Podhoretz and Dickens

It makes me feel better about my own inability to wade through Dickens when I find out that I'm in good company: Norman Podhoretz can't either.

RIP, Jeane Kirkpatrick

Jeanne Kirkpatrick died today. Norman Podhoretz eulogizes,

Having enlisted [in the Cold War] as a young woman, she went on to perform brilliant service on the ideological front, where she stood up magnificently for this country at a time when it was under a relentlessly vicious assault at home no less than abroad. It was as a hero of that war that she made her mark, and it is as a true American hero that she will be remembered.

It was an article by Kirkpatrick in Podhoretz's Commentary magazine ("Dictatorships & Double Standards," November, 1979) that caught Ronald Reagan's eye thus launching Kirkpatrick into the national political and intellectual spotlight.

(Hat tip.)