THE POINT OF IT ALL by Charles Krauthammer

I finished reading THE POINT OF IT ALL.  It is good.  The following is extracted from it.

Not too many people can point to a specific day when they sat down with a book and got up cured of the stupidities of youth.  I can.  I was 19.  The book was Four Essays on Liberty.  The author was Isaiah Berlin.

 Four Essays on Liberty is his great argument for pluralism.

Leo Strauss observed that Berlin's position made pluralism - the denial of one supreme, absolute value - the supreme, absolute value.

Chapter 11 - CHURCH AND STATE is particularly good/relevant/whatever.

It's subtitle is "Civil Religion -- and No Religion

Outside the Beltway

A few weeks ago Gloria Borger on CNN said “We don’t want to re-litigate that.”  At the time I thought some of us do.

I moved inside the Beltway in 1968.  I came from Madison, Wisconsin, a liberal city in a conservative state.  I remember thinking of Alexandria, Virginia, as the location where a member of the American Nazi party lived.

I moved outside the beltway in 1997.  With the Monica Lewinski scandal and Bush vs Gore in 2000, my ABC Nightly News was almost the same as when I was inside the Beltway.

Outside the Beltway has two parts

:

1.       Inside the US

2.       Outside the US

Inside the US/Outside the Beltway may have litigated along with Inside the Beltway.  Some people, particularly conservatives, may well want to re-litigate lots of stuff.

Outside the US/Outside the Beltway did not litigate along with Inside the Beltway.  Inside the Beltway people tend to forget that.