Recommended Reading

Andy McCarthy: Cutting Their Support
"For example, under American criminal law, circa 1993, a successful bombing could be punished with a term of life imprisonment and, once capital punishment was revived under federal law in the mid-1990s, by execution if the bombing had caused any deaths. The criminal code, however, contained no specific provision for bombing conspiracy. Thus, if a group plotted a bombing but was interrupted by effective law enforcement, the plotters had to be charged under the catch-all federal conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. ( 371), which punishes an agreement to violate any criminal statute with a maximum five-year penalty (and no requirement that the judge impose any minimum term of incarceration at all). Such a term was grossly insufficient for a conspiracy to kill of tens of thousands."

Jonah Goldberg: B16 & Left-Wing Dreams
That said, there's still a good lesson for the American right and left to draw from Ratzinger's election. One of the most interesting aspects of his story is that he was, by all accounts, a liberal until the year 1968. But during student riots at Tübingen University, where he was teaching, he looked into the soul of the New Left and saw a deep void. "For so many years," he said in an interview years ago, "the 1968 revolution and the terror created — in the name of Marxist ideas — a radical attack on human freedom and dignity, a deep threat to all that is human."

John Derbyshire: Noether's Novelty
"Göttingen, though liberal by the standards of Wilhelmine universities, still balked at putting a woman on the faculty. David Hilbert, a broad-minded man who judged mathematicians by nothing but their talent, fought valiantly for Noether, but without success. Some of the arguments on both sides have become legendary among mathematicians. The faculty: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the University and find that they are expected to learn at the feet of a woman?" Hilbert: "I do not see that the sex of a candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent [that is, a lecturer supported from fees paid to him by students]. After all, we are a university, not a bathing establishment." (Aber meine Herren, wir sind doch in einer Universität und nicht in einer Badeanstalt. You can't help but like Hilbert.)"

A new Radio Derb, too.