labels my book "a formidable piece of work--a synthesizing popular history that deserves an audience wider than its polemical title suggests." Nevertheless, both critics, as critics are wont to do, find points to criticize in their generally positive reviews. The reviews, appearing in ISI's First Principles and the New York Sun respectively, interestingly criticize me on (nearly) the same point from opposite angles. Willcox, a former Bush II Pentagon spokesman who believes America's role in the Cold War to be praiseworthy, faults me for not highlighting "the significant role played by some liberal Democrats in exposing and opposing Soviet Communism." He strangely cites the American Federation of Labor--a group whose opposition to radicalism and Communism I repeatedly address (see pp. 187-89)--as an example butressing his point. Kauffman, contra Willcox, finds the Cold War an ignoble pursuit. "[Flynn] throws in with, or at least excuses, the obsessive red hunters," Kauffman writes. "Elevating anticommunism to a central principle of the American Right wrecked the Right by crushing its most decent and humane aspects: respect for home, for place, for decentralized liberty, for local tradition." As the author of the book reviewed, I don't mind criticisms reflecting the reviewer's ideological quirks as readers are generally smart enough to see them as just that. In other words, some criticisms say more about the critic than the criticized. Unfortunately, that idea may also apply to the complaining guy whose book is being criticized, too!

"This title does Daniel J. Flynn's fine new history a disservice," Ronald Radosh writes of A Conservative History of the American Left in the current issue of the Weekly Standard. "Some readers seeking a thorough and critical history of the left in America are likely to ignore it because of its claim to be a 'conservative history.' Flynn is certainly a conservative, as some of his candid and pithy judgments indicate, but what he gives readers is a well-rounded history of the left that should be read by anyone interested in the subject--and that includes those who call themselves left or liberal." This is an important review for my book both in terms of the influence of the journal in which it appears and the authority its author has on the subject matter. Ron Radosh is a red-diaper baby turned critic of the Left, who literally, then, knows the Left from the inside out. He has written on the Left as a memoirist in Commies: The Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left and as an historian in The Rosenberg File, the best book on the case of Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife-accomplice Ethel. "A Conservative History of the American Left could not have come at a better moment," Radosh writes. Ditto for his positive review.

UPDATE: Read the full review here.

America has not always been the most dominant nation on the globe. Its military, culture, and economy have not always been the most powerful, popular, and rich. But it has been this way for all of our lives. Some people foolishly take this as evidence that it will be as it was. It won't. Someday, America will be a fading power.

In a provocative cover story, Newsweek posits that that day has come. The good news? With America no longer at the top, there won't be so much anti-Americanism. The bad news? Well, at least according to Newsweek, there isn't any. "The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be," writer Fareed Zakaria posits. "This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else."

The piece is must reading, but the glee with which Mr. Zakaria dots every "i" and crosses every "t" is unseemly. The writer betrays the tone of a prophet desirous of the truth of his prophecy, as if putting to paper his hopes and wishes will make them true. Its hubris is most glaring when Zakaria tells us how historians one hundred years from now will judge us or perhaps when he tells from his myopic vantagepoint of the present in which imaginary stage of history we are living. Its sermonizing is most annoying when Zakaria says shame on you to Americans from refraining from using the metric system. Its applause most insulting when it finds America's greatest strength its rapid demographic transformation that has coincided with the demise of its strength. America's greatness, in other words, is proportional to the greatness of the demographic change to America.

Such post-mortems for the American Century were common in the 1970s, a decade that ours so closely resembles in rising oil prices, declining prestige abroad, and economic maladies. But America emerged stronger than ever after seventies hard times, reasserting its economic might and peacefully vanquishing its Cold War foe. Reports of the death of America--yeah, that 900-foot-tall Uncle Sam America--may be once again greatly exaggerated. Or, then again, they may not be. Newsweek could be right and still be wrong: America could be fading as a global power and the relative rise of other powers could prove a terrible development.

I purchased tickets, in anticipation of the financial windfall that is A Conservative History of the American Left, for this summer's best tour. REM headlines, with Modest Mouse (Johnny Marr on guitar!) and The National opening (click to listen). It's like a boxing card that is solid top to bottom. All killer, no filler.

Anyhow, I was psyched to see the ticket prices in my local "summer shed" venue at a meager $25 a pop. I can do that, I thought. I repeated Algebra in high school, but I never realized that my math skills are as bad as I discovered. $25X4=$100, right? Wrong. In ticketmaster math, $25X4=$206.50.

You see, the market rate for parking in rural Massachusetts apparently is $40. I'm not sure if that charge covers those guys who go around in golf carts to save me from any dangerous beverages I might attempt to imbibe in the parking lot, but I do know that they don't get paid merely in the free beer that they expropriate. Somebody has to pay the people tasked with saving me from me. Why not me? Then there's the convenience charge of $7.60 per ticket, which docks me for the "convenience" of saving ticketmaster the cost of postage and paper by printing the tickets myself. There are an additional $7 in charges per ticket. I'm not sure for what service those "service charges" go, but I'm sure Ticketmaster has mastered some justification for it. To make a long story short, I paid $51.37 for my ticket that Ticketmaster advertised for $25--and I don't even get a seat but instead a square foot of lawn to stand atop.

I don't blame the bands. God knows Pearl Jam and other acts, possessing foresight that I lacked, attempted to avert such false advertising by Ticketmaster more than a decade ago. The corporate behemoth that is Ticketmaster, probably earning more per ticket than the actual performers for the show that I will see, was just too powerful and monopolistic for Eddie Vedder and company to defeat in the legal arena. If you can't beat em, join em, I guess. So the people still pay the money. The bands still take the money. And, ah yes, Ticketmaster still gets its cut.

I am bothered nonetheless. First, there is something fundamentally dishonest about advertising a product for a certain price and then charging double. When will movie theaters start demanding a "service charge"? One-hundred-years ago, shopkeepers who employed the digit "9" as the last number in advertising a price were considered hucksters. Nowadays, capitalists broadcast one price and then charge another price significantly higher. This is dishonest. Second, the war against scalpers by Ticketmaster and the venues they serve--limiting numbers of tickets per buyer, arresting private sellers, coaxing legislatures to pass anti-free-market laws against middlemen sellers that do not apply to Ticketmaster or the venues they serve--is an effective way for unethical businessmen to eliminate competition.

That's right, ticket sellers are in the ticket scalping business and they seek not to protect the consumer but to protect themselves from the competition that comes from middlemen providers. To point to but one instance of this lawbreaking by the "scalping" monopolists, I direct you to ESPN, which reported last year: "The Cubs set up a sham firm, Wrigley Field Premium Tickets, which was owned by the same people who owned the Cubs, run by a Cubs VP, and even had the Cubs do their accounting. The Cubs would then funnel them face-value tickets before they were available to anyone else, which the sham company would scalp." Of course, the Cubs have a zero-tolerance policy against independent profit-seeking ticket providers, which they contemptuously, and more efficiently, refer to as "scalpers." Just don't call the Chicago Cubs scalpers.

At least those dudes outside the ballpark and concert shed usually have some powerful addiction to feed. What excuse can the owners of a Major League Baseball team offer?

I confess, in high school I charged above face value--even to friends--for tickets I purchased with the intent of making a profit. I got the idea from the so-called scalpers I saw every day that I worked at Fenway Park. Walking from the Kenmore Square station to Yawkey Way, I was bombarded with hoodlums asking, "Buying? Selling?" A lightbulb clicked on over my head.

I worked, had the capital to buy, and took the risk of eating unused tickets. I even organized interesting transportation and parking-lot options, in one case renting a UHaul and using the back as a living room in the Sullivan Stadium parking lot. Why shouldn't I have been rewarded? No one bailed me out in the instances, rare, when I lost money on the deal. U2, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Rolling Stones, and The Who were among the acts that I saw for free in the late '80s/early '90s because I invested in large quantities of tickets and sold them for a markup. Ocassionally, I capitalized on the fears of holders of unused tickets ("You want some salt and pepper with those tickets?") only to turn around and capitalize on the fears of last-minute ticket buyers ("I hope the concert sounds as good from the parking lot as it will from inside the stadium."). I was out to make a buck. They were out to see a concert. Our interests coincided, and that was that.

Everybody needs to earn a living. I strenuously object to those who "earn" it by force or fraud. In the case of the ticket monopoly, it gets money by both. Agree to their stated price for a ticket, and they will shortly inform you that the price is actually double. Infringe on their territory of ticket markups, and they will sic the police on you. There are rackets everywhere. The most successful ones are those that convince the authorities to protect their turf and eliminate the competition. That's Ticketmaster.

I'm honored that Young America's Foundation is holding an essay contest on A Conservative History of the American Left. If you are an undergraduate or a high school student, consider submitting an entry. There are $20,000 in cash and prizes available, including a $5,000 Grand Prize for the winning entry. Judges include new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart and talk-radio host Kirby Wilbur.

Here are the rules and here is the essay question:

"Can there be an American Left? Since Robert Owen made his July 4, 1826, Declaration of Mental Independence from the "trinity of the most monstrous evils"--private property, traditional religion, and marriage--the Left has crusaded against numerous American cultural markers. Freedom, faith, family, and flag seem essential to the American experience but are often under attack by the Left. Using examples from Daniel J. Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left, craft a 1,200 word essay outlining ways that American leftists have at times sought to conform to the surrounding culture and at other times rebel against it, ultimately answering the question: Can there be an American Left, or must radicals--by virtue of an alien ideology--be forever consigned to operating outside of the American mainstream?"

Jamie Glazov interviews me on Frontpagemag. The discussion covers several of the major themes of A Conservative History of the American Left, including the transition from a Religious Left to an Irreligious Left, the tension between the Force Left and the Freedom Left, and the problem of a Left that denigrates family, faith, freedom, and flag appealing to the inhabitants of a nation that seems to stand for family, faith, freedom, and flag. Read the Frontpagemag interview here.