“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK. For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava. On Oct. 1, Scozzafava was leading. Today, she trails Democrat Bill Owens and is only a few points ahead of...
If humility is the skandalon of Neopagans, they typically base their more pragamatic case against Christianity on its suppose opposition to what pagan cultures regarded as the legitimate use of violence: personal self-defense, defensive war, and the execution of murderers, rapists, traitors, and other serious malefactors. They are entirely wrong, ...
Across the country last weekend, there were antiwar demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him. I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, Calif. My neighbor...
The U.S. has every characteristic of a failed state. The U.S. government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation. Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the U.S. relies on terrorism and military aggression. Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest...
In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters. Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be? Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.” Formed in...
Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reports that none of these aides faced Senate confirmation. Yet, they are overseeing the handout of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to their former employers. The...
Before President Obama even landed at Andrews Air Force Base, returning from his mission to Copenhagen to win the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago had been voted off the island. Many shared the lamentation of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, “What has become of America, when Chicago can’t steal an election?” A second and more serious battle...
The double standard under which the Israeli government operates is too much for everyone except the brainwashed Americans. Even the very Israeli Jerusalem Post can see the double standard displayed by “all of Israel now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report”: This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We’re entitled to...
September’s unemployment figures were not only disappointing—they were grim. For the 21st straight month, Americans lost jobs. Fifteen million are out of work—5 million for more than six months. But as the Washington Times asserts, “America’s jobless crisis is much worse than the 9.8 percent unemployment rate.” The U.S. economy actually lost 785,000 jobs in...
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”—Karl Marx If Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics. Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination...
Humility is the great moral skandalon (stumbing block) of Christianity, in much the same way that Christ—the God who became man, suffered, and died a humiliating death—was the skandalon to the Jews. Thus it is a little amusing to read the complaints of so many uneducated neopagans—most of them anti-Semites—against ...
Jonah Goldberg has a piece in yesterday’s USA Today defending television loudmouth Glenn Beck from his critics. In the course of his piece, Goldberg takes a swipe at Pat Buchanan for not being a Republican and for writing a revisionist history of the start of World War II, making the same sort of arguments that...
The Institute for American Values gives us the news that—all right, they don’t say it in so many words, but two and two are easy to add, and there seems no way not to understand that David Letterman didn’t inadvertently become a cad and a bounder and Roman Polanski a rapist on the run. Our...
The Pentagon’s pre-emptive strike came with the leak of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s confidential review of the Afghan war to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. McChrystal’s painting of the military picture was grim. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where...
Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by President Bush and the “mainstream media” about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that...
Obama is by nature a booster—like the first stage of the missile lofting its payload into the upper atmosphere. A huge bang, a mighty whoosh and then a few miles up, a fizzle as the Obama-booster burns out and drops back to earth. Who knows what happened to the payload? He doesn’t seem to have...
A few months ago in this space I described the Pecorino Effect, referring not so much to the Italian cheese as to the shopper’s inability to refuse any merchandise he has sampled, irrespective of what he thinks of the quality. I diagnosed this modern malady, with myself as a specimen of social tissue in the...
Several weeks ago I was watching a program on the BBC called Would You Risk Your Own Life to Save a Complete Stranger? In Britain, few people apparently would. Far more common is the story of a young girl who was beaten severely in a London subway by several “youths.” The attack took place on...
“Truth is stranger than fiction.” This commonplace is abundantly illustrated by the life of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-99), the young Paris watchmaker who is most famous for his plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. From the facts of his extraordinary career, more than one lively novel could be drawn, including...
A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them. Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task. Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...
“Nobility is the symbol of mind.” —Walter Bagehot In times of texting and sexting, Twittering and wittering, there is something positively antediluvian about epistolary collections—a whiff of fountain pens and headed notepaper, morocco-topped escritoires in long-windowed drawing rooms looking out over lawns studded with cedars and peacocks. Such fleeting evocations are lent depth and body...
It’s a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers, exam answers, and essays for an A, or telling the truth for a low grade. What to do?...
I began this novel, set in Germany between the two world wars, after watching Valkyrie. I found the film both shallow and grandiose, dominated by clicking heels and clashing chords; the choice of Tom Cruise to play Claus von Stauffenberg was singularly inept. Cruise is a Hollywood celebrity; the personality of Stauffenberg—an aristocrat, soldier, and man...
District 9 Produced by Key Creatives and WingNut Films Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Distributed by Sony Pictures Forty-five years ago, radio humorist Jean Shepherd wondered why filmmakers invariably portrayed alien invaders as intellectually light years ahead of human beings. Wasn’t it possible, he mused, that extraterrestrials might be a tad slow on...
Your Excellency: October and November in these mountains often seem to me a time of melancholy and bereavement, of Demeter grieving the loss of Persephone, the good earth receding into itself. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe, who grew up less than a mile from here, and who lies buried around the corner, connected October,...
During the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House frequently trotted out Laura Bush to laud our soldiers’ heroic efforts to “liberate” women. These were not wars of aggression or conquest. They were wars for “education,” the former schoolteacher averred: “The United States government is wholeheartedly committed to the full...
The Tea Partiers and the Town Hallers are clearly angry that the Obama administration so quickly began to pursue policies that run contrary to traditional conservative values—values that are based on skepticism of, if not hostility toward, the role of government in the management of human affairs. Indeed, if there was one thing that used...
I have a picture pinned over my desk here in Brussels, a 1929 photograph—“obtained under great difficulty,” the caption says—of a man being executed by guillotine at 5 a.m. on an open street in France. The title of the picture is “Legacy of the French Revolution.” I keep it because it is a modern link with...
“Diversity enriches education,” then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama commented in a Q&A session with The Chronicle of Higher Education. Students should be “exposed to diversity in all its forms,” and affirmative action is the vehicle to guarantee this goal. Contrary to the expectations of naive commentators who hoped we had entered a new epoch, the election of...
Greece is under the influence of an aggressive (and violent) left, which has made common cause with liberals in an attempt to eliminate every vestige of the Hellenism that is so deeply rooted in the psyche of the indigenous population. Of course, they call it political correctness and modernization. Following the familiar pattern of the...
The trial was fixed. The judge knew it. The rancher had the town buffaloed. The jury would deliver the verdict the rancher wanted. The judge was concerned that the rancher’s rowdies would use the verdict for a lynching. The rancher didn’t want any more nesters around. The nester’s wife was a good-looking woman, and the...
“The people who go to St. Stan’s aren’t Polish; they’re Polish-American.” Those words, blurted without thinking, have haunted me for almost a decade and a half. Anna Mycek-Wodecki, then art director of Chronicles, was a true Pole. Like Leopold Tyrmand, the founder of Chronicles, she was a refugee from communism. Unlike Tyrmand, she was ethnically...
The death at age 97 of Prof. Alex N. Dragnich, a leading American expert on Serbian and Yugoslav history, marks the departure of one of the last witnesses to an era in which this country’s involvement in Southeastern Europe was neither contrary to her traditional values nor overtly harmful to the region’s inhabitants. His dozen...
He is the clown prince in a continent whose rulers boast of more clowns among them than all the circuses of the world combined. He uses more black shoe polish on his hair than a company of Rumanian hussars use on their thigh-high boots, and plasters more makeup on his face than Norma Desmond. He...
We were in Athens, near the end of July, having dinner with some Greek friends at Attikos, a popular rooftop restaurant with a view of the Parthenon. Like most conservatives, our friends are somewhat pessimistic about what the future holds for their country, and from their description it seems to me that as the left...
The sale of The Weekly Standard should put paid to any lingering illusion that the neoconservative empire was anything but a Potemkin village. Allegedly, Rupert Murdoch sold the magazine for one million dollars to Philip Anschutz, the billionaire owner of Clarity Media Group, but the price seems either much too high or much too low. ...
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence. And it’s a good...
Eunice Kennedy Shriver died less than two weeks before her brother Edward, beginning a month of tributes to the Catholic left’s first family that reached a crescendo when Senator Kennedy was laid to rest. But there was a difference between the two Kennedy siblings that was seldom mentioned in the encomiums: Mrs. Shriver’s Catholic liberalism...
In her short piece “Men in Power” (Vital Signs, September) Nicole Kooistra describes a men’s organization at the University of Chicago that grew out of a satirical article, and then proceeds to berate the organization for its pursuits (such as developing professional contacts and learning about prostate cancer), the appearance of its members (“perfectly groomed,...
More Lies, More Deception by Paul Craig Roberts • September 30, 2009 • Printer-friendly “What does imperialism mean? It means the assertion of absolute force over others.”—Robert Lowe, 1878 The G-20 ministers declared their meeting in Pittsburgh a success, but as Rob Kall reports in OpEdNews.com, the meeting’s main success was to turn Pittsburgh into...
PERSPECTIVE Remembering Who We Were by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Exporting Political Correctness by Justin Raimondo Through force of arms. Obama's Right-Wing Cheerleaders by Leon Hadar Rah-rah government intervention! NEWS Dissolving Britain by Mary Ellen Synon The Lisbon Treaty's Eurojustice. REVIEWS Supernova by Derek Turner Charlotte Mosley, ed.: In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor Matthew A. Roberts on Dora L. Costa's and ...
That Iran is building a secret underground facility near the holy city of Qom, under custody of the Revolutionary Guard—too small to be a production center for nuclear fuel, but just right for the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade—is grounds for concern, but not panic. Heretofore, all of Iran's nuclear ...
Lord knows I’ve had my run-ins with Andrew Sullivan, who seems to think that a devotion to gay rights and Obama constitutes a form of “conservatism,” and yet I’ve got to give the guy credit for writing this ...
At the Heart of Darkness by Samuel Francis • September 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “The New Englanders are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.”—Cotton Mather H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography by S.T. JoshiWest Warwick, Rhode Island:Necronomicon Press; 704 pp., $20.00 H.P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous WritingsEdited by S.T. JoshiSank City, Wisconsin:Arkham...
Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with 1 million schoolchildren now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over. The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer ...
In August, the Georgian navy seized a Turkish tanker carrying fuel to Abkhazia, Georgia’s former province whose declaration of independence a year ago is recognized by Russia but not the West. The Turkish captain was sentenced to 24 years. When Ankara protested, he was released. Abkhazia has now threatened to sink any Georgian ship interfering...
You know—you must—you can’t help it—aren’t you alive?!—that the marketplace isn’t perfect. Haven’t we all been told often enough, amid the political chatter concerning how to crack down on Wall Street? Bad, bad bankers whose pay should be regulated and selfish brokers—not to mention negligent directors of corporations—are among the current targets. John Maynard Keynes...