LIBERTY, RIGHTS, CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

• "McCain’s national greatness 'conservatism' sees the individual as a cog in the service of the collective. Contra McMussolini, the American Founders placed the individual before the collective, giving pride of place to individual liberties before duties."—ILANA (September 12, 2008)

• On the Medellín case: "A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. 'Consular rights' are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule—technicalities tarted up as real rights."—ILANA (August 8, 2008)

• "Democracy has not sprung Athena-like from her father’s head."—ILANA (July 18, 2008)

• “If Thomas Jefferson begrudged the Normans’ malign influence on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!"—ILANA (July 4, 2008)

• "For the edification of libertarians prone to vulgar individualism, the Declaration is at once a statement of individual and national sovereignty."—ILANA (July 4, 2008)

• "In the land of the free and home of the brave hundreds of children can be rounded up and removed from their families based on a hunch or a hoax. No hue and cry will ensue—not from professional civil libertarians, nor from members of the unwatchful dogs in the media, or from presidential candidates vying to uphold—or is it just to hold—the Constitution."—ILANA (April 25, 2008)

• If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind."—ILANA (February 15, 2008)

• About the futility of central planning: "Societies are built from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by the people, not the politicians."—ILANA (January 4, 2008)

• "Policy by definition addresses the collective, not the individual. Duly, the reality-based libertarian will seek to minimize political overreach, not mandate heaven on earth."—ILANA (January 15, 2008)

• “A right that can't be defended is a right in name only.”—ILANA (August 6, 2003)

• "Natural rights are not for governments to grant but to uphold.”—ILANA (June 25, 2004)

• In unfree societies... governments pacify the multitudes by mulcting the few."—ILANA (March 2, 2007)

• "All men are imbued with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. The laws of this country ought to respect the natural rights of all people, legal and illegal. Not so their demands for political and welfare privileges."—ILANA (December 14, 2007)

• “We have a solemn duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.”—ILANA (September 2, 2005)

• "The sole role of a legitimate government is to protect ... life, liberty, and property, not provide housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, ad infinitum. Why? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others."—ILANA (June 27, 2007)

• “Liberty is a simple thing. It's the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician, unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured and even killed.”—ILANA (September 28, 2007)

• "Those demanding the Speaker channel 'The Decider' are on the side of concentration of power, and consequently, a further loss of power by the people."—ILANA (April 6, 2007)

• "A rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power."—ILANA (May 18, 2007)

• "A sizeable majority of the people 'receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes.' The minority funding the orgy 'pays in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements.' The latter, not the former, should have the vote."—ILANA (April 24, 2007)

• "Taxpayers ought to have the vote, not so tax consumers. And that goes for politicians, who pay taxes out of what they loot from the taxpayer."—ILANA (April 24, 2007)

• "The freer a society, the less likely government is to placate the envious by taking from those they envy."—ILANA (March 2, 2007)

• "In a truly free society, the kind we once enjoyed, one honors the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will."—ILANA (September 15, 2006)

• “If the Constitution were binding and America still a republic of limited government, the president and his incontinent legislators would have to quit marking their territory around the world.”—ILANA (February 3, 2006)

• “Casting a vote to give someone power does not make a man free; freedom is the knowledge that even if one doesn’t perform that ritual, nobody can exercise power over one’s life, liberty, and property.”—ILANA (December 18, 2005)

• “Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments will benefit Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”—ILANA (June 8, 2005)

•  “In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people.”—ILANA (January 26, 2005)

• “James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as ‘incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.’ Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a 'small spot' (like Athens). Indeed, the Bush administration's deafening demagoguery notwithstanding, democratic majoritarianism is thoroughly un-American.”—ILANA (September 16, 2004)

• “Restoring the people's 'unalienable rights' may well lie in Jeffersonian interposition and nullification, whereby states beat back the federal occupier by voiding unconstitutional federal laws.”—ILANA (September 24, 2004)

IMMIGRATION

• "John McCain thinks you commune with God by amnestying illegal aliens."—ILANA (July 25, 2008)

• “Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project."—ILANA (July 4, 2008)

• "Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country’s laws."—ILANA (July 4, 2008)

• "McCain might consider modifying his mantra about illegal aliens being God's children to whom he owes a path to citizenship. This is not about the Arizonan’s relationship with God and His creatures; it’s about McCain’s relationship with the Constitution. The Constitution binds a president to uphold the law; it doesn’t authorize him to legislate compassion.""—ILANA (April 4, 2008)

• "From their vantage point, cultivated usually from the serenity of their stately homes, open-border utilitarians often tout the advantages of high population density. Apparently, Cairo and Calcutta are models for the specialization that comes with an increased division of labor."—ILANA (November 2, 2007)

• "While open-border libertines love Bastiat’s elegant argument about 'What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,' they seldom apply it to mass immigration, where these implacable enemies of America choose to see only benefits. Thus, for every mound of cheap strawberries, there are crops of criminals, failing schools, and folding hospitals."—ILANA (August 3, 2007)

• "The future leader of a superpower should be emphasizing innovation-oriented, not labor-intense, forms of production. More mechanization and less Mexicanization."—ILANA (October 12, 2007)  

• "The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved."—ILANA (March 31, 2006)

• "When government orchestrates an unfettered movement of people into an interventionist state, in which the rights to property, free association, and self defense are already heavily circumscribed by the state—it is guilty of unadulterated social engineering, central planning, and worse."—ILANA (August 21, 2007)

• On amnesty: "How better to diminish property rights and accelerate wealth distribution and, with it, the death of the republic, than to add to the 'union' each year the equivalent of a New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and peopled predominantly by tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers?"—ILANA (June 15, 2007)

• "The notion of dissolving the people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht—that’s very much alive in the minds of the political caste."—ILANA (May 22, 2007)

• The Republican presidential candidates "insist the American military’s obligation is to patrol the borders of Kosovo, Korea and Kurdistan, while our own borders remain perilously porous; Americans living alongside them forsaken."—ILANA (May 18, 2007)

• “Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state’s laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.”—ILANA (May 3, 2007)

• "Want to see an immigration liberationist rise on his hind legs, mention a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Hysterical yelps of 'tear down this wall' will ensue. Irrational minds have transformed a defensive wall à la the Emperor Hadrian’s, intended to keep the 'barbarians' out, into the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, constructed to keep people in."—ILANA (October 20, 2006)

• "It’s now mandatory to pair an objection to the invasion of the American Southwest with an embrace of all forms of legal immigration. The sole emphasis on border security has, in all likelihood, entrenched the status quo—Americans will never assert their right to determine the nature of the country they live in and, by extension, the kind of immigrants they welcome."—ILANA (April 28, 2006)

• “America’s immigration policies select for low moral character by rewarding unacceptable risk-taking and law-breaking—an undesirable feature that’ll be further refined by the imminent passing of the amnesty bill.”—ILANA (April 6, 2006)

• “The purely economic argument about the price at which American workers will perform menial work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—a nation. Render asunder the idea of a nation, make borders obsolete—and the world is your labor market.”—ILANA (March 31, 2006)

• “Most illegal aliens do not come to the U.S. to wage war, but the reality is that, once in the country, almost all wage welfare.”—ILANA (March 27, 2006)

• American immigration policy: "a statist revolution directed from above by a treacherous political class that has shared the ideological cockpit with 'intellectuals,' who hate their country’s history and inhabitants (aboriginals excluded)."—ILANA   (December 16, 2005)

• “Would that the American Welfare State did not exist. But since it does and is, unfortunately, likely to persist for some time to come, it must stop at the Rio Grande.”—ILANA (October 31, 2003)

ELECTIONS 2008

• "McCain’s national greatness 'conservatism' sees the individual as a cog in the service of the collective. Contra McMussolini, the American Founders placed the individual before the collective, giving pride of place to individual liberties before duties."—ILANA (September 12, 2008)

• "As she stood there in all her resplendence, it was crystal clear that Sarah Palin was the outsider; McCain the insider. Palin’s the candidate of change; McCain the Manchurian candidate. She’s the maverick and the man he’s not."—ILANA (September 5, 2008)

• "When Barack Obama looked Americans in the metaphoric eye and told them he was not and was never a Muslim, he had, admittedly, been worshipping at the Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty odd years. So we know for certain that he is not a Christian. Obama’s voodoo theology aside, do we know with the same certainty that he was never Muslim?"—ILANA (August 1, 2008)

• "America’s pathological elections-time self-absorption makes a mockery of the idea that it is suited to lead the world. Shouldn’t a world leader take an interest in the world?"—ILANA (July 11, 2008)

• "Media were only too happy to mislead the man on the street into believing that Democratic Party petty rules were as sacred as those governing the Electoral College. The rules committee of the Democratic National Committee subsequently chose to halve the votes of the Florida and Michigan delegates. Slaves got a slightly better deal under the 'Three-Fifths Compromise' during the Constitutional Convention."—ILANA (June 6, 2008)

• "Obama must be put on the spot not for his presence or absence in the pews during sermons delivered by the pornographic preachers of the Trinity cesspit, but for his adopted philosophy of two decades.”—ILANA (May 24, 2008)

• "Why did Obama not attend a less radical church where Jesus, not Jeremiah, was king?"—ILANA (May 2, 2008)

• "America’s pathological, election-time self-absorption makes a mockery of the notion that the US is suited to lead the world. Shouldn’t a world leader take an interest in the world?"—ILANA (April 24, 2008)

• On Obama's sliming of small-town America: "the incident is significant for what it tells us about who Obama is and what he disdains: guns and God—not the God of Rev. Wright, but the God white, rural, gun-toting America carriers close to its heart."—ILANA (April 11, 2008)

• "McCain demonstrated his inability to tell Shiite from Shinola: Al-Qaida international and Al-Qaida Iraq are Sunni. Call them Wahhabis, Salafis, Takfiris, if you like, but not Shiites!"—ILANA (April 11, 2008)

• "McCain might consider modifying his mantra about illegal aliens being God's children to whom he owes a path to citizenship. This is not about the Arizonan’s relationship with God and His creatures; it’s about McCain’s relationship with the Constitution. The Constitution binds a president to uphold the law; it doesn’t authorize him to legislate compassion."—ILANA (April 4, 2008)

• "Obama is an ass with ears when it comes to the economy. The same goes for Clinton. So Sen. McCain did not help himself (or us) by being charmingly self-deprecating about his understanding of the economy. He has allowed Obama and Clinton, infinitely more asinine than he, to assert their superiority."—ILANA (March 28, 2008)

• "The genteel Obama is nothing like the Rev. Wright, except that they both appear to be overcompensating for not looking more like Kunta Kinte. There’s another small something the two share: a philosophy."—ILANA (March 21, 2008)

• "McCain, the global warmonger, is also a global-warming Wing Nut."—ILANA (February 15, 2008)

• "McCain has promised a monstrous 'Marshall Plan' for Iraq. What cuts to welfare he will deliver stateside, McCain will divert to Iraq in the form of massive government make-work schemes."—ILANA (February 15, 2008)

• "All the 'giving' Hussein and Hillary plan to do is extraconstitutional. Obama’s Manna From Heaven Healthcare Plan, and Hillary’s Cuba Care—these are not inalienable rights."—ILANA ("The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil," February 15, 2008)

• "It’s manifestly clear how close on the unconstitutional continuum Hillary, Hussein and McCain stand."—ILANA ("The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil," February 15, 2008)

• "So what do I think of the next president? I didn’t like his predecessor’s 'New New Deal, so why would I like Barack Hussein Obama’s Great Great Society."—ILANA (February 15, 2008)

• "The greater philosophical significance of McCain lies in his violence-for-values verbiage; in how he deceptively frames the bloodletting in Iraq and elsewhere around the world as the heroic upholding of individual rights."—ILANA (February 8, 2008)

• "I had hoped that, in the dust-up between conservatives and the neocon-dominated Republican Party, McCain would serve as the curdling bacteria, separating the neoconservative whey from the conservative curd. I was wrong."—ILANA (February 5, 2008).

• "Reaching across the aisle to get things done”: McCain’s euphemism for relinquishing principles in favor of political expediency.”—ILANA (February 5, 2008)

• "As a man of the classical liberal, unquestionably American, Old Right, Rep. Paul is perfectly congruous in his defense of a sovereign America bounded by borders. It is his libertarian critics who belong to a different tradition—and who don’t make a lick of sense to sane Americans."—ILANA (January 11, 2008)

• "From the fact that Rep. Paul celebrates free, unfettered movement of goods across borders—trade—Paul’s detractors have 'deduced' that he must also rejoice in the free flow of people across our borders. This is so because these anarchists confuse desires with rights—they believe that preventing anyone from studying or settling in the US is an act of savage aggression.”—ILANA (January 11, 2008)

• “Ron Paul stands alone among the presidential contenders for a solvent, sovereign America—he has the will to stop the squandering of men and matériel in Iraq and the intellectual wherewithal to salvage an ailing currency, fortify forsaken borders, and restore individual liberties.”—ILANA (December 19, 2007)

• "I can see why media, women especially, love Big Daddy; whether he’s sermonizing about diet or the deity, Huckabee is fast becoming the Oprah of the Evangelicals."—ILANA (December 14, 2007)

• "The paradox of the peace-loving Ron Paul is this: Given his commitment to national sovereignty—to defending this country, not Israel, Iraq or Afghanistan—Paul will have the will and the wherewithal to smash any enemy entering our orbit."—ILANA (October 12, 2007)

• "Like the remarkable Rep. Ron Paul, opponents of the invasion [of Iraq] were right because we cleaved to the kind of intellectual and moral principles that were immutably true before Sept. 11, after it, and forever after."—ILANA (June, 2007)

• The Republican presidential candidates "insist the American military’s obligation is to patrol the borders of Kosovo, Korea and Kurdistan, while our own borders remain perilously porous; Americans living alongside them forsaken."—ILANA (May 18, 2007)

• “'Leadership' is a euphemism for overriding the will of the people. No sooner does the pesky popular will intrude into the debate than the top Republican contenders begin to yammer about their obligation to demonstrate “leadership."—ILANA (May 18, 2007)

• Why immigration ought to be the central issue in the 2008 elections: "The neoconservative 'idea' of preemptive wars or wars for democracy is as dead as a doornail. However, the notion of dissolving the people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht, that’s very much alive in the minds of the political caste."—ILANA (May 22, 2007)

REPUBLICANS & DEMOCRATS

• Bipartisanship: "Far better that the people’s representatives sleep with prostitutes than slip between the sheets with members of the opposition. The more the quislings collude, the less competition in government voters end-up with."—ILANA (May 23, 2008)

• “'Leadership' is a euphemism for overriding the will of the people. No sooner does the pesky popular will intrude into the debate than the top Republican contenders begin to yammer about their obligation to demonstrate 'leadership.'"—ILANA (May 18, 2007)

• "Would that Republicans fussed as much over the many fully formed human-beings dying daily in Iraq, as they do over fetuses."—ILANA (November 10, 2006)

• "If establishment Republicans had the faintest affinity for conservatism, they’d quit pouring American blood and treasure down the Iraqi drain."—ILANA (October 6, 2006)

• "Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.”—ILANA (May 26, 2006)

• "What we have now is a cartel, the traditional ideological differences between the political parties having been permanently blurred."—ILANA (May 26, 2006)

• "Republicans have framed a demand for accountability as an attempt to 'politicize' the Katrina cataclysm. Democrats, as always, refuse to recognize the banality of bureaucratic evil. Their boilerplate battle cry is "racism." As the factions settle into their familiar foxholes, it becomes crucial to remind Americans that, irrespective of political fidelity, politicians – local, state, and federal – must pay for the lives lost to Katrina."—ILANA (September 13, 2005)

ISLAM & ARABIA

• "Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam."—ILANA (March 17, 2006)

• "Islam doesn’t brook reason or reformation and is commanded to will the world to its ways."—ILANA (September 22, 2006)

• "That Islam counsels conquest, not coexistence, is ultimately what has given the pope pause."—ILANA (September 22, 2006)

• "Whenever a Muslim woman’s genitals are infibulated, when she is flogged for having been raped, killed for “honor,” or betrothed at age nine, Islam’s aficionados invariably claim these barbarisms are a manifestation of cultural peculiarities, or of the imposter, inauthentic Islam."—ILANA (December 7, 2007)

• "What do you fear most? Your youngster 'finding' Jesus, Jehovah, or Allah?  Faced with those choices, would you prefer that she come home one day wearing a black nose bag, and clutching a Quran and a prayer mat, or dressed in a long skirt, nose in the Hebrew or Christian Testament?"—ILANA (August 31, 2007)

• "In Islam, provided they’re Muslim, the murderous, not the meek, shall inherit the earth."—ILANA (November 24, 2006)

• “In the ‘progressive's’ universe, evil actions don't incriminate, they mitigate. Rather than signify a lack of moral fiber, the criminality of the darling buds of France—her raging Muslim youths— is said to be a symptom of inadequate freebies and fraternité.”—ILANA (November 11, 2005)

• “Whenever a Muslim commits odious acts in the name of his faith, these are deemed—post haste and post hoc—a manifestation of the inauthentic Islam.”—ILANA (September 15, 2006)

• "Unlike Iranian Holocaust humor, there is no objective reason to label the Danes and their drawings immoral—they have violated Islamic, not Western, strictures. This slur is based on the demands of cultural relativism and cowardice."—ILANA (March 10, 2006)

• "So long as it's voluntary and doesn't involve The Rack … unleashing an army of missionaries on the Islamic patrimony would be far more efficacious than the military offensives currently underway."—ILANA (February 23, 2005)

• "On the Danish Cartoons: The camel in the room… is legal and unselective immigration…A culturally coherent immigration policy is the best defense. Unless Bush does his constitutional duty, it'll be only a matter of time before the first American Theo van Gogh is stuck like a pig on our streets.”—ILANA (February 10, 2006)

• "While throwing money and men to Moloch, the commander in chief ignores that the Arab Street has always been more militant than its leaders…The only way Bush will get the democracy he desires in the Arab world is by dissolving the people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht."—ILANA (February 3, 2006)

• "Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one."—ILANA (July 19, 2005)

• “…the catalog of Muslim complaints and contrivances is a little longer than the excuse-makers allow. Violence against innocent nonbelievers and the infliction of Shari'a are as integral to Muslim exegetics as are declamations about occupation."—ILANA (July 19, 2005)

• “Based on Muslims’ own say-so… it’s both disingenuous and stupid of Islam’s champions to claim categorically that Muslim aggression is entirely reactive, a function solely of our misguided foreign policy.”—ILANA (July 19, 2005)

•  “…an estimated 100 to 300 million Muslims are active adherents of Islamism: small potatoes, right? Yet to listen to the Bush/Blair pair, you’d think that Jihadists are as alien to Islam as edelweiss is to the Kalahari.”—ILANA (July 26, 2005)

• "Our Demagogue-in-Chief insists that democracy will both empower and pacify Muslims. [But] Democratic elections across the Muslim world would see the pan-Islamists take power everywhere; then elections would cease."—ILANA (January 26, 2005)

FOREIGN POLICY

• "Democracy has not sprung Athena-like from her father’s head."—ILANA (July 18, 2008)

• "Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own. In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war."—ILANA (July 18, 2008)

• "As Obama sets forth strategically to ingratiate the conflict in Afghanistan on his constituents—all in order to flaunt his fitness for the office—remember: This war too must end."—ILANA (July 18, 2008)

• "Maybe Musharraf should have kept Bhutto under house arrest for her own good—and for the sake of the many bystanders.”—ILANA (January 4, 2008)

• "About the futility of central planning: Societies are built from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by the people, not the pols.”—ILANA (January 4, 2008)

• "Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one."—ILANA (July 19, 2005)

• "Patriots for a sane American foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends, Israel included, to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours."—ILANA (April 6, 2007)

• "Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach."—ILANA (April 6, 2007)

• "A real conservative would never graft democratic institutions onto a society in which adversaries have always assassinated—not outpolled—one another."—ILANA (October 6, 2006)

• “‘Philanthropic’ wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects. The perpetually profligate Bush should quit pretending he’s an apostle of smaller government.”—ILANA (October 6, 2006)

• “A Katrina Question: Hey, what do Americans have to do to get their army reservists to bat, not for Baghdad, but for the homies and the homeland? Climb on their rooftops and yelp for help?”—ILANA (August 30, 2005)

• "So long as it's voluntary and doesn't involve The Rack … unleashing an army of missionaries on the Islamic patrimony would be far more efficacious than the military offensives currently underway."—ILANA (February 23, 2005)

• "Healthy patriotism is associated with robust particularism – petty provincialism, if you like – and certainly not with the deracinated globalism."—ILANA (March 9, 2005)

IRAQ

• "While small-time functionaries like Scott McClellan can be big enough to express remorse, self-reproach is rare in the leaders they serve. A breast-beating Bush: now that would provide a truly teachable moment.—ILANA (June 20, 2008)

• "Petraeus is defending a pie-in-the-sky policy much more than a viable military mission. The former is beyond his purview. But then constitutional overreach is the name of the game for politicians and their pet generals."—ILANA (April 8, 2008)

• "The idea that we can rehabilitate what we ruined in Iraq is delusional—a function of a collective mindset that rejects reality and its lessons. We can’t fix Iraq because of what we wrought—because of the Original Sin of invasion. The sinner cannot turn savior."—ILANA (October 12, 2007)

• "The surge’s claim to success is more serendipity than science."—ILANA (September 14, 2007)

• "The Bush Administration has gone from discounting Iraqi civilian casualties to miscounting them. That must surely be counted as progress."—ILANA (September 14, 2007)

• "Like the remarkable Rep. Ron Paul, opponents of the invasion [of Iraq] were right because we cleaved to the kind of intellectual and moral principles that were immutably true before Sept. 11, after it, and forever after."—ILANA (June , 2007)

• On the Baker et al. Report: "In Iraq, every potential for conflict, however small, is fully realized. Arabs and Turkmen feud with Kurdish irredentists; the Badr Brigade battles the Mahdi Army, even though both are Shia. But why dwell on the negative? All this will be behind us once Israel cedes more territory to those plucky Palestinians."—ILANA (December 8, 2006)

• "In their depiction of the Middle East as a magically interconnected ecosystem, Baker et al. have conjured a construct every bit as mystical as Bush’s democracy-by-osmosis."—ILANA (December 8, 2006)

• "Saddam’s last major massacre was in 1991, during which only 3,000 Shiites were murdered. That’s less than the monthly quota under 'democracy.'”—ILANA (December 1, 2006)

• "Under our ministrations Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state."—ILANA (December 1, 2006)

• "When it comes to Iraq, the pols fetishize details, hang hopes on minutia and forfeit a deeper understanding of the place and people. The devil is not in the details—more troops, or better training for Iraqis—but in the big picture."—ILANA (November 16, 2006)

• "The government of Iraq doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them. The divisions that have riven the region for four millenniums are mirrored in the current government, and will continue to hobble every successive government that hunkers down in the Green Zone."—ILANA (November 16, 2006)

• "Remove one Saddam, who kept a lid on the cauldron of crime and corruption that is Iraq, and there’ll be another waiting to take his place—and another and another. Just like a shark’s teeth."—ILANA (November 6, 2006)

• "Hyping a war as a symbolic war gives it momentum—and facilitates its expansion beyond regional confines."—ILANA (July 16, 2006)

• Person of the Year: “The Average Iraqi is a tragic hero, not a Randian hero. His image should be seared in the minds of men with a conscience. He is the repository of state evil; first Saddam, and then a faraway president and his Revolutionary Assembly sealed his fate without his consent.”—ILANA (12.18.05 @ 2:01 am)

• “Once a rogue state; Iraq is now a failed one, where any faction that imagines its wishes are being frustrated goes out and kills its foes. Freedom is on the march.”—ILANA (December 6, 2005)

• “Prior to Bush’s invasion, I didn’t give a tinker’s toss what Iraqis did to Saddam. He was their baggage. But now that this burlesque of justice [Saddam's trial] is branded ‘made-in-America,’ it's a Mark of Cain on all of us.”—ILANA (December 6, 2005)

• "Bush and his devotees continually compare the carnage in Iraq to the constitutional cramps of early America: Yes, the hoots, hollers, and blasts emanating from members of Iraq’s tribal troika capture to a tee the tone of the debates in, what’s that document called? The Fedayeen Papers?"—ILANA (October 12, 2005)

• Again, "on the continual comparisons between the carnage in Iraq and the constitutional cramps of early America: Why didn’t it occur to me? Only a fool would fail to trace the philosophical link between the warring Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu."—ILANA (October 12, 2005)

• “Let’s ignore Bush’s reverse Midas touch, and assume for the sake of argument that his ‘project’ has not whittled Iraqi liberties. If indeed we’ve subsidized ‘freedom’ for Iraqis and fought their battles—then we’ve also increased their impotence and diminished their initiative.”—ILANA (September 2, 2005)

• “We have a solemn duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.”—ILANA (September 2, 2005)

• “Let's leave aside the question of whether the invasion of Iraq was unjust and unattainable or merely mistaken and misguided. Why must we continue to feed this false idol with more lives? What does this make us? Worshippers of Moloch or mere fools?”—ILANA (December 1, 2004)

• “To say that Saddam may have had WMD is quite different from advocating war based on those assumptions. It’s one thing to assume in error; it’s quite another to launch a war in which thousands would die based on mere assumptions, however widely shared.”—ILANA (June 25, 2003)

• "Murder with majority approval is still murder."—ILANA (April 23, 2003)

• “… a brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.”—ILANA (March 26, 2003)

CHINA

• "It’s time we came clean about our economic system. The Chinese are honest about theirs; they call it 'socialism with Chinese characteristic.' We call ours free-market capitalism, when in fact it is a Third Way system too: 'Socialism with American characteristics.'”—ILANA (February 29, 2008)

• "Since American society is increasingly silhouetted by the State, we’re in the unproductive business of graduating lawyers. Because the Chinese State is receding, they’re in the productive business of graduating engineers."—ILANA (February 29, 2008)

• "The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail."—ILANA (February 29, 2008)

• "China is changing. It is 'out of the red' in more ways than one. The US is changing too: It’s in the red and getting redder."—ILANA (February 29, 2008)

• "The Chinese are ditching Mao for Milton, as Americans trust Oprah to pick their literature and leaders."—ILANA (February 29, 2008)

• "While America is becoming more militaristic; China is growing increasingly capitalistic. As America’s middle-class dwindles due to government’s wastrel ways, China’s middle class is 200-million strong and growing. The Chinese have money on their minds; murder, not so much."—ILANA (May 11, 2007)

NEOCONSERVATISM

• On the neoconservative's "propositional nation": "No longer will communities comprise individuals bound by a shared language, literature, culture, faith, history, habits and heroes. Rather, what we’re being fashioned into is a disparate people, forced together by an abstract, highly manipulable, coercive, state-sanctioned ideology."—ILANA (December 28, 2007)

• "For exhorting that 'we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,' Ann Coulter was even banished from National Review. This was a puzzling purge, considering neoconservatives promptly adopted her recommendations (save the peaceful one), invaded Muslim countries and killed their leaders.—ILANA (October 26, 2007)

• “Neocon nirvana is a U.S.-supervised world, where Afghani and Israeli alike are fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world.”—ILANA (April 24, 2002)

• “In the process of pursuing some sort of neoconservative ‘Manifest Destiny,’ President Bush has junked the American Constitution—it gave him no authority to ‘promote’ global freedom, democracy or nation-building with blood and treasure not his own.”—ILANA (September 11, 2003)

• "Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin."—ILANA (January 16, 2004 Also mentioned here by Larry Auster)

• “Neoconservatives are committed cultural and religious relativists who firmly believe a good democratic heart throbs in every thorax.”—ILANA (February 23, 2005)

• “Loving Islam and leveling an Islamic country—these are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.”—ILANA (November 4, 2005)

ECONOMICS

• “Bush’s bailout society” is an instantiation of the principles upon which “Bush’s ownership society” was founded: credit for those who are not creditworthy.—ILANA (October 3, 2008)

• "Is America ever going to understand that nothing can grow in the shadow of a State that has squandered trillions and makes up for it by printing more?—ILANA (October 3, 2008)

• A crisis that was created by cheap credit must be corrected by less of the same.—ILANA (September 26, 2008) 

• "Bush’s ownership society, built as it was on quicksand, has metamorphosed into the bailout society."—ILANA (September 26, 2008)

• "Trade, not democracy, is also the best antidote to war. The more economically intertwined countries are, the less likely they are to go to war. Boycott Iran less and barter with it more and it’s bound to tone down its belligerence."—ILANA (September 19, 2008)

• "All in all, Exxon Mobil has done a smashing job of bringing oil to market considering the fly-in-amber policies it faces."—ILANA (June 13, 2008)

• On Glorious Gas: "The more efficient the source of energy, the less waste and pollution are involved in its conversion into energy. Think of the totality of the production process! The fewer resources expended in bringing a fuel to market, the cleaner and cheaper is the process."—ILANA (June 13, 2008)

• McCain's pronouncements on pumping-up oil supply—the only way to satiate demand and reduce prices—are limited and delimited by the shamanic thinking he and Obama share: Godless humans are overheating the Goddess Gaia."—ILANA (June 13, 2008)

• "Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve."—ILANA (June 13, 2008)

• "Obama is an ass with ears when it comes to the economy. The same goes for Clinton. So Sen. McCain did not help himself (or us) by being charmingly self-deprecating about his understanding of the economy. He has allowed Obama and Clinton, infinitely more asinine than he, to assert their superiority."—ILANA (March 28, 2008)

• "Where Kemp-McCain economics meet Obama-Clinton “freakonomics” is in the unnatural and un-American idea that the government is entitled to a portion of your income; that it has a lien on your life and on what you acquire in the course of sustaining that life. Be it Hillary, Hussein or McCain—they all agree that it is up to the all-knowing central planner to determine how much of your life ought to be theirs.—ILANA (March 28, 2008)

• "Forced to choose between various forms of enslavement, as we indeed are, then the flat tax is the second best option, revolution being the first."—ILANA (March 3, 2008)

• "CNN's Lou Dobbs would do a great service to American innovators and middle class, if he waged his wordy war against their government, which has buried American business under a burdensome bureaucracy."—ILANA (February 29, 2008)

• "The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers. Aguilera (Christina) probably sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney outdoes Borodin. For some, this will be faith-inspiring, for others deeply distressing."—ILANA (February 7, 2003)

• "Politics is a form of sheltered employment."—ILANA (February 8, 2008)

• "Profits are the street signs of the free market—without profits there’d be no products."—ILANA (February 8, 2008)

• "It’s high time Americans, who never tire of cramming their values down gagging gullets, remember that solvency is a virtue; bankruptcy a vice."—ILANA (January 25, 2008)

• "The freer a society, the less likely government is to placate the envious by taking from those they envy. In unfree societies, that’s precisely what governments do: pacify the multitudes by mulcting the few."—ILANA (March 2, 2007)

• "The concept of an income gap is meaningless in its circularity. Some people are richer than others. Some don’t like it. It’s called envy."—ILANA (February 5, 2007)

• "Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.”—ILANA (May 26, 2006)

• “The Securities and Exchange Commission operates on an unconstitutional ex post facto basis—its victims have no way of foreseeing or controlling how vague law will be bent and charges changed in the course of seeking the desired prosecutorial outcome.”—ILANA (December 2, 2005)

• Socialists: Their zero-sum economics dictate that one person’s plenty is another’s poverty.”—ILANA (August 19, 2005)

• “Statists say that if not for the state, man would be unable to produce. That's like saying that the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn't produce wealth—it only consumes it.”—ILANA (Sixteen, the Number of the Beast, in Broad Sides, 2004)

LEFT-LIBERALISM

• "Liberals are always exalting man’s basest instincts and debasing his most exalted achievements.”—ILANA (2007)

• Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”—ILANA (December 29, 2004)

• "Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope."—ILANA (April 29, 2005)

• "The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution."—ILANA (March 26, 2005)

• What distinguishes civilized beings from animals, primitive societies, and liberals is that they don’t see nature as an exemplar of all that is fine and good. To the contrary: the civilized don’t abandon the burdensome or the enfeebled to nature. When some of us do, others will always strive to rescue them.”—ILANA (March 26, 2005)

• "Evidence that primitive societies abandoned their enfeebled members to 'nature' only intensified the liberal’s Rousseauist reverence for this practice, as the case of Terry Schiavo showed."—ILANA (March 26, 2005)

• “Left-liberals ... believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent. George Bush thinks a judicial activist is someone who disobeys the President.”—ILANA (October 3, 2005)

THE WELFARE-WARFARE STATE

• "The idea of charity is to improve society, not the State; and to do so through personal, not political, acts."—ILANA (August 29, 2008)

• "The-state-as-parent is a leftist legal doctrine that has been eagerly embraced by the rigor-mortis riddled Right."—ILANA (April 25, 2008)

• "Whether they are 'plural' or single, Wicca or just weird, bohemian or bourgeoisie—parents should take the kids and skedaddle when they hear that phrase 'in the best interests of the child.'"—ILANA (April 25, 2008)

• The nation’s foster parents: "Fagin on welfare."—ILANA (April 25, 2008)

• "The danger exists that by subsidizing 'freedom' for others, we’ll disempower them and encourage dependency."—ILANA (February 3, 2006)

• “‘Philanthropic’ wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects. The perpetually profligate Bush should quit pretending he’s an apostle of smaller government.”—ILANA (January 6, 2006)

• “Most of what the Federal Frankenstein does is either unconstitutional, immoral, illegal, or all of the above.”—ILANA (October 15, 2005)

• “A Katrina Question: Hey, what do Americans have to do to get their army reservists to bat, not for Baghdad, but for the homies and the homeland? Climb on their rooftops and yelp for help?”—ILANA (August 30, 2005)

• "The Key to Katrina: “The inverted and perverse incentive structure that characterizes [government] endeavors guarantees failure. ... Wrongdoing and incompetence in government are seldom punished, but are, rather, rewarded with budgetary increases. A government department accretes through inefficiency. Failure translates into ever-growing budgets and powers and a further collectivization of accountability.”—ILANA (September 2, 2005)

• “Statists say that if not for the state, man would be unable to produce. That's like saying that the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn't produce wealth—it only consumes it.”—ILANA (Sixteen, the Number of the Beast, in Broad Sides, 2004)

• “A brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.”—ILANA (March 26, 2003)

THE THERAPEUTIC STATE

• "To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not  committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease."—ILANA (April 20, 2007)

• "Police and campus authorities responded to Cho’s stalking, pyromania, and voyeurism by medicalizing his misbehavior. As the nation’s pseudo-experts generally advise, Cho was referred to a mental health facility."—ILANA (April 20, 2007) 

• "The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals"—ILANA (April 20, 2007)

• "If the consensus in society is that doing the bare minimum is an act of supreme courage; then failing to perform basic obligations must be considered the norm."—ILANA (February 2, 2007)

• "It is an error to use the disease paradigm to describe or explain errant behavior."—ILANA (January 2007)

• "Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes."—ILANA (August 4, 2006)

• “According to the disease theory of delinquency, the arsonist has 'pyromania,' the thief 'kleptomania,’ and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a ‘sex-addict.’''—ILANA (August 4, 2006)

• “At the root of the diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, ‘therapeutic’ or state interventions.”—ILANA (August 4, 2006)

• “In the ‘progressive's’ universe, evil actions don't incriminate, they mitigate. Rather than signify a lack of moral fiber, the criminality of the darling buds of France—her raging Muslim youths— is said to be a symptom of inadequate freebies and fraternité.”—ILANA (November 11, 2005)

• “Someone is considered creative and strong in the Zeitgeist not when she builds an empire and employs hundreds of people, but once she has conformed by gaining therapeutic ‘self-knowledge’ and whimpering on Oprah. In fact, the therapeutic creed is often used to coerce people into conformity.”—ILANA (Everyman: A Men’s Journal, April-June 2005)

BUSH

• "Bush’s ownership society, built as it was on quicksand, has metamorphosed into the bailout society."—ILANA (September 26, 2008)

• "Bush would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. Medellín the murderer was no exception."—ILANA (August 8, 2008)

• "Bush babble, I believe, is less a consequence of congenital stupidity than it is of the confusion caused by incessant, habitual lying."—ILANA (February 8, 2008)

• "The Bush Doctrine: Aggress against non-aggressors (Iraq); surrender to aggressors (gangs, goons and grafter crossing our Southwestern border)."—ILANA (March 7, 2008)

• “Left-liberals ... believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent. George Bush thinks a judicial activist is someone who disobeys the President.”—ILANA (October 3, 2005)

• "Bush's 'bring 'em on' grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis."—ILANA (July 16, 2003)

• "Bush is a stupid man, but he’s not a yes man. He’s not even a 'let’s-hear-what-you-have-to-say' man. He’s a 'do-as-I-say' 'Decider,' a nickname he gave himself."—ILANA (July 13, 2007)

• "Bush has betrayed US borders and identity because, he doesn’t believe in them. Afghani and Israeli: if Bush had his way, they’d all be molded into global democrats, citizens of the world."—ILANA (July 13, 2007)

• "I liked Bush when he started out. Libertarians were generally hopeful about a president who promised a humble foreign policy and less taxation. I still liked Bush when he chased bin Laden in Afghanistan. But soon after, the real Bush revealed himself to anyone willing to see: A man with a megalomaniacal glint in the eyes and an unstoppable will to wage war on a backward, secular, harmless Arab state, hobbled by sanctions." (July 13, 2007)

• "Bush ... should be slithering on his belly to Bashar to thank him for serving as the US’s pressure relief valve vis-à-vis Iraq. Together, Jordan and Syria have taken in 1.6 million fleeing Iraqi refugees."—ILANA (April 2, 2007)

• "If Bush is so concerned about how the Arab world views us, he should not have invaded a sovereign Arab country, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and propelled the place into a bloody civil war."—ILANA (March 11, 2006)

• “Why would George Bush care whether Harriet E. Miers can tell Blackstone from Bentham when he can’t?”—ILANA  (October 3, 2005)

• "Our Demagogue-in-Chief insists that democracy will both empower and pacify Muslims. [But] Democratic elections across the Muslim world would see the pan-Islamists take power everywhere; then elections would cease."—ILANA (January 26, 2005)

• “In the process of pursuing some sort of neoconservative ‘Manifest Destiny,’ President Bush has junked the American Constitution—it gave him no authority to ‘promote’ global freedom, democracy or nation-building with blood and treasure not his own.”—ILANA (September 11, 2003)

• "George W. Bush is oblivious to a basic principle of his own conservative ideology: Top-down central planning—economic or political—is doomed to fail."—ILANA (September 11, 2003)

• “Under the Bush Iraq Doctrine, evidence against a theory  constitutes evidence for a theory: No smoking gun meant that there was a hidden gun somewhere or a plan to acquire a gun, or a hidden plan to acquire a gun and hide it.”—ILANA (December 18, 2002)

ENVIRONMENTALISM & ANIMAL RIGHTS

• "Environmentalists are seeking to drop civilization down a black hole."—ILANA (July 11, 2008)

• "All in all, Exxon Mobil has done a smashing job of bringing oil to market considering the fly-in-amber policies it faces."—ILANA (June 13, 2008)

• McCain's pronouncements on pumping-up oil supply—the only way to satiate demand and reduce prices—are limited and delimited by the shamanic thinking he and Obama share: Godless humans are overheating the Goddess Gaia."—ILANA (June 13, 2008)

• "Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)—ILANA (April 4, 2008)

• "Environmental lobbies abhor all by-products of human existence, unless generated by illegal aliens. In that case, the vast latrine and land fill created along the border with Mexico, as millions of illegals defecate and despoil their way to their destinations in the US, are just dandy. To interfere with the natural formation of this outsized outhouse is to “jeopardize the quality of life and beauty of South Texas.”—ILANA (April 4, 2008)

• "A heart-warming thought about global-warming wombats: These mutant Marxists are worried sick about the planet. The Worry Factor may just increase the rate at which this particular invasive species falls off the earth."—ILANA (January 30, 2008)

• "If one is looking to criminalize 'excessive' emissions of carbon, as Al Gore is, then buying carbon credits is like getting a hit-and-run allowance. Exceed your allowable hit-and-runs, and you get to pay a lesser offender for the right to pick-off more pedestrians."—ILANA (November 2, 2007) 

• "To PETA, man and beast exist along the same continuum, their faculties and feelings differing in degree, not in kind."—ILANA (September 2, 2007)

• "Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people."—ILANA (September 2, 2007)

• "Whether one kills animals for food or for fun, the naturally licit basis for large-scale pig farming or game hunting is the same: ownership of the resource."—ILANA (August 24, 2007)

• "Members of the canine community have yet to deliver disquisitions against dog fighting. However, when the day arrives and Fido fights tooth and nail for more than Kibbles 'n Bits, he will indeed have earned his rights."—ILANA (August 24, 2007)

• "The only thing that might lift the malodorous aura that has clung to Sheryl Crow since she came out of the toilet with these schemes is the knowledge that her well-appointed bathroom sports a bidet."—ILANA (April 27, 2007)

• "[G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania."—ILANA (April 27, 2007)

• On the unfalsifiable theory of global warming:"Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it."—ILANA (December 29, 2006)

• "Katrina Culpability: 'Please don’t neglect the environmentalists. ... A Holy Grail for these humanity-haters is to launch litigation to hinder the construction of hurricane-prevention floodgates and other barrier projects. They’ve succeeded. I happened on a car sporting one of their bumper stickers: 'save the planet; commit suicide.' 'Save the planet; commit murder' better encapsulates their 'philosophy.'”—ILANA (September 13, 2005)

• “It used to be that men killed and hunted encroaching creatures. Thanks to decades of cultural queering and legal emasculation, men no longer have the urge to protect home and hearth. Instead, they now robotically spew the Sierra Club’s line: animal are the true homesteaders of the planet; humans come second.”—ILANA (June 11, 2005) 

ISRAEL &  THE PALESTINIANS

• At 60, Israel has demonstrated that a country can at once respect the rights of all its inhabitants, retain its historical majority and reject the mass of mankind."—ILANA (May 16, 2008)

• "Certain nihilists appear to believe that it’s preferable for their Palestinian protégés to be masters in a failed state than a minority in a functioning one."—ILANA (March 14, 2008)

• “The notion that Hezbollah is a Jihadist organization that would like to see Israel destroyed does nothing to address whether there is utility or justification in destroying Lebanon."—ILANA (August 10, 2006)

• "The blame for civilian casualties lies indirectly with Hezbollah … which targets civilians and hides among them. Although necessary, this fact, however, is not sufficient to exempt Israel from responsibility for its direct actions … Israel can’t claim it didn’t intend to take out civilians when Israeli generals can both see and foresee the devastating results of their bombardments."—ILANA (July 21, 2006)

• “It's hard to imagine Angelina Jolie...visiting an Israeli child who has survived a suicide bombing. I know she has hung out with the M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed People Ever aka the Palestinians). I guess some people just don't die as well as others.”—ILANA (June 23, 2006)

• “No amount of wanking with words is going to change that Palestinians, unlike their Israeli neighbors, don't live under the rule of enlightened Western law, don't have a free and ferociously critical media or liberal courts, and are more likely to approve when their coreligionists strap on belts of nails and dynamite and blow up innocents.”—ILANA (January 13, 2006)

• “Apologists for lackluster Palestinian productivity blame Israel—the few thousand [Gazan] 'settlers,' especially. Socialists will do that. Their zero-sum economics dictate that one person’s plenty is another’s poverty.”—ILANA (August 19, 2005)

• "In Israel, the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened Western law prevails, and where Christians, Jews, and their sacred places are safe. Yet what is the West feverishly fighting for? The utter emasculation of Israel."—ILANA (August, 23, 2005)

• “By returning land to the aggressors—the Sinai first—Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law [and natural law] to punish the aggressor.”—ILANA (August 23, 2005)

• “It is becoming apparent that to some, bringing about the end of Israel is well worth the deadly price of reviving and consolidating a caliphate. There’s a word for that (besides insanity).”—ILANA (August 23, 2005)

• "Gaza is being 'cleansed' of Jews to the sounds of a jeering media. The punditocracy has cheered the evacuation of the descendants of the Hasmoneans and heralded a takeover by the spiritual scions of Hamas."—ILANA (August 19, 2005)

• “When it comes to Israel, the logical power pyramid is mysteriously inverted so that a small nation is seen as wielding paranormal powers over a superpower.”—ILANA (May 29, 2005)

• “Sharon was a soldier in the style of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter. As a Special Forces commander, he personally led his troops into battle, performing daring assaults that saved Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.”—ILANA (November 14, 2003)

• “The world mistakes the Palestinian’s military weakness for moral innocence.”—ILANA (April 17, 2002)

REASON & REALITY

• "Policy by definition addresses the collective, not the individual. Duly. The reality-based libertarian will seek to minimize political overreach, not mandate heaven on earth."—ILANA (January 15, 2008)

• "Reality: the rational man’s anchor."—ILANA (June 15, 2007)

• "Unvarnished objective reality is morality’s best measure; and human action the ultimate adjudicator of moral worth."—ILANA (January 13, 2006)   

INDIVIDUALISM VS. COLLECTIVISM

• "What greater contrast can there be between the Olympian, who powers himself to the pinnacle, and the politician, who drapes himself in the noble toga of idealism, in the famous words of Aldous Huxley, so as to conceal his will to power.”—ILANA (August 20, 2004)

• "Societies are only as good as the individuals of which they are comprises, individuals only as good as their actions"—ILANA (June 22, 2007)

• "Generalizations, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities."—ILANA (May 27, 2006)

• “To consider nationhood a collectivist concept is to confuse authentic individualism with a caricature thereof. The real individualist knows that man is a social being by nature. He knows that to belong to a variety of social systems is not necessarily to be bound by—or subjugated to—them. Mostly, the real individualist knows who he is and whence he came.”—ILANA (April 7, 2006)

PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS

• "Just as one can’t be slightly pregnant, one can’t be a partial property owner with the government as the sleeping partner. If the government can claim a percentage of a man’s income as a condition of letting him live unmolested—that man owns diddly-squat. Ownership is then symbolic, subject to the whims and “wisdom” of the sovereign of the day."—ILANA (March 28, 2008)

• "The right of ownership is an extension of the right to life. If ownership is not an absolute right but is instead subject to the vagaries of majority vote, then so is the right to life."—ILANA (November 20, 2002)

• "The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on a man’s property and, by extension, on his life."—ILANA (November 20, 2002)

• "If U.S. ports were private, and not state run, their proprietors would have to underwrite the endeavor and would thus be extra cautious, since it would fall to them—and not to taxpayers—to cover the costs of an attack…port owners would then express the same trepidations most Americans are now voicing over who manages—and has easy access to—their ports."—ILANA (February 24, 2006)

• "Most American ports are owned by localities—states, cities, and local port authorities. This is the American people’s backyard. They feel they own the ports, which is why they responded as cautiously as any proprietor who prizes and protect what is his."—ILANA (March 3, 2006)

• “Inherent in private property is the right to include or exclude; associate with or dissociate from. This attribute is also why we in the West are supposed to uphold private property as a civilizing institution. How better to keep the peace than to keep a distance?”—ILANA (November 18, 2005)

DRUG WAR

• "Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder."—ILANA (May 8, 2002)

• "If for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can't be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else—government—owns him."—ILANA (May 8, 2002)

• "Policy wonks have arbitrarily decided that heroin consumption is potentially worse for individual and society than compulsive eating, bunjie jumping, gambling, alcohol consumption, fatty foods, or tobacco.—ILANA (December 28, 2001)

• "The U.S. has been able to make prohibition piety an integral part of its foreign policy."—ILANA (December 28, 2001)

• "The brutal punishing of adults for the substances they ought to be able to ingest, inhale, or inject at their own peril is based on a parochial prior restraint argument."—ILANA (December 28, 2001)

EDUCATION

• "In America’s progressive schools prurience and psychobabble combine in equal measures."—ILANA (June 27, 2008)

• "For decades, America’s progressive schools have been conducting a sick experiment in parallel parenting. Gloucester's Hatchery High is the payback: It’s Rosemary’s pedagogic Baby."—ILANA (June 27, 2008)

•  "Despite being the best funded school system in the world, American public schools graduate the thickest kids in the developed world."—ILANA (January 26, 2007)

• "The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education."—ILANA (January 27, 2006) 

• On smashing the state’s monopoly over education: “Staying stupid is a perfectly valid choice, so long as it’s not a government-enforced status quo.”—ILANA (January 29, 2006)

• “[Ward] Churchill's tirades are [not] bereft of any truth. ... But, unless one is a magpie, one doesn't rummage through garbage in search of bright objects.”—ILANA (April 20, 2005)

• "Government schools produce misguided, mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds...the uniformity of opinion is almost scarier than its uninformed nature."—ILANA (September 3, 2004)

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

• "Good newsmen are a dying breed. Good newswomen are mostly dead already. By the time she died, the brilliant and brave Oriana Fallaci had long since been buried professionally by mediocrities like Barbara Walters of the 'cutting edge' anti-aging reportage and colonic crusader Katie Couric."—ILANA (June 6, 2008)

• "I suspect most media cheered for Obama reflexively, rather than consciously—too stupid to ask themselves whether what they were doing was journalism or advocacy."—ILANA (June 6, 2008)

• "The moribund mainstream media is dead from self-inflicted wounds."—ILANA (February 22, 2008)

• "Ann Coulter is right about very many things; it’s a shame she rarely writes about the things she’s right about. That's the secret to success: keep the masses euphoric and moronic."—ILANA (February 13, 2008)

• "Too Many pundits posing as populists have benefited handsomely from turning folks onto war—pornographically so."—ILANA (February 9, 2007)

• "CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a major culprit in changing the face of news. Forehead furrowed into a perpetual I-feel-your-pain frown, Cooper’s broadcasts are an interminable kvetch that elevates feelings above facts."—ILANA (June 27, 2007)

• "The media monolith, pitchforks hoisted, has conducted a swift public trial, meant to make an example of Imus, and serve as a warning to all others who fail to march in lockstep, shouting 'Jawohl!'”—ILANA (April 13, 2007)

• "In the financial benefits they derived from whooping it up for war, a great many media types were as good as Halliburton war profiteers."—ILANA (December 4, 2006)  

• Fox News is full of statists on steroids.—ILANA (January 25, 2006)

• “The media talking heads are props to the politicos. As long as they play to the ‘Demopublican Monopolists,’ and sustain the respective parties’ constituencies, media 'mavens' will retain their perches, their pensions, and their sizeable salaries.”—ILANA (August 8, 2005)

• “The commentariat... is a mirror image of the political class, reflecting and reinforcing the opinions—and the reality—of the elites. More often than not, the chattering classes are as privileged—and protected—as their masters.”—ILANA (August 8, 2005)

• “News is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please—not inform—the public.”—ILANA (May 28, 2004)

HILLARY

• "All the 'giving' Hussein and Hillary plan to do is extraconstitutional. Obama’s Manna From Heaven Healthcare Plan, and Hillary’s Cuba Care—these are not inalienable rights."—ILANA ("The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil," February 15, 2008)

• “Her claim to the contrary notwithstanding, Hillary’s 'progressivism' is as American as Jalal Talabani is Jeffersonian..”—ILANA (July 27, 2007)

• “Hillary Clinton's sole contribution to political philosophy is a so-far failed attempt to try and revive the North Korean, Cuban, and Soviet traditions of slavery—or socialism—in medicine.”—ILANA (October 6, 2004)

• “The ‘Hildebeest’ is another believer … in the power of legislation to renew communities. ... Clearly, it takes a village idiot to think of government policy as a means to a Renaissance.”—ILANA (January 23, 2002)

HOLLYWOOD

• "Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn."—ILANA (July 6, 2007)

• On Hollywood and Africa: "If colonialism was our original sin; capitalism is our cardinal sin. Our voracious system of production, these do-gooders typically claim, is a zero-sum game. To wit, the standards of living we enjoy come at the expense of Africa's poor."—ILANA (June 10, 2007)

• “Mel Gibson raged against the generic Jew of his belief system—the Illuminati who manipulate world affairs from the center of the earth and are responsible for unleashing Pokemon on children around the world.”—ILANA (August 4, 2006)

• “It's hard to imagine Angelina Jolie tearing up over the systematic extermination of Boer Afrikaners by blacks. Or visiting an Israeli child who has survived a suicide bombing. I know she has hung out with the M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed People Ever aka the Palestinians). I guess some people just don't die as well as others.”—ILANA (June 23, 2006)

• “Bono, a compassionate pickpocket, uses his undeserved celebrity to get Western heads of state to transfer funds not their own into corrupt African coffers. For his philanthropy-by-proxy, this shakedown artist was named Time's ‘Person of the Year.’”—ILANA (December 30, 2005)

• "On That Timeless film, 'A Christmas Story'”: “This was boyhood before ‘bang-bang you’re dead’ was banned, family life prior to 'One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,' and Christmas without the ACLU.”—ILANA (December 23, 2005)

• "There is a lot to dislike about the self-aggrandizing Brangelina of Benetton. But where is Bollywood’s match for these giving, gullible, American do-gooders?"—ILANA (August 17, 2007)

HOMOSEXUALITY & SEXUALITY

• "Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State’s pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of their anger and activism.—ILANA (June 9, 2006)

• “The closet, sadly, has come to signify oppression, rather than discretion.”—ILANA (August 14, 2002)

• "Sex to [Ayn Rand] was an elevated union between two outsized personalities, united in values and life force; a savage yet spiritual act of conquest."—ILANA (July 9, 2004)

• "Homosexuality is as innate as heterosexuality, but how one lives one's sexuality is a legitimate object for ethical judgment."—ILANA (July 9, 2004)

• "The heroic and creative inner struggle of an older generation of Gay Greats, exemplified by the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White, was Randian at its best: silent and stoic, principled yet private. White was a hero in the Greek tradition."—ILANA (July 9, 2004)

• "If, in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, 'civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,' then sexual activism or exhibitionism—homo or hetero—is anathema."—ILANA (July 9, 2004)

FEMINISM & FEMINIZATION

• "'You Go Girl!,' the bimbo battle cry."—ILANA (February 18, 2008)

• Girl Talk: “And he was like, ‘come here’; and I was like, ‘No’; and he was like, ‘You’re amazing’; and I was like, ‘I know.’”—ILANA (February 13, 2008)

• "Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them."—ILANA (July 14, 2006)

• "Only women can cause traffic jams with supermarket trolleys."—ILANA (February 13, 2008)

• "Vagina monologues or uterus prattle—feminists believe that as long as their insides are being discussed, humanity’s progress is guaranteed."—ILANA (July 14, 2006)

• The Vagina Monologues: "the soliloquies from down under."—ILANA (May 25, 2000)

• On the author of the Vagina Monologues: "In an orifice, I suggest, women like Ms. Ensler have found a suitable interlocutor."—ILANA (May 25, 2000)

• "I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote."—ILANA (August 8, 2007)

• "Is it at all possible that the feminization of society over the past 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind? Could the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature be producing less manly men?"—ILANA (November 2, 2006)

• "The admixture in so many American men of maniacal, missionary militarism and humbug humanitarianism follows decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—at home."—ILANA (March 9, 2005)

• “Feminism has aimed to make man over in the image of woman (a caricature of woman), and woman in the image of man."—ILANA (Everyman: A Men’s Journal, April-June 2005)

• "By deconstructing what it means to be a woman and a man respectively, feminism has helped immeasurably to coarsen the culture."—ILANA (Everyman: A Men’s Journal, April-June 2005)

• Few things are uglier than the 'Girls Gone Wild' of North America—promiscuous, sexually aggressive, but never sensuous; loud, and Nietzschean in their unjustified self-adulation. Feminism has helped sunder softness, femininity, romance, and has thus been an uncivilizing force.”—ILANA (Everyman: A Men’s Journal, April-June 2005)

• Does suppressed manhood in America result in rampant militarism abroad?—ILANA (March 9, 2005)

• "Today’s metrosexuals malign manliness. To the hip, heroism is 'so yesterday.'”—ILANA (March 16, 2007)

CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM

• "It is impossible for a commentator to credibly expatiate upon America, in particular—and the West, in general—without reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition."—ILANA (December 7, 2007)

• "It is impossible to appreciate the greatest composer of all times—Bach—without acknowledging the contribution of his muse—Christianity—to the glory of his music."—ILANA (December 7, 2007)

• “Christian forgiveness is... contingent on the sinner's repentance, and can be granted only by the one sinned against, and not by the various proxies of popularity. Instant expiation flows more from the values of the 1960s than from any doctrinal Christian values.”—ILANA (November 25, 2005)

• "The proper metaphor for the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is that of parent and progeny. Self-anointed Jewish leadership, however, has managed to cast Jews as a mere faction among a multicultural mob, a position Jews (being liberals) love."—ILANA (May 4, 2005)

• “The Catholic Church’s consecration of condoms will have the same overall effect on African AIDS infection rates as its condemnation of sex outside marriage.”—ILANA (April 29, 2005)

POPULAR CULTURE & POPULISM

• "In contemporary America, crying automatically vests the blubberer with moral virtue."—ILANA (July 18, 2008)

• “Imagine what a locust-like cloud of Girls Gone Wild, or bumping and grinding semi-nude spring breakers, would do to Saudi Arabia. Before long, pious Muslim men, the potential Jihadi pool, would succumb to a bacchanalia of debauchery—sex, sloth, and stupidity."—ILANA (May 9, 2008)

• “'Reality' TV regularly lifts from well-deserved obscurity a procession of shameless degenerates."—ILANA (May 9, 2008)

• "Misplaced compassion is common in sentimental, sensation-driven America."—ILANA (April 25, 2008)

• "The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers. Aguilera (Christina) probably sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney outdoes Borodin. For some, this will be faith-inspiring, for others deeply distressing."—ILANA (Hudson Institute, February 7, 2003)

• "The marketplace doesn't adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture. Thus one’s artistic judgments must be animated by something more, if one thinks that there are objective standards by which popular culture or art can be judged"—ILANA (Hudson Institute, February 7, 2003)

• "America's idea of beauty nowadays is of a piece with its idea of good food: cheap and nasty."—ILANA (February 25, 2008)

• "The late Robert Mapplethorpe of the bullwhip-bedecked behind..."—ILANA (February 17, 2007)

• "Postmodern literary analysis is an error—an artificial, political construct that doesn’t render reality but rapes it."—ILANA (December 2007)

• "Dogmatic plebeians are always poised, pitchforks hoisted, to enforce the lowest common denominator."—ILANA (February 4, 2007)

• "In music nowadays, the visual, not the auditory, is the medium."—ILANA (December 10, 2006)

• "The Queen of England has only ever done what is right by her country, whether it knows it or not. Yet the British almost had the elderly lady up for treason because she didn’t tear her frock and roll in ashes when that dodo, Diana, died."—ILANA (May 8, 2006)

RACIAL & MULTICULTURAL ISSUES

• "Blacks have a sense of humor. They have fun with the nasty 'N' word. Etiquette and good breeding dictate that whites steer clear. Self-deprecation doesn’t work when others deprecate you."—ILANA (July 25, 2008)

• "Americans had come out in droves for Barack, not because he’s a black man, but because they think he’s the right man. Yet the journalistic herd never stopped riding the same old racism ass."—ILANA (June 6,2008)

• "Obama gets away with conjecture—he saddles white America with black America’s woes. Grandma, however, has still not acquitted herself for expressing a visceral fear borne of the brutal reality of crime in this country."—ILANA (March 21, 2008)

• "The genteel Obama is nothing like the Rev. Wright, except that they both appear to be overcompensating for not looking more like Kunta Kinte. There’s another small something the two share: a philosophy."—ILANA (March 21, 2008)

• "Race is like stigmata. And Obama plunged deep into those suppurating sores, intent on making white Americans welt-up and bleed at the mention of their alleged sins."—ILANA (March 21, 2008)

• "Michelle Obama’s sentiments seep out from that festering reservoir of racial animosity—the same cesspool wherefrom the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their perennial strikes against honky."—ILANA (February 22, 2008) 

• "If Americans were as good at driving a bargain as they are at coming out in droves for Obama, they’d insist that he insist that his spouse quit smearing them as racists."—ILANA (February 22, 2008)

• "CNN’s Kyra Phillips has led her viewers to believe that dangling a noose—an impolite and impolitic form of expression—is a hate crime; a black man beating a white man to a pulp—not so much. Being maimed or murdered, evidently, doesn’t compare to being maligned."—ILANA (November 23, 2007)

• "Broad statements about aggregate group characteristics, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives as to where to invest scarce and precious resources—to wit, one’s life and property—based on probabilities and generalities."—ILANA (September 15, 2006)

• On racial quotas: "No one has ever demanded that the NBA or the 100-meter dash be made to better reflect the general population."—ILANA (September 9, 2007)

• "This latest Sharpton-and-Jackson-led reign of terror has made Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League look as genteel and sedate as an English squire."—ILANA (April 13, 2007)

• “Race is intricately and ineluctably tied to freedom because we live under a state which circumscribes liberty by enforcing codes of hiring, firing, renting, and money lending, among others."—ILANA (September 15, 2006)

• "Race has become such an issue because we labor under nominal property ownership, and are subject to what is flippantly called political correctness, but is in fact codified and legalized theft and coercion.”—ILANA (September 15, 2006)

• "Race and crime can be discussed as long as the topic is framed in bogus root-causes terms: stick to the Three P’s—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness.”—ILANA (October 1, 2005)

LAW & ETHICS

• "A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. 'Consular rights' are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule—technicalities tarted up as real rights."—ILANA (August 8, 2008)

• "The-state-as-parent is a leftist legal doctrine that has been eagerly embraced by the rigor-mortis riddled Right."—ILANA (April 25, 2008)

• "The Spitzer piranha didn’t give law teeth; he used bad law to bite business to the bone."—ILANA (March 17, 2008)

• "Consistency is the touchstone of truth."—ILANA (March 14, 2008)

• On Plagiarism: "Why borrow what I may be able to best?"—ILANA (February 18, 2008)

• “Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.”—ILANA (March 20, 2002)

• "Can there be any doubt that civil rights laws coerce individuals, often against their better judgment, into involuntary associations?"—ILANA (January 2, 2007)

• "As affable as he is, Judge Roberts regrettably, is no Janice Rogers Brown. Let's hope, at the very least, that Roberts is a Rehnquist."—ILANA (September 15, 2005)

• "Their devotion (and dotage) prevents President Bush’s lickspittles from realizing that he too considers Janice Rogers Brown 'outside the mainstream,' to use the Democrats' demotic line. Let's hope, at the very least, that Roberts is a Rehnquist."—ILANA (September 15, 2005)

• “Restoring the people's 'unalienable rights' may well lie in Jeffersonian interposition and nullification, whereby states beat back the federal occupier by voiding unconstitutional federal laws.”—ILANA (September 24, 2004)

FREE WILL

• To say... that the state’s laws made masses of men and women commit ... crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.”—ILANA (May 3, 2007)

• “In the ‘progressive's’ universe, evil actions don't incriminate, they mitigate. Rather than signify a lack of moral fiber, the criminality of the darling buds of France—her raging Muslim youths— is said to be a symptom of inadequate freebies and fraternité.”—ILANA (November 11, 2005)

• "The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said this of his experience in Auschwitz: 'In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.' You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl. Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”—ILANA (December 29, 2004)

• “In every situation, no matter the constraints, one can exercise some free will, even if it’s only to decide how to respond to a hopeless predicament.”—ILANA (March 20, 2002)

AFRICA

• "The apartheid libel is fast replacing the Nazi and fascist ones, which have been mocked out of meaning."—ILANA (March 14, 2008)

• Hollywood and Africa: "If colonialism was our original sin; capitalism is our cardinal sin. Our voracious system of production, Hollywood do-gooders typically claim, is a zero-sum game. To wit, the standards of living we enjoy come at the expense of Africa's poor."—ILANA (June 10, 2007)

• "The commentariat hasn’t protested the evils of property confiscation [in Zimbabwe] so much as it has bemoaned the fact that the land ended up in the hands of Mugabe's cronies, rather than being redistributed 'fairly' to all black Zimbabweans.—ILANA (March 30, 2007)

• "In democratic South Africa, dispossession is nine-tenths of the law."—ILANA (January 19, 2007)

• "Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl."—ILANA (January 19, 2007)

• “The Catholic Church’s consecration of condoms will have the same overall effect on African AIDS infection rates as its condemnation of sex outside marriage.”—ILANA (April 29, 2005)