At his March 24 press conference, President Obama demonstrated that he is capable of understanding issues as presented to him by his advisers and able to pass on the explanations to the press. The question is whether Obama’s advisers understand the issues. Obama’s advisers are focused on rescuing banks and the insurance company AIG. They...
Year: 2009
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Obama’s Fall Guy
Since America is in its worst economic mess in 70 years and since President Obama’s designated Mr. Fixit is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, you’d think the Obama presidency is in desperate shape. The reason? Mr. Fixit is surely the most derided man running the U.S. Treasury since Andrew Mellon cut spending and raised taxes amid...
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The Way We Are, No. 2
Shine on, O perishing Republic. —Robinson Jeffers If Western man in the future should recover his analytical ability, our times will be known as the age in which trivia replaced culture and bureaucracy replaced life. Economic stimulus: On the face of it, the proposition that we can borrow and spend ourselves into prosperity is lunacy....
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Defining Terms
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Launching Lifeboats Before the Ship Sinks
On March 19, the New York Times reported: “The Fed said it would purchase an additional $750 billion worth of government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities, on top of the $500 billion that it is currently in the process of buying. In addition, the Fed said it would buy up to $300 billion worth of longer-term Treasury securities...
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What Is History? Part 26
A Morsel of Genuine History, a Thing so Rare as to be Always Valuable. —Jefferson Fate can smirk as well as smile. —Ferrol Sams At times along life’s way there arises an occasion when the appearance of innocence is greatly to be preferred over innocence itself. —Ferrol Sams It is interesting—albeit not pleasant—to watch the...
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Multicultural Heaven (We Did It to Ourselves)
The new government stimulus legislation will help unemployed Americans by providing 300,000 jobs for illegal aliens. Your Congresspersons voted down a provision requiring a simple check to identify illegal workers. As a patriotic veterans’ organisation recently pointed out, illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. U.S. Marines have been declared not to be tough enough...
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Hollywood Does Bush the Lesser
I forced myself recently to watch Oliver Stone’s movie takedown of George W. Bush called W. I have a morbid curiosity about cataloging trends among the pseudo-intelligentsia. This film, like previous productions of the same auteur, is doubtless providing multiple thrills for the type in America and Europe. As readers here are well aware, I...
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Israel’s American Chattel
I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation,...
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A Sellout of Our Unemployed
By the choices we make we define ourselves. We reveal our biases and beliefs. And so, too, do our institutions. In writing the $789 billion stimulus bill, Congress revealed that, for all its
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How the Networks Went into the Drug Peddling Business
When, sometime in the 1960s, the late Frank Stanton, overseeing news operations at CBS, asked his boss William Paley, the network's founder, for more time for newscasts, Paley shook his head.
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The American Criminal Injustice System
Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison because Jennifer Thompson provided eyewitness testimony that he was the person who raped her. On March 9, National Public Radio revisited the story. It turned out that Thompson was completely wrong. DNA evidence indicated that it was not Cotton but another man who had bragged about the rape....
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It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again
It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again by Clyde N. Wilson • March 12, 2009 • Printer-friendly “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” —Orwell (Things that are known but which Americans do not acknowledge or discuss.) Ruby Ridge. Your President George H.W. Bush sent...
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Afghanistan South
Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010. But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border? Prediction: After...
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We’re Shocked, Shocked! To Find David Frum Engaging in Character Assassination
Over at NRO, the online home of David Frum until January of this year, Frum’s former colleagues are expressing shock and dismay at his attacks on Rush Limbaugh, most prominently in a cover story for Newsweek. Today, Andy McCarthy noted that Frum had insinuated to Chris Matthews on television that Limbaugh might be racist. McCarthy...
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From the Archives: Stemming the Tide
On August 9, 2001, during a speech from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President George W. Bush put an end to several months of debate surrounding government funding of research on stem cells derived from human embryos. After discussing his administration’s research into the matter and declaring his own “deeply held beliefs” in science and...
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The Gay Science
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What Is History? Part 25
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk—G.K. Chesterton The North is full of tangled things. . . . —Chesterton Whiskey and blood run together. —Ferrol Sams If you’ve got two worms in one apple, sooner or later they’ll meet. —Ferrol Sams...
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Change for the Worse
The following is part one of a two-part essay. President Obama has presented the most irresponsible budget in U.S. history. His fiscal year 2010 budget projects federal spending of $3.5 trillion and a federal deficit of $1.75 trillion. In other words, 50 percent of the government’s budget consists of red ink. And Americans are angry...
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The Way We Are
It’s amazing how many crises you can live through unscathed if you just don’t follow the news. We all develop silly pointless habits from time to time. Some chew gum. Some collect string. Some vote and write their Congressman. I don’t think voting is actually sinful. It is more a state of cluelessness, like chewing...
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The President of Special Interests
The Bush-Obama bailout-stimulus plans are not going to work. Both are schemes hatched by a clique of financial insiders. The schemes will redistribute income and wealth from American taxpayers to the shyster banksters who have destroyed American jobs, ruined the retirement plans of tens of millions of Americans and worsened the situation of millions of...
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America’s Dwight Schrute
In an hilarious episode of NBC’s The Office, Dunder-Mifflin übertwerp Dwight Schrute unwittingly adapts the words of several speeches by Benito Mussolini and Karl Marx in order to appear impressive at a conference for salesmen. “Blood alone moves the wheels of history!” he cries, and by the time he gets to Il Duce’s “It is...
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Luck and the Mass Man
Why was Christ put to death? Because Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, had told the Sanhedrin, “Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people.” Literally, Caiaphas was inviting the Pharisees to reason through—logizesthe is the Greek word—to calculate, or to...
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School of Rape: From Health Class to Hotties
America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.” This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction. But sex education suddenly required its own graphic, stand-alone how-to course, then morphed into a “nonjudgmental” monstrosity designed to transmit knowledge of...
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A Night on Bald Mountain
Héctor, who had never camped out in his life before, was entirely unprepared for the nighttime cold of the desert in late spring. And he had failed as well to anticipate the utter and complete blackness—the blackness of outer space, of nothingness—of the desert night. Though Jesús “Eddie” built a blazing fire that lit up...
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The Perfect Storm
The best-seller The Perfect Storm tells a true story of a ship caught in a vortex created by a continental low-pressure system, a tropical hurricane, and an arctic cold front off the shores of Newfoundland. This complex disaster comes to mind when trying to describe the nature of the crisis that nearly closed down the...
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Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon . . . terrible as an army with banners?” —Song of Songs 6:10 “Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.” (“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried...
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Valor
Valkyrie Produced and distributed by United Artists Directed by Bryan Singer Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie Slumdog Millionaire Produced by Celador Films Directed by Danny Boyle Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy from Vikas Swarup’s novel Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In Valkyrie, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer tell the story of Col. Claus von...
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Worst Recession Since . . . ?
The National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed the suspicions of many Americans by declaring on December 1 of last year that the U.S. economy entered a recession in December 2007. The recession’s duration has already exceeded the postwar average (10 months), and it could surpass the two longest (both 16 months) since World War II. ...
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Romancing the Skull
“I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.” —Sigmund Freud An old professor of mine once joked that ecumenism was a case of “the bland leading the bland,” an epithet that could just as appropriately describe contemporary humanism. Cast your net at Google, and you will haul...
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Diplomacy Before the Fall
The first two sentences of this fine book tell it all. “This is a text for our times. It is a celebration of diplomacy and diplomats—of an essentially extinct profession.” I shall return to this summa summarum; but first, here is my account of the contents of this book. It consists of five substantial portraits...
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City Mouse, Country Mouse
We whose parents read to us the Bible, the Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, Hans Christian Anderson, Reynard the Fox, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Aesop’s Fables know almost by heart the story of “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse.” This is the version translated by the English scholars George Tyler Townsend and Thomas James: Once upon...
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Two—State Solution, R.I.P.
Upon being congratulated for defeating the Romans at Asculum in 279 b.c. during the Pyrrhic War, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had lost half of his army during the battle, said something to the effect of “Another victory like this, and we’re done for.” Hence the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” which could probably be applied to...
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Life in the Borderland
Returning from a Slavic land on a Slavic airline after serving a mission aiding the Catholic Church in Slavic Eastern Europe, I craved a little freedom from Slavdom. So I eschewed the late Slavic pope’s tradition and refrained from kissing the earth after touching down at O’Hare. Instead, I enjoyed a quiet cigarette outside arrivals,...
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Holes in the Plot
Can I ask for some help? I am trying to write a novel—a futuristic political thriller—but at present, the plot is ridiculously implausible. I would like some advice about making it credible. This is my scenario. It is 2011. A hugely popular Barack Obama is cruising toward an inevitable second term. He is, however, at...
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Immigration and Marriage in America
Listening to the news media, you’d think that Americans simply don’t understand marriage. One in two marriages fails. Public schools peddle theories about “alternative families” with such textbooks as Heather Has Two Mommies. Single women run hither and yon looking for Mr. Goodbar, who turns out to be a white-frocked fertility guru equipped with a...
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Epic But Forgotten: Peleliu
Few Americans today know of Peleliu, a speck of an island in the southwest Pacific. A part of the Palau group of the Caroline Islands, Peleliu is only six miles long and two miles wide. It lies 550 miles due east of the Philippines in splendid isolation. Covered with dense green vegetation and surrounded by...
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Everything in Its Place
On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy. Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in...
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Burning Down Camelot
One of the more annoying gaucheries of the British tabloid press is that of always referring to the Kennedys as “American royalty.” Back in 1963, with JFK still alive and in the White House, I escorted C.Z. Guest, a true American patrician, to a Park Avenue party given by Sam Spiegel, producer of Lawrence of...
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Self-Evident Lies
Jon Stewart: “You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society. Why would you not want more couples to buy into the stability of marriage?” Mike Huckabee: “Marriage still means one man one woman life relationship. I think people have a right to live any way they want to, but even anatomically ....
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Il Whig in Italia
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
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Mainline Marital Mélange
We know the stereotype, do we not? Eyes like marbles, jaw clinched tight as a bear trap; icy baritone voice; accusatory finger slashing the air. Yea, brothers and sisters, hear the word of the Lord, Who condemns . . . For some wacko reason, popular culture (you know what I mean—talk shows, movies, plain old...
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On Darwin Day
In his review of Darwin Day in America by John G. West (“Man on Holiday,” Reviews, December), Fr. Michael P. Orsi’s concerns and opinions are unassailable. Yet in the course of representing the book’s statements, he repeats an outrageous falsehood that should not go uncontested. Father Orsi writes that “West points out that there is...
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Marriage in America—March 2009
PERSPECTIVE Self-Evident Liesby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Mainline Marital Mélangeby William MurchisonWhen the culture preaches to the church. Immigration and Marriage in Americaby R. Cort KirkwoodBeyond definitions. Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmosby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.Romancing the self. NEWS School of Rapeby Beverly K. EakmanFrom health class to hotties. REVIEWS Romancing the Skullby Jack Trotter John Carroll:...
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From One Assault on the Constitution to Another
The U.S. Constitution has few friends on the right or the left. During the first eight years of the 21st century, the Republicans mercilessly assaulted civil liberties. The brownshirt Bush regime ignored the protections provided by habeas corpus. They spied on American citizens without warrants. They violated the First Amendment. They elevated decisions of the...
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Israel First, Again
Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy. One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26. A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment...
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Return of the War Party
“Real men go to Tehran!” brayed the neoconservatives, after the success of their propaganda campaign to have America march on Baghdad and into an unnecessary war that has forfeited all the fruits of our Cold War victory. Now they are back, in pursuit of what has always been their great goal: an American war on...