Year: 2008

My farewell column has a melancholy air not only because all partings are inherently sad, but because the times are genuinely grim. The world is changing . . . not for ...

The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., John Bryson Chane, delivered on Oct. 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church. The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon, he called on “politicians seeking the highest office...

Before going on the Eumenides , let us reflect a little on the theme.  The Greeks regarded homicide with awe.  Like Montenegrins and Albanians until recently, the brother or father of a murder victim felt a physical burden.  The would-be avenger could not eat or sleep until revenge had been ...

. . . the human mind, as allotted by the Creator to certain of his creatures, is capable of receiving any impression it chooses, and holding it as a fixed conviction.  Other minds may gather a different and more rational conclusion. . . .  —Dr. John A. Wyeth The dismaying sense of it, perhaps the...

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes...

At a time when the U.S. power and authority are increasingly challenged around the world, the incoming team sees the Balkans as the last geopolitically significant area where they can assert their “credibility” by postulating a maximalist set of objectives as the only outcome acceptable to the United States, and duly insisting on their fulfillment....

Satan knew what he was doing when he aided and abetted the fall in the Garden.   —Robert M. Peters As we consider the world’s rulers, one question overshadows all others: are they fools or charlatans? . . . I lean toward the view that they are both.   —Robert Higgs It must be noted to that...

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.” Thus did Bush concede that protectionism, if a critical U.S. industry is in peril, must trump free-trade ideology. For in offering the bailout...

After the defeat of the Persians in 480/479 Athens was  united as never before.  There was little division in the social classes, and leaders of the Alcmeonid party like Aristides cooperated with rivals like Themistocles and even with Cimon, of the enemy Philaid clan, in the continuing war against Persia.  The lowest class, the day-laboring...

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”  (Of the dead, nothing but good.)  So said Dean Acheson of Sen. Joe McCarthy on his death in 1957. “Tailgunner Joe” had bedeviled the secretary of state for his lassitude toward communist penetration of State in President Truman’s time. But the passing of Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI...

The Choephoroe (Libation Bearers) is the most dramatically interesting of three play.  The dramatic focus is on Agamemnon’s two children–the long-suffering Electra and the heroic Orestes–and also highlights minor players such as the loyal Pylades, and even the lower-class character of the faithful nurse who intrigues with the Chorus to keep Aegisthus in the dark...

“Something is rotten in the state,” says Marcellus in Hamlet.  Well, it certainly is in the state of Illinois. Yet, on hearing U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald describe a plot by his governor to sell his Senate seat—”conduct (that) would make Lincoln roll over in his grave”—how did reform President Barack Obama respond?  “I had no...

So what is the real significance of Barack Obama’s victory?  Pundits’ fingers and tongues have been flying, of course, scoring the triumph in a variety of ways: the terrible legacy of slavery and racism has been dealt a conclusive blow; the Democratic Party has displaced the Republicans as the party of Middle America; the nation...

The Pearl Harbor anniversary passed a few days ago.  I remembered my father’s account of his walking downtown that Sunday morning in 1941 with the six-months-old Yours Truly in a stroller, when people began yelling and running. Grandmother always pointed out that I and my cousins were not “war babies.”  We were born before Pearl...

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may be right about a lot of things when it comes to former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s future cellmate—current Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich—but he got one thing very wrong at today’s press conference. In a nutshell, Governor Blagojevich is being charged with trying to squeeze the Chicago Tribune into firing editorialists...

In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas.  My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War...

That India should accuse Pakistan of involvement in recent Islamic-terrorist outrages in Bombay was to be expected. That the accusation would turn out to be so well founded so quickly, was not. The only lasting solution to the problem of Pakistan is the disappearance of Pakistan from the political map of the world. This goal...

For the past 67 years America has commemorated over 2,400 sailors, soldiers and airmen who were killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Every such anniversary reminds us that all history is to some extent contemporary history: Almost seven decades after the event, the myth of FDR’s goodness and greatness—revived for...

Much of the commentary on the current economic crisis has compared 2008 to 1982, the depth of the last major recession. But there are some important differences, chief among them that, despite losses in manufacturing in ...

The foreign adulation of Obama proves only one thing—they like him because they see him as not very American. I’m sorry, President-elect Obama, but I don’t feel very healed by this election. Opposed to a black President?  I am not reconciled yet to John Quincy Adams. I hear that local gun sales are up 49...

The Agamemnon Concluded: I’ll be very brief with the rest of the Agamemnon in order to discuss, more rapidly, the next two plays, where the moral and political crisis becomes apparent.   The central scene of the play, in dramatic terms, is the confrontation of Clytaemestra and Agamemnon.  She is the complete master of the situation,...

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I discovered that Planned Parenthood of Indiana has deployed a new weapon in the War on Christmas—er, Holiday.  Not to mention the War on Life—er, inconvenience. There’ve been some real dingers lately in the War on Holiday.  I just heard an ad on a sports-talk-radio station in...

Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the archduke and...

Socrates and Xanthippe have been discussing a proposed bailout of the cartmakers in the Peiraeus.  They are joined by a very young Plato and  Pheidippides, the dissolute son of Strepsiades, who sent him to study in order to find out how to evade his debts. Socrates:  Well, I see we have reached another impasse, Xanthippe. ...

PERSPECTIVEChristmas Nightmaresby Thomas Fleming VIEWSSola Scriptura: The Case for the Crusadesby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.Following Christ. How to Win the War Against Christmasby Tom PiatakRemembering how we got here. Muslim Pressure and Christian Appeasementby Christie DaviesThe British retreat as the Muslims advance. NEWSThe Cold War Never Endedby Joseph E. FallonU.S.-Russian relations since September 11. REVIEWSThe Fall...

The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington.  It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended.  Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...