Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:26:00 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Conrad Black :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Conrad+Black istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/moral-of-the-story/86307/ Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The fate of the giant insurance company, American International Group, is a tale with a clear moral. Maurice "Hank" Greenberg built this company up from a storefront during a period of 40 years, turning it into the greatest insurer in the world, doing business successfully, and often as a pioneer, all over the world. Elliot Spitzer, as New York State attorney general, said on television that he thought Mr. Greenberg had violated criminal statutes, which has never been alleged since, formally or... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-importance-of-2008/85336/ Mon, 8 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The policy and ideological differences between the Unites States's Democrats and Republicans this year are greater than in all the elections since the Second World War, except for Barry Goldwater's quixotic challenge to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society in 1964; George McGovern's kamikaze mission against Richard Nixon in 1972; and Ronald Reagan's release of Jimmy Carter to spend more time with his family in 1980. The differences over taxes, the economy, and medical care are profound, and very... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-shape-of-things-to-come/83123/ Mon, 4 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Robert Kagan is an eminent and provocative strategic commentator and one of the chief authors of the successful Iraqi "surge" which has redeemed that conflict from the appalling fiasco it appeared to be only 18 months ago. In his recently published book, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams" (Knopf, 128 pages, $19.95), he rightly debunks Francis Fukuyama and other millennial forecasters of the permanent and universal triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. But he goes too far in... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/escape-from-nixonland/80270/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST There has been a good deal of comment on "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein, a pastiche of journalistic highlights of the tumultuous years between Lyndon Johnson's immense landslide over Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Richard Nixon's comparable burial of George McGovern in 1972. The country effectively rejected the right for the center-left, and then the left for the center-right, similar responses, bracketing the heavy Vietnam involvement. The book is unrigorously and almost unrelievedly opinionated... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/five-minutes-that-saved-france/79538/ Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST There has been an outpouring of sentimental celebration in French and other European intellectual circles over the 40th anniversary of the general strike and student uprising in France in 1968. This is a nostalgic reenactment of the leftist ritual of self-indulgent historical myth-making. Forty years ago, Charles de Gaulle was observing the tenth anniversary of his government, and of his (Fifth) Republic. He had proposed a referendum in the reorganization of local government and university... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/americas-european-lesson/76415/ Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST With the tremendous razzmatazz of the U.S. nomination campaigns, some important political events in other countries have been under-publicized. Startling is the imminent adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon, intended to transform Western and Central Europe into a functioning confederacy. And so is the decisive defeat of the left in the London mayoral elections and the Italian general elections. The treaty of Lisbon, which would substantially amend the legal underpinnings of the European Union... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/iraqs-competing-fortunes/75413/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Observers on all sides of the conflict in Iraq can agree that it is difficult to judge the real course of competing fortunes there. The believability of the U.S. military has been damaged by the public relations blitz of Pentagon spokesmen and kindred spirits in the conservative think tanks. Many of the war's current advocates were among those who predicted five years ago that invading American soldiers would be greeted like arriving tourists in Oahu. In one of the most horrible military... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/showtime/73785/ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Heartfelt thanks for the thousands of messages of good will I have received from all parts of Canada and the U.S. and many other countries, over my present confinement. * * * Even those who are habitually dismissive of the U.S. political process seem to be entranced by this fierce struggle between Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama. No other country has recently fielded such a formidable trio of contenders for its highest office, and they are a good deal more prepossessing than George W. Bush... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/my-faith-in-american-justice/72187/ Mon, 3 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Conrad Black, a founding director of The New York Sun, is scheduled to report today to federal prison in Florida, to begin serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. At the trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago, he was acquitted of nine of the 13 charges against him; he is appealing the convictions. The following dispatch was sent yesterday. * * * It is a terrible thing to be falsely accused, and wrongly convicted, even of a fraction of the original... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/on-the-campaign-trail-only-in-america/71134/ Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST In the campaign so far, the Democrats have raised $286 million and the Republicans $218 million, and both are passing the hat with revivalist fervor. Richard Nixon's daughter, Tricia, seems to have pulled more votes campaigning with Senator McCain than the Kennedy family did for Mr. Obama. Hillary Clinton waxed Mr. Obama and his supporters, the Kennedys, and the Democrats' last presidential nominee, John Kerry, in their home state of Massachusetts. Surely, the Kennedy mystique and the bunk... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/world-class-chump/70294/ Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST As the forces of recession stoke up, traditional signs and indicators are crowding the masts like warning flags at a shark-infested beach. As usually happens at this stage in the economic cycle, the proud façade of some of the great, stone-faced banks are vibrating and showering passers-by with debris from the upper stories. Societe Generale, France's second bank, suddenly announced that it had been defrauded of $7.2 billion. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, which has been intermittently... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/genius-move/69524/ Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The New Hampshire primary was a great triumph of American democracy. The Granite State, humbled and preemptively disencumbered of its influence and credibility the entire overstuffed talking-shop of American political commentators. They almost all announced the political demise of the Clintons, whom most of them had strenuously supported for 15 years, after Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama by a few thousand votes in a sub-primary delegate-selection process in Iowa. This state has 2% of the... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/kissinger-buckley-and-me/68169/ Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST For two years, I have avoided mention in this column of my legal travails, and only vary that this week, in matters already on the public record, at the request of the commissioning editor. Throughout these five challenging years, most people whom my wife Barbara and I really considered to be friends have behaved as friends. My late father, who died more than 30 years ago, and was a very intelligent man, if somewhat eccentric in his later years, admired William F. Buckley and Henry Kissinger... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/so-foul-a-sky-clears-not-without-a-storm/42515/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Almost every factual assertion in the first New York Post excerpts from Tom Bower's malicious novel about my wife and me is false, (and many are defamatory in Britain), except for the quotation from my e-mails to him, predicting that he would write a libelous onslaught, and declining his repeated, fawning pleas for an interview. There is dishonesty even here, as Bower claims that I predicted "stardom" for myself at my trial. I referred to our defense as "spectacular" not any performance of mine... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/maybe-next-time/36559/ Mon, 24 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST The rush in the United Nations to demand a ceasefire in Lebanon and the interposition of peace-keepers is increasingly seen as a bankrupt policy. There are already 2,000 peace-keepers on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Like other peace-keepers, they are not needed when there is peace, and are ineffective when there is war. The spectacle of the uninvited and well-meaning Kofi Annan, erupting into the G-8 meeting at St. Petersburg and invoking the same tired, nonsensical formula for a problem that... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/undocumented-dilemma/31997/ Tue, 2 May 2006 00:00:00 EST For many years until quite recently, it was impossible to discuss American politics with Europeans without one of them knowingly stating that the United States was circling the drain. America was going to become a non-white country in 20 years or so, and be pillaged by proliferating Latin Americans. The more enlightened version of this view was that pigmentation didn't matter per se, but that the unstoppable influx of Latin Americans would turn the United States into a dysfunctional country... CONRAD BLACK http://www.nysun.com/opinion/yalta-and-roosevelts-hope/13505/ Mon, 9 May 2005 00:00:00 EST In his otherwise stirring and eloquent remarks at Riga on the weekend, President Bush, as has been his habit when in Eastern Europe, revived the Yalta Myth about the origins of the Iron Curtain and the post-war division of Europe. He said that "the Yalta Agreement followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable." Yalta's Declarations on Liberated Europe and on Poland...