On Christmas Eve, when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, THE New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at...
Year: 2009
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Terror Wins Another One
Here’s what we can look for as the federal government implements new rules meant to thwart the likes of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, the would-be pants bomber: —Sharp drop-offs in beverage sales as passengers find themselves barred from restrooms during the last 60 minutes of international flights. —Airport check-in times longer than airplane flight times. —An...
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Of Christmas, War and Peace
Of Christmas, War and Peace by Patrick J. Buchanan • December 28, 2009 • Printer-friendly “And this shall be a sign unto you: You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger. “And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying: Glory...
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Christmas With the Devil
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter.Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of salt....
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A Tender Unitarian Christmas II: Yankees and Jews Slapping Norwegians
A Tender Unitarian Christmas II: Yankees and Jews Slapping NorwegiansThis [insert preference] Season, the message from the Chicago Tribune to Garrison Keillor is clear: Feel free to slap around Unitarians all you want, but leave the Jews alone.I like Garrison Keillor. There, I said it. (We fellow-ex-fundamentalists-turned-Lutherans must stick together.) Not everyone on the Chronicles...
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America’s Party
For Democrats like Harry Reid, who called them “evil-mongers,” and Nancy Pelosi, who called them “un-American,” the NBC News poll must have hit like a sucker punch at a Georgetown wine-and-cheese. The Tea Party movement, those folks rallying against spending last spring and Obamacare in the summer town halls, are viewed more favorably than the...
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Silent Night, Sordid Night
Americans sick over Congress’ “health care” outrage should be glad to sniff the generally unpolluted air of Christmas Eve in order, at last, to hear the angels sing. Because if anyone ever took a political vote-counter for one of the heavenly host, it had to be a long time ago: not in the eight or...
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Scrooge IV
It was a cold and dreary New York that Ebenezer Scrooge V looked at from the window of his Upper East Side office. The sun was setting, but his long day was not over yet. His secretary, Mrs. Cratchit buzzed to ask if he was ready for his appointment with the representatives of UNESCO’s International...
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A War Worth Winning
As someone who has written on the War Against Christmas for both Chronicles and VDARE.COM since 2001, it should come as no surprise that my perspective is different from Thomas Fleming’s. I welcome anyone, Christian or non-Christian, who is willing to defend this matchless holiday, and look with suspicion on all those who are hostile...
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Israel Lobby Pulls the Strings in America
“Settlers attack West Bank mosque and burn holy Muslim books” was a London Times headline on Dec. 11, 2009. These attacks, together with the demolition of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of Palestinians’ olive groves, the innumerable checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from accessing schools, work and medical care, the Israeli wall that denies Palestinians access to...
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A Kind Word for King George
Possibly the best reason for not understanding what’s in the Senate health care bill is that no senator knows for sure, not even Harry Reid, without whose subservience to the Obama White House we might have some idea what’s up; but let that go . . . Few legislative spectacles of our time, and there...
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Fat City
“It’s time to stop worrying about the deficit—and start panicking about the debt,” the Washington Post editorial began. “The fiscal situation was serious before the recession. It is now dire.” The editorial continued: “In the space of a single fiscal year, 2009, the debt soared from 41 percent of the gross domestic product to 53...
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Ron Paul’s Hour of Power
The decades-long campaign of Ron Paul to have the Government Accountability Office do a full audit of the Federal Reserve now has 313 sponsors in the House. Sometimes perseverance does pay off. If not derailed by the establishment, the audit may happen. Yet, many columnists and commentators are aghast. An auditors' probe, they ...
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A Bad Year for the Experts
As if policy “experts” were not growing almost daily in disrepute, along came the Environmental Protection Agency Monday to fortify, in a backward way, the case for just plain old, you know, common sense in public policy. No 2,000-page congressional bills; no international conferences; just homely intuition, leading to the conclusion that, Pa, this whole...
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Why Import Workers Now?
At last week’s Job Summit, there was talk of a second stimulus package, of tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers, of an Infrastructure Bank to select national priority pubic works projects like the Hoover Dam and TVA of yesteryear. But no one, it seems, advanced the one obvious idea that would have...
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Trickle-Up Economics
Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.” One can understand why the banksters are worried. The company, now known as Gold Sachs, has a large responsibility for...
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Obama’s Exit Strategy
If actions speak louder than words, President Obama is cutting America free of George Bush’s wars and coming home. For his bottom line Tuesday night was that all U.S. forces will be out of Iraq by mid-2011 and the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan will, on that date, begin to get smaller and smaller. Yet the...
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War Cries from a Defeated Man
Ritual trumphalism about America’s righteous mission in the closing sentences of his speech did not dispel the distinct impression during President Obama’s 33-minute address to cadets at West Point Tuesday night that we were listening to a man defeated by the challenge of justifying the dispatch of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Obama didn’t make...
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Fish or Cut Bait
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Obama Bumps Charlie Brown
In the great 1947 Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street, Judge Harper (played by Gene Lockhart) is all set to rule that there is no Santa Claus, until his shrewd political adviser Charlie Halloran (played by William Frawley) convinces him that such a ruling would be political suicide. Obama could have used a Charlie Halloran...
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Christmas With the Devil
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter. Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of...
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A Voice From the Mass Grave
This difficult book has a long history. Zwyciestvo prowokacji was originally published by its Polish author, then a penniless exile in Munich, at his own expense in 1962. I first read the work in Russian translation some 20 years ago, thanks to the editorial heroism of Nina Karsov, who had brought out a Russian edition...
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Dignity
The phrase human dignity is as ubiquitous today in enlightened global discourse as human rights. Indeed, the two are intimately connected, the first being regarded as a subset of the second, as in, “the right to human dignity.” But dignity in this context is used abstractly and in a universal sense, rather than concretely and...
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Heisenberg’s Curious Principle
A Serious Man Produced by Studio Canal and Working Title Films Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Focus Features Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is hardly cinematic, yet Ethan and Joel Coen have made it a linchpin in the plots of two of their films, The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)...
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Being and Nothingness
The financial collapse, which loomed so large more than a year ago as trillions of dollars disappeared and politicians ran for cover, may have suggested a lesson or two. The chairman and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, the former head of Goldman Sachs (nice name, that), the president of the United States,...
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Thirty Pieces of Silver
The news of the arrest of Stewart David Nozette, a top government scientist, on charges of spying for Israel had barely hit when none other than Steve Rosen, former top AIPAC official and accused Israeli spy, piped up in Nozette’s defense. Some character witness! Rosen was recorded culling state secrets from Larry Franklin, formerly the...
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Fighting for Orthodoxy Among the Methodists
The Episcopal Church, with two million members, drove off the cliff in 2003 by electing its first openly homosexual bishop. In 2005, the United Church of Christ (1.1 million members) officially endorsed same-sex “marriage,” though the UCC had already long been ordaining active homosexuals. This year, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (4.9 million members),...
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The Fainting Irish
Yes, the Irish caved in and reversed their vote against the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty. Gutless? Of course. But I’ve spent too many years in Dublin and Cork to be surprised. The Irish did the same thing when they voted no to an earlier treaty in June 2001. The next year they gave in to...
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Waiting for Charles the Second
“How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries?” —Edwin Markham, “The Man With the Hoe,” 1899 “A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in...
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Leaving the ECLA
The recent decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to ordain active homosexuals and adopt a more permissive attitude toward fornication has put many parish churches in the difficult position of choosing whether to remain in the ELCA. One such church is Prince of Peace Lutheran in Rockton, Illinois, a village of some...
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Left Turn In Greece
Security has always been a key issue for conservatives and nationalists worldwide. But that’s not the case in Greece. So voters in the homeland of democracy, displeased by riots and anarchy, the inability of the government to put down the protests, and the effects of the financial crisis, have reacted angrily against the “conservatives” on...
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Privilege Displaces Equality
None of us growing up in Atlanta in the 1940’s were under the delusion that we were equal. We were aware of a myriad of differences that had nothing to do with race or gender. Some were better football players. Others were better baseball players. Some could run faster. Others were more witty, or better...
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Fairabia
Most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew that a foreign government had built a school in the United States which teaches hatred of Americans and their country. Indeed, most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew a foreign government had built a school here that teaches hatred of anyone or anything. Then again, most...
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Obama and the Army of Sodom
Homosexuals coast-to-coast have been doing the slow burn in the past few months because their jug-eared leader, Barack Obama, has delayed fulfilling a key campaign promise: to scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. The policy is actually federal law, and it’s very simple: Keep your mouth shut, and you can serve. Ten months...
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Twice-Baked and Twice as Bad
Every couple months or so, my wife and I host an event we call Twice-Baked Tales. We’ll have friends over for a home-cooked meal followed by a screening of a movie (usually from the 1930’s, 40’s, or 50’s) and its remake. So far we’ve watched Out of the Past (1947) and its 1984 remake, Against...
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An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit over busing. Today, little effort...
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Forgotten Corners
Minnesota celebrated its 150th birthday in 2008. This occasion drove news reporter Boyd Huppert from KARE–TV in Minneapolis to travel to the corners of the state for a four-part feature series. In the far northwest corner sits Kittson County, bordered by North Dakota and Manitoba. (Winnipeg is about an hour-and-a-half drive.) The landscape is flat...
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A Tale of Two Subversives
The intention of postmoderns to destroy real people, with their natural loyalties, traditional morality, and inherited cultural preferences, is the same everywhere. Its specific manifestations may be different in the United States and Serbia—the homes of our two interlocutors and my good friends—but the underlying motivation is identical. It is Christophobia, the incubator of countless...
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Government-Managed Business
“The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge, a few years before the Great Depression. In the worst economic downturn since then, Barack Obama won the White House after a campaign in which he made it clear, to what might be described as populist delight, that he was not a friend to corporations. In...
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The Limits of Compassion
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...
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Going Through the Motions
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
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Recovering the Dignity of Truth
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
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Ubuntu!
William Murchison gets right to the point in his eloquent account of mainline Protestantism’s near-terminal degeneration, written poignantly from an Anglican’s perspective: Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more laxity and less permanence in belief. Don’t...
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On Race and Fairness
In “Race and Racism” (Views, November) Tom Landess states that a seismic shift occurred in race relations with Strom Thurmond leading the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic National Convention in 1948. Now, in 1948, blacks were paying taxes (federal, state, and local). They saw that money used by politicians to foster second-rate education, housing, and...
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Hamlet as War President
Led by a conflicted president of a divided party and nation, America is deepening her involvement in a war in its ninth year with no end in sight. Only one parallel to Barack Obama’s troop decision comes to mind: the 2007 decision by George W. Bush to ignore the Baker Commission and put Gen. David...
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Of Government and 10.2 Percent Unemployment
If government would just stop trying to do everything in the world . . . Well, wait. Let’s review what the U.S. government is currently up to: 1. Overhauling health care, or, if not actually overhauling it, talking endlessly about how government should do it. 2. Reconfiguring the way Americans use energy. 3. Rejiggering financial...
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A Trial That Will Convict Us All
Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11, and four alleged co-conspirators. The Republican and right wing ranting that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have...