Name-calling at the National Review

At The Corner Kevin Williamson calls Pamela Geller a "nasty piece of business." I now have a significantly lowered opinion of Kevin Williamson.
Read more here.

Responding to barbarism from the seventh century with soft rock from the 1970s

Out of respect for my readers, I have not re-posted the You Tube video of James Taylor singing "You've got a Friend" to the French. I presume you have already seen it, and were as embarrassed as I. Kevin Williamson writes that

It is the substitution of celebrity for power, of sentiment for analysis, of sloppy gesture for clear-headed commitment.

We’re responding to barbarism from the seventh century with soft rock from the 1970s.

Who is James Taylor?

He became a hired hand for politicians, playing with MoveOn.org’s “Vote for Change” tour through swing states on behalf of – small world! – John Kerry, our national personification of vanity, a kept man, dilettante, and Democratic time-server whose career was both launched and sustained by self-serving accounts of his service in the Vietnam War, a conflict that Taylor avoided by being declared mentally unfit to serve.

If you find yourself in a fight, you want to know that you’ve got a friend. But do you really want that friend to be James Taylor?

It’s not that we should send the 101st Airborne to les banlieues, rather that we should be the sort of country that makes it matter when we say “you’ve got a friend.” When it comes to jihad, there are no obvious solutions, but there are some obvious non-solutions, and an impromptu James Taylor concert surely is one of them.