Arnoud de Borchgrave
I received this recommendation (3 December 2004, 8:16 PM):
I don't know if you read Arnoud deBorchgrave, but I wish you would. He's not a conservative, and if anything he doesn't seem to support President Bush's foreign policies, but he seems very intelligent and well-connected. His last two columns concern the radical islamic movement and are very interesting - and scary.
My response follows:
You needn’t call de Borchgrave “not a conservative” and play up has foreign-policy disagreements with Bush to sell me on his writing; I don’t read (or ignore) writers based on their politics. As a philosophe, I look for sources of knowledge (which makes their accuracy paramount); as a writer, I look for quality of the written word. The style of political commentators’ writing is, unfortunately, almost always better than their thinking.I already read plenty of conservatives’ work, from my local newspaper and the Internet to bookstore magazine racks and the local university library. I have much less reading time than I once did; this has lowered my “bullshit threshold” significantly. Life is too short to fact-check everything, and multiple obvious falsehoods from writers (Cal Thomas and George Will are the most recent examples that come to mind) make it more likely that I’ll pass over their future writings in favor of honest reportage elsewhere. (I do make exceptions for some of the well-known pundits, who – although often biased and inaccurate – I consider sociologically important.)
Anyway, thanks for recommending de Borchgrave; from what I’ve seen so far, he does a decent job.
In turn, I’d like to recommend Andrew Sullivan. He’s a conservative Christian (if that matters to you), a decent writer, and a fairly astute observer. His books (at least “Virtually Normal” and “Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con”) are excellent, and his website has a broad selection of his short writings. His “Federalism Now: More Than Ever” editorial in the current issue of The New Republic is a case in point.