Meet Roman Genn, an escapee from the Soviet Union, who knows what freedom is all about.

BC: Some of your pieces, such as the clever depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill that you just alluded to, rely heavily on the viewer having a background knowledge of history. Does this fact limit your commercial appeal? It seems to me that the general population is about as interested in history as they are in quadratic equations.

Roman Genn: Yes, Sir Winston's life and achievements are undoubtedly less interesting than Ms. Hilton's current legal predicament. As Liddell Hart put it to J.M. Scammell, “I've done enough knight-errantry of forlorn heroes to know the difficulty. If I had done Hannibal instead of Scipio, or Lee instead of Sherman, I should have sold double or treble.” Pity he doesn't know we still read him.

[Update on Wednesday morning, the anniversary of our declaration of independence from England]

I hope he's wrong about this, but fear he's right:

...it is my deepest belief (and here I differ from my fellow conservatives) that modern democracies are incapable of fighting effectively and wining a war of any duration against nonwestern opponents. (Notable exceptions being, what Bernard Lewis calls Kuwaitus interruptus and the Israeli wars), reasons being primarily, the complete lack of understanding of ideological warfare, as well as the inability to control the home front. And yet no lessons have been learned and no changes have been made. It is our great fortune thus far that our current adversaries do not employ Mansteins and Guderians, but that may very well change, so who knows? All of this, plus other minor things, lead me to believe that this is going be a long and interesting century...

A Libertarian Cartoonist

We need more of them.

The ironic thing about ideological warfare is that so many of the Leftists fighting it firmly believe that it doesn't exist. One of the first principles of the Leftist ideology is that it isn't an ideology, but is in fact the complete and fundamental truth.

That's why it's so difficult to defeat, because who can argue with The TRUTH?

Oh, and memo to the guy sitting next to me: Okay, biting your nails loudly in public is disgusting, but for God's sake don't smack your lips as you swallow the chewed-off bits.

One of the first principles of the Leftist ideology is that it isn't an ideology, but is in fact the complete and fundamental truth.

That's the first principle of any ideology really. Without belief that you hold to the truth, you have no cause to debate. That's lefty, righty, and in the centery.