R.S.V.P.

“Thomas Sowell says the question for this election is not whether you or your candidate is Republican or Democrat but whether you’re ‘serious’ or ‘frivolous.’ A lot of Americans, and not just their sorry excuse for a professional press corps, are in the mood for frivolity.

It’s like going to the theater. Do you really want to sit through that searing historical drama from the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or would you rather be at the sex comedy next door?

In the 1990s, Americans opted for the sex comedy—or so they thought. But in reality the searing historical drama carried on; it was always there, way off in the background, behind the yuk-it-up narcissist trouser-dropper staggering around downstage. The mood of the times was to kick the serious stuff down the road so we could get back to President Lounge Act offering to feel our pain.

With North Korea, the people delegated to kick the can a few years ahead—Madeleine Albright, Jimmy Carter are now back, writing self-congratulatory op-eds about their genius and foresight.

Not at all.

Albright’s much-touted ‘agreement’ was a deal whereby Washington agreed to prop up a flailing basket-case state in order to enable it to buy enough time to become a serious destabilizing threat to its neighbors and beyond.

Many of our present woes—not least Iran—derive explicitly from the years when Carter embodied the American ‘superpower’ as a smiling eunuch...

Life isn’t a night on Broadway where you can decide you’re not in the mood for ‘Henry V’ and everyone seems to be having a much better time at ‘La Cage Aux Foley’.”

—Mark Steyn