Roger Kimball is publisher, editor and brilliant taskmaster for the magazine, New Criterion. He is also the publisher of Encounter Books, known for scholarly but eminently readable contributions to the literature of modern conservatism. He is a most compelling speaker and conversationalist. Here he is in a 2013 discussion.

With no holds barred, Elliott Abrams examines what he designates as the “Citizen of the World Foreign Policy” of President Obama with, inevitably, some special focus on Syria. Abrams, formerly on the Middle East beat for the State Department and the National Security Council, is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In today’s episode, Victor Davis Hanson joins us once again. The Middle East is seething with trouble, discord, danger and the inhumane murder of civilians in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt.  So what else is new? Perhaps the inadequate and conflicted  responses of the major governments looking on. Or, is it perhaps time for them to go “neo-isolationist?” We discuss this with Victor who, in our judgement, is the wisest and most strongly spoken of the “realpolitikers.”

Joseph Epstein sees through all of our foibles, affectations, eccentricities and higher-level stupidities including his own (though he is very light on the last!). Here he is in a rambling 2013 conversation which, like all his contributions to this most basic human art form, delights, illuminates and provokes. Simple impression: If Dr. Samuel Johnson were with us today, this is probably what he would sound like.

We talked once again with Stanley Kurtz, at the time a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute and recent author of Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. We talk with Kurtz about his book, President Obama’s attempts at “regionalism,” and even reminisce about our mutual run-in with the Obama campaign back in 2008.