Richard Sahn. Introduction by William Astore. Being a college professor is supposed to be a grand profession. Assuming we’re not underpaid adjuncts with neither benefits nor job security, our pay is decent, our autonomy is considerable, and we get a fair amount of time off in the summer. How dare we whine about hardships! But…
Michael Gallagher Maureen Dowd, in her recent New York Times column (“A Saint, He Ain’t”), was, unfortunately, one of the few commentators on John Paul II’s canonization bold enough to voice a dissent. I, for one, wholly agree with her misgivings. My only problem is that she should have expressed a few more. As heinous,…
b. traven Who is the real aggressor in Ukraine? The U.S. appears to be playing the democracy card again, this time to save Ukraine from big, bad Putin. But is there a joker in the deck? Is it possible that our President, our Vice President, and our eminent Secretary of State, emboldened by their claims of…
P. J. Sullivan What is the most urgent problem facing our planet? Our country? Is it warfare? Nuclear proliferation? Oil depletion? Hunger? Epidemics? Air and water pollution? Degradation of our food? Soaring housing costs? Global climate change? Species extinctions? Deforestation? All of these are important, but what is it that they all have in common?…
W.J. Astore There’s a new bear in the woods and his name is Vladimir Putin. Remember that Reagan campaign ad from 1984 that showed a menacing, obviously Soviet, bear patrolling the woods, with ominous music in the background? Fast-forward thirty years and a bare-chested Putin is that new bear, marauding in the Crimea and threatening…
By Todd Miller. Introduction by William Astore. About twenty years ago, I received emails from a conservative friend that depicted an ongoing invasion of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California by a flood of Mexican immigrants hellbent on reversing the outcome of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. I laughed at the time at the…
W.J. Astore Eleven years after my freshman essay on the Vietnam War in 1982, I found myself at Oxford in a Strategic Studies Seminar. For that seminar, I wrote the following paper on People’s War and Vietnam. Based on deeper reading and more reflection than my freshman essay, I concluded that the Vietnam War had…
W.J. Astore Much like my father, I can be a pack rat. Going through old files, I found a “blue book” exam that I took as a college freshman in 1982. The essay question I had to answer was whether the U.S. could have won the Vietnam War. Recall that in 1975, South Vietnam had…
Michael Murry The government of the United States still demands that all American males between the ages of 18 and 24 register for military conscription – i.e., the Draft – even though that same government maintains that no such system of military conscription any longer exists. To enforce this Draft Registration, various penalties accrue to…
W.J. Astore What will West Point graduates do without wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Don’t worry! There are a lot more threats listed on the classroom chalkboard. The New York Times this morning has an interesting article on this year’s West Point graduates. With the end of the war in Iraq (at least for us)…
The Contrary Perspective 