The Monster Strikes.

We went to the 2nd round of the PGA Championship at Oakland Hill CC. The course played brutally, featuring kudzu-like rough and unforgiving greens with tough hole placements. They will have to squeegee the blood from the 17th green (our base of operations for the late afternoon), with its only Friday birdie coming from Anthony Kim's chipshot. Sergio Garcia watched his teeshot to the left side of the green disintegrate with a four-putt five for the hole! The International Red Cross has intervened, and the course masters may acquiesce with more favorable hole locations for Saturday.

The Truth That Flows.

Jonah Goldberg thinks Mr. Obama is the Postmodern Candidate:

The Obama campaign has a postmodern feel to it because more than anything else, it seems to be about itself. Its relationship to reality is almost theoretical. Sure, the campaign has policy proposals, but they are props to advance the narrative of a grand movement existing in order to be a movement galvanized around the singular ideal of movement-ness. Obama's followers are, to borrow from David Hasselhoff — another American hugely popular in Germany — hooked on a feeling. "We are the ones we have been waiting for!" Well, of course you are.

Go watch The Candidate - we've seen this before!

A Fashion in Thinking.

Without censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accomodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.

- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "A World Split Apart", 1978.

In Case You Missed It...

John McCain appeared at the Urban League last week, fielding questions from a skeptical audience. We can't wait until Mr. Obama makes his appearance at the YAF convention!

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008.

The great writer who chronicled the terror of the modern totalitarian state has passed away in Moscow. R.I.P.