Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:47:31 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Daniel Johnson :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Daniel+Johnson istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/dubious-defense-of-democracy/86832/ Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Are the streets of Vienna echoing to the sound of jackboots again? Two anti-immigrant parties, the Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria, achieved the far Right's best result since 1945 in last weekend's elections. They took 29% of the vote, dwarfing the 18% that the Nazis achieved when they made their breakthrough in Germany in 1930. These are parties that, while avoiding openly neo-Nazi policies, do support symbolic policies such as the legalization of public... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/deafening-silence/86591/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — This time he went too far. If a Western head of state had echoed Adolf Hitler, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did this week, would Europeans have shrugged their shoulders and dragged their feet over sanctions? Yet it seems that the Iranian president is now licensed to blame "Zionists" for everything from the economic crisis to "the whole world order," to threaten Israel's existence and to use words like "cesspool" to describe its people. There was a deafening silence in Britain. Prime Minister... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/self-fulfilling-prophecy/86129/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Are American voters susceptible to blackmail? Ever since Sarah Palin lifted John McCain's campaign, it is becoming increasingly clear that America will be branded racist if Europe does not wake up on November 5 to find that Barack Obama has been elected. Here is what Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian had to say last week: "If [the election] is deemed to have been about race — that Obama was rejected because of his colour — the world's verdict will be harsh." His view is that the... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/how-palin-can-save-the-world/85636/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — What has Sarah Palin to do with the end of the world? I am not thinking of her former pastor, Ed Kalnins, who reportedly believes that the "End of Days" is nigh. Governor Palin takes a practical, rather than an apocalyptic view, of the future. It is enough to say that she has had five children, and that her son Track is about to serve in Iraq. As it happens, the global press has been in an apocalyptic mood this week. Yesterday's switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, the giant... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-silent-majority/85168/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — From the patronizing, snobbish, misogynist, bigoted, and, at times, downright malicious flood of bile emitted by the transatlantic intelligentsia over the past week, you would never have guessed that Sarah Palin is the most interesting figure to have emerged so far in this presidential campaign. What you might correctly surmise, however, is that liberal columnists from Maureen Dowd of the New York Times to Alice Miles of the London Times have a real problem with the very fact that... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-iron-lady-at-twilight-on-living-longer/84699/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — So now it is official: like her late friend and comrade in arms Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher is suffering from Alzheimer's. According to her daughter Carol, dementia was first diagnosed eight years ago and the former prime minister's condition has been deteriorating gradually ever since. It was generally known that Lady Thatcher, 82, had suffered a number of minor strokes, but until now her memory loss — which sometimes makes it hard for her to finish sentences — had been hidden... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-new-insecurity/84356/ Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In the last few weeks, the world has suddenly become a much more dangerous place. Two events in remote countries have come to together to force the West to reassess its situation: the Georgian crisis and the fall of Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf. I call this change of mood the New Insecurity. It will have an impact on the domestic politics of every democracy, including America's presidential election in November. Like other commentators, I believe that John McCain's claim to office has... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-cardinal-error/83838/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The Russian invasion of Georgia is a damning indictment of Western, and especially European, diplomacy. Though denied membership of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, Georgia cannot be denied its geographical and historical membership of the continent and the civilization of Europe. The Georgians are now paying a terrible price for the failure of European leaders to learn the most important lesson of Europe's catastrophic history in the last century: the lesson of... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/britain-after-brown/83347/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — I am not a betting man, but if I were, I would hazard $100 that Britain will have a new prime minister before America has a new president. By the time that either Senator McCain or Senator Obama is settling into the White House next January, the chances are that the new resident at Number 10 Downing Street will already have booked his or her flight to Washington D.C. Hold on a minute, I hear you saying — hasn't there only just been a change of prime minister? That Scottish guy, the one... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/borrowing-from-the-brits/82939/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Caught up in election fever, I wonder whether the Washington elite will notice a fine article in the current Weekly Standard by Fred Barnes about the British Conservative revival. The tongue-in-cheek title — "First, Lose Three Straight Elections" — belies what actually is a more cheering message for the Republicans. Mr. Barnes spent some time in London interviewing a wide range of people, and his conclusion is that American conservatives can benefit from lessons that took the British Tories... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/arresting-karadzic-mark-of-cain/82532/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST This week's news of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who is accused of the genocide of many thousands of Bosnian Muslims, prompted me to reflect on the baleful presence in history of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called "radical evil." What did Kant have in mind? In the absence of the legal or moral constraints of civilization, mankind descends into barbarism with terrifying swiftness. Radical evil is, by definition, ineradicable — it is rooted deep within us, beyond... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/petraeus-for-president/82053/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The New Yorker has achieved the impossible: it has united Barack Obama and John McCain. Both camps are competing to outdo one another in denouncing the magazine's cover illustration, which shows Senator Obama dressed in robes and head gear normally associated with Islamist-type radicals and Michelle Obama with an Afro and dressed in fatigues like a 1970s radical with a sub-machine gun slung on her shoulder celebrating their takeover of the White House by burning the Stars and Stripes. The... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obamas-grand-tour/81542/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Even before November's presidential election, Barack Obama already is being treated as the most important person on earth. The mere prospect of his appearance in London on July 18 — as a brief stopover on a tour that will, we are assured, take him to Paris, Berlin, and Israel, and very likely to Iraq and Afghanistan — has the London press salivating. Mr. Obama's second coming — he spent 24 hours in Europe a decade ago — promises to be less a visit than a visitation. It does, however... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/healthier-than-europe-is/81298/ Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON -- Why is American democracy in much better health than its European counterpart? The widely-noted excitement generated by the Democratic primaries shows no sign of abating, now that the presidential campaign proper is underway, and 2008 promises to be an even more colorful contest than those of 2000 or 2004, both of which were hard-fought and close-run. The minority view, that President Bush's victories were illegitimate or that the system was fatally flawed, never prevailed. In Europe... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/step-forward-tony-blair/80754/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — This past week, the case of Robert Mugabe versus the free world has moved onto a different level. First the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of the presidential election and sought refuge in the Dutch embassy. With this collapse of the last vestiges of democracy, the full horror of the campaign of torture, murder, and intimidation being waged by Mr. Mugabe's Zanu P.F. party became clearer than ever before. Belatedly, international opinion began to mobilize. The United... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-man-who-wasnt-there/80269/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes a gesture of reconciliation is not as salutary as a custard pie in the face. Europe has done its damnedest to ignore the valedictory visit of President Bush, but it could not ignore the Irish referendum. By a substantial majority, Ireland, one of the smallest of the European Union's 27 member states, has driven a coach and horses through the Lisbon Treaty, which itself emerged from the wreckage of the ill-fated European Constitution that was torpedoed by the French and Dutch... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-bush-europe-will-miss/79823/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — On the day that the president of America flew in to Slovenia to begin his last European tour, the BBC was much more interested in the visit of Donald Trump to Scotland, where the tycoon faces opposition to his plan for a golf resort on an unspoilt stretch of the North Sea coastline. Americans and Europeans may be impatient for a new, younger president who is more to their taste, but Mr. Trump is hardly a spring chicken himself. The fact that the leader of the free world receives so... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/straws-in-the-wind-the-atlantic-alliance/79357/ Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Will senior members of the Bush administration ever set foot on British territory again? I ask this question in all seriousness, and it could well apply to future American administrations too. Last week an attempt was made to arrest John Bolton, while the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security was speaking about his memoirs before a large audience at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, which is held at... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/cultural-amnesia-anew/78811/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — This week my wife took our four teenagers and me to see the newest Indiana Jones flick, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." The movie has a promising beginning set in the Cold War, in which the KGB and the FBI compete to become the principal villains. But no sooner has Harrison Ford left America for the lost world of the Peruvian jungle, than Steven Spielberg takes leave of his cinematic senses. We are to believe that the Incas worshipped aliens from outer space who... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/frankenstein-science/76862/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — The name of Frankenstein should not be lightly invoked in the context of science. But the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill, which the British Parliament has been debating this week, really does deserve the accusation of "Frankenstein science" that has been levelled against it — most notably by the Archbishop of St. Andrews in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien. The bill permits the creation of hybrid animal-human embryos and the selection of embryos to serve as "saviour siblings,"... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/cool-look-at-global-warming-for-america/76491/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Watching the U.S. election from afar, it has been instructive to see how the issue of global warming has collided with the economic crisis. Crudely, the question of Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama could come down to whether you care more about gas prices than you do about the green agenda. It is not clear that the Gores and Schwarzeneggers are winning the argument, now that tough choices must be made. But whoever becomes president, environmental sceptics will have a tougher time even... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/restoring-democracy-in-britain/76109/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Boris Johnson, the new conservative mayor of London, owes me a drink. When he first entered politics nearly a decade ago, I wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph (for which we both then worked) in which I predicted that he might well be a future prime minister. Everybody mocked the very idea that a man who had cultivated a Bertie Wooster image and regularly appeared on TV comedy shows could ever be more than a political maverick. Now, as Irwin Stelzer has pointed out, Boris — as he is... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/americas-moral-authority/75681/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Anti-Americanism is not only the world's most pernicious and ubiquitous ideology — it is also the most tenacious. In fact, it has taken on some aspects of a religion. Richard Dawkins thinks God is a delusion. He is mistaken, of course: people are deluded when they worship idols. But the worst idol of our time is anti-Americanism. Its devotees will fit any facts into their all-embracing faith in the unique wickedness of the Americans — the people that, of all the nations on earth, least... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/character-assassination-of-gordon-brown/75225/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Americans fear assassination; Brits fear character assassination. Like most baby-boomers, I remember 1968 — but not for students and hippies, flower power and anti-Vietnam War protests. No, the two things I remember most clearly are: Russian tanks snuffing out the Prague spring, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. At the time, the death of Kennedy loomed much larger than that of King; Today, my children study the civil rights movement in detail but have... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/happy-to-be-in-america/74849/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — The pope who already has made such a huge impact in America is, as even those most ignorant or hostile toward him must have noticed by now, a shy and scholarly octogenarian. Though he speaks fluent and idiomatic English, the former Joseph Ratzinger has a strong German accent. So he does not fit any of the categories into which celebrities normally go. Worse still, he is inevitably compared to his heroic and highly charismatic predecessor, John Paul II, whose canonization is imminent. A... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tony-blair-does-god/74482/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — One of the most obvious transatlantic contrasts is the role of religion in politics. In American politics, religion is usually overt; in Europe, it is usually covert. In America, a candidate who parades his piety may hope to be rewarded; in Europe, that candidate would more likely be punished. That, at least, is the received wisdom. It lies behind the petulant response of Tony Blair's spokesman, Alastair Campbell, when the then prime minister's faith came under the spotlight: "We don't... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tale-of-two-cities-2008-04-03/74103/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — You can tell a lot about the differences between New York and London by comparing their mayors. Just as New York would never elect a socialist, let alone a corrupt one, so London would never elect a capitalist, even an honest one. New York is proud to be represented by one of its wealthiest and most philanthropic citizens, Michael Bloomberg, whose fortune is founded on one of the world's most innovative media companies and who does not even need to draw his salary. London's Kenneth... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/italian-doll-in-britain/73735/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — In France, it is fashionable to sneer at President Sarkozy, who is supposedly too authoritarian yet not presidential enough. Private life has eclipsed public policy, say his detractors, forgetting that when he came to office last year they warned that these same policies might provoke a revolt, or even a revolution. In Britain, where Mr. Sarkozy is on his first state visit, they can't get enough of him — and especially of her. As the Sarkozy show hit town, Carla Bruni inevitably stole... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/londons-no-go-zones/73320/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — St. George's-in-the-East is the most exuberantly baroque of the many churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early 18th century to adorn London's East End. Its white towers rise like one of Disney's fairytale castles above the surrounding squalor of Shadwell. Just a mile or two away from the fabulous wealth of the City of London, Shadwell is one of the poorest places in Europe. During the 1990s I used to walk through the churchyard on my way to and from work at the Times in... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/reawake-britains-patriotism/72423/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Prince Harry was a dysfunctional younger son born into a dysfunctional family, with his father's looks and his mother's brains. Until recently, his only achievement was notoriety, as the kid brother who dressed up in a Nazi uniform for a fancy dress party and brawled with paparazzi outside nightclubs. Then, unexpectedly, he had heroism thrust upon him. Until the Drudge Report last week broke the strict press embargo on reporting his presence on the front line — a breach which doubtless boosted... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/nation-building-in-kosovo/72020/ Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Serbian attacks on the American consulate in Banja Luka on Tuesday and the burning of the American embassy in Belgrade last week were ugly but pitiful gestures of spite and impotence. But they were also reminders that nations rarely declare independence without violence of some sort. In the case of Kosovo, the birth pangs have so far been remarkably mild; but that is largely because the conflict between Serbs and Kosovars was decided nine years ago by North Atlantic Treaty Organization's... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/blair-for-president/71628/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — Do you ever turn a blind eye to things you don't want to see? The phrase originated with Admiral Horatio nelson, the greatest British naval hero. At the battle of Copenhagen in 1801 he put his telescope to his blind eye in order to ignore a signal from his commander giving him permission to abandon the action. "I have the right to be blind sometimes," he told his flag captain, and proceeded to win a famous victory. More commonly, however, turning a blind eye has less desirable... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/faith-to-have-or-have-not/71364/ Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — A couple of years ago, I had an encounter with the Archbishop of Cant, as his critics privately call him It was at the British Academy, where His Grace had been lecturing a roomful of historians on the subject of "the other" — a pretentious way of referring to remote historical figures, which segued into a disquisition on how the British ought to treat Muslims. According to Archbishop Williams, it was quite wrong to impose Judaeo-Christian cultural norms on "the other" in the name of a... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/putins-new-cold-war/70910/ Thu, 7 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — So you thought the Cold War was over, did you? Welcome to Vladimir Putin's new Russian Empire. Using the wealth generated by soaring oil and gas prices, the Kremlin has intimidated its former satellites in Eastern Europe, while treating most of America's North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies as if they too could be pushed around. Russian revanchism for the supposed humiliations of the Yeltsin era in the 1990s drives this agenda. President Putin calls the collapse of the Soviet... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/its-not-about-the-economy/70514/ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The Florida primary leaves Americans with a clear choice — but it isn't a choice between Republicans and Democrats. Watching the race from across the Atlantic, it seems to me that the real divide is between those candidates who think the main issue is the economy and those who think it is the war. In the former camp are not only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but also Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. In the latter camp, now that the Giuliani campaign is over, only John McCain is left. The... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/flawed-hero/70133/ Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Last Saturday I went searching for Bobby Fischer. That is to say, I went, like Marcel Proust, in search of lost time. I belong to the generation of adolescents who were inspired by the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match in Reykjavik, but I gave up playing the game seriously more than 30 years ago. I found what I was looking for in Bush Hall, an old music hall near where I live in West London. A chess tournament was taking place, played at lightning "blitz" speed — so fast that when each round began the... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/himmelfarb-for-oxford/69680/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST What is it about Victorian England that simultaneously fascinates and repels us? The other day I took my 10-year-old daughter, Agatha, on the bus and subway in Victorian dress. She was going on a trip with her classmates to the Ragged School, where poor children once received a rudimentary education and which is now a museum. It was all great fun for Aggie, but when I asked her if she would like to have lived in those days, she reacted with horror. "No, of course not, Dad!" The image of the... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/kenya-connection/69273/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST As he reminded us again after losing narrowly to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Barack Obama likes to evoke Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. We must all hope that, like King's, Mr. Obama's dream is "deeply rooted in the American dream." But before giving him the keys to the White House, Americans might like to know a little more about the content of Mr. Obama's dream. Let me propose an unlikely place to start looking: Kenya. Even in the midst of the primaries, the horrific... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/benazir-bhutto-i-knew/68862/ Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Benazir Bhutto fell victim to the murderous misogyny of Islamofascism. About 32 years ago, I met Benazir Bhutto at Oxford. We didn't hit it off straight away. I made a fatuous but innocent remark about how our two fathers — hers Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan, mine Paul Johnson, historian and journalist — represented the pen and the sword. "My father doesn't represent the sword," she retorted, eyes flashing and nostrils flaring. "He brought peace and democracy to... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/church-without-a-narrative/68626/ Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism has opened a can of worms. The only surprise about Tony Blair's reception into the Catholic Church on Friday was that it took him so long. His wife Cherie is a cradle Catholic and throughout the 10 years that he was prime minister, Mr. Blair attended Sunday Mass, with or without his family, wherever he was in the world. He was mildly rebuked by the late Cardinal Hume for receiving communion in Catholic churches while still an Anglican, but he did not seem... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/answering-the-call/68390/ Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The crisis in the Sudanese province of Darfur is usually reported as if it were something new. In fact, the Arab Islamists who are committing genocide there have also been committing genocide in other regions of Sudan over decades, killing some two million Christians in the process. But marauding Arabs have preyed on East Africa for centuries, as the story of Josephine Bakhita demonstrates. She was born in Darfur in 1869. At age nine, she was kidnapped by Arab slave-traders. The experience so... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/on-waterboarding-lesser-of-two-evils/68036/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Did CIA interrogation of Al Qaeda terrorists amount to torture? And can torture ever be justified? Can the end ever justify the means? And can any end justify torture? This controversy, which has troubled Americans and Europeans ever since the war on terror began, was reignited this week. The CIA admits that it destroyed a video of an interrogation of an Al Qaeda terrorist named Abu Zubaida. Speaking on ABC News, a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, gave the first account of how he and his... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/teddy-problem-in-britain/67582/ Thu, 6 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Until a class of seven-year-old Sudanese children decided to call their teddy bear Mohammed, the Koran had been rarely consulted on the subject of cuddly toys. Apart from its connection with the eponymous bear-hunting president Teddy Roosevelt, there was nothing political, let alone blasphemous, about the teddy bear. On November 25, Gillian Gibbons, a kindly Englishwoman in her 50s who was teaching in Khartoum, found herself arrested for allowing her students to "insult" the name of the Prophet... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/howards-end/67184/ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The defeat last weekend of Australia's second longest-serving prime minister, John Howard, was a reminder of just how unforgiving democracy can be. One person who does not need reminding is his British counterpart, Gordon Brown, whose crisis-ridden government is already being written off almost before it has started. After more than a decade of conspicuously stable and able leadership of his country, Mr. Howard may have felt that the voters owed him something. Why else did he risk running for a... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fatherless-brown/66909/ Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Do children need fathers? This is the question at the heart of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, which has sparked huge controversy in Britain because it proposes to give same sex couples the same rights as married parents. Gay rights campaigners see this bill as merely the removal of one more form of discrimination, but Christians and others see it as enshrining a radical new principle which spells the end of the traditional family's unique legal status. At present, when a lesbian... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/morman-mailer-or-hate-him/66481/ Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST One should not speak ill of the dead, but I shall make an exception for Norman Mailer. This is not a matter of politics. Arthur Miller, who occupied a comparable position in the canon of American literature, supported many of the same causes, but I found him eminently courteous, especially toward women. Mailer, unlike Miller, tried to raise misogyny to an art form. This is the man who made the case for feminism better than any feminist. He spent the first part of his career brutalizing women... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/reclaiming-heroism/66077/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST First, something good made in England: a film about America which I can recommend without reservation. Not only does this documentary betray no trace of anti-Americanism: it displays American values in a positive but unsentimental way that is rare to find in Hollywood. "In the Shadow of the Moon," directed by the Briton David Sington, tells the story of the Apollo missions in the words of many of the surviving astronauts — there is no narrative, just interviews interwoven with contemporary... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/for-the-sake-of-oil/65661/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Buckingham Palace, October 30: "The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia today commenced a State Visit in London to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh." The Queen did more than just roll out the red carpet for King Abdullah: as well as the 21-gun-salute, the Household Cavalry and the rest, she invited two dozen of his family to stay at the Palace and another hundred or so to a lavish banquet. But these princes were merely a fraction of the... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/new-islamists/65251/ Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST History never quite repeats itself, but — like a bad remake of a great movie — the news sometimes feels very old. That sense of déjà vu is hard to escape in Europe and the Middle East, because these are regions with long recorded histories, where almost anything that happens has some kind of precedent. It is easy to dismiss the significance of events with a weary shrug of the shoulders: "We've been here before." Easy, but wrong. So, for example, it would be easy to underestimate the importance... DANIEL JOHNSON http://www.nysun.com/opinion/dropping-the-a-word/64800/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST We all want our leaders to be statesmanlike, but to be an "elder statesman" is political death. It is a strange paradox of western societies that, as the average age of voters increases year by year, we seem to expect those we elect to be, or at least to pretend to be, ever younger. In other fields, age and experience are properly valued. Take literature: Doris Lessing has just won the Nobel Prize aged 88, while the two other living British literature laureates, V.S. Naipaul and Harold Pinter...