the F rant

I’ve just purchased and read “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed The World“, by editor-at-large of the National Review, John O’Sullivan.

It is a GREAT read. Do yourself a favour and buy it, kids. The Conservative Book Service says:

Who brought down the Soviet Union? According to liberals [lefties], it collapsed of its own, with an assist from the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev. But this explanation not only scants the role of Western anti-communists – it implies they had exaggerated its dangers all along. Now, John O’Sullivan gives credit where it’s due. The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister is a sweeping, dramatic account of how President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher together took on the most powerful and aggressive foe that liberty has ever known — and won.

O’Sullivan begins by reminding us that when these three figures entered the world stage, Communism — far from imploding — was on the march around the globe. Jimmy Carter and other Western leaders had pursued a defeatist policy of “dialogue” and appeasement. But Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope (who, as a Pole, knew Communist tyranny first-hand), would have none of it – and thus began one of the great moral-political battles of will that history has ever known.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

A VERY cool editorial from The Daily Reckoning

A bit…

The founders of the United States of America distrusted democracy so much they designed a whole government to prevent it. Not once does the word ‘democracy’ appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is basically an elaborate restriction on what the voters can do. There are different branches of the federal government, expected to offset each other’s power. And there’s the Bill of Rights itself, limiting the power of the central government – no matter how many people vote.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business