I agree entirely with Aaron Wolf both on the constitutional argument but also on the deeper political question of the centralization of power. The problem is that we are all tempted to use the court when it suits our purpose, and in this case if I lived in Chicago I'd ...
Month: June 2010
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Islamists
Two small additions. First, the powers-that-be insisted upon Islamist as a negative term to distinguish real Muslims who want to kill us for the sake of religion from people who pretend to be Muslims without really having firm convictions. Perhaps we should call them Methodist Muslims or, for AW's sake, ...
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Importing Multiculturalism—June 2010
perspective Cursing the Darknessby Thomas Fleming views Immigration: A History Lessonby John Willson Cannibal Statisticsby Chilton Williamson, Jr. news Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crimeby Roger D. McGrath reviews Great Cooptationsby W. James Antle III [Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass: A Memoir andSarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life] Past, Present, and Futureby Darío Fernández-Morera...
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Failure on Many Levels
Goldman Sachs buys and sells securities for customers and also trades for its own book. It’s the world’s biggest derivatives dealer. CEO Lloyd Blankfein told a British magazine in late 2009 that they were “doing God’s work.” Now we know what that entails. At an April 27 Senate subcommittee hearing, Carl Levin (D-MI) quoted from...
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Politics, Power and Sen. Byrd
“The Former Klansman Who Backed Obama,” was the Huffington Post’s hook for its account of Sen. Robert Byrd’s demise. The New York Times‘ website came closer to the mark: “Elected a record nine times to the Senate, Mr. Byrd, 92, championed the legislative branch and brought huge amounts of federal dollars to West Virginia.” The...
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Down With Islamists
Ali Mir of the USC Muslim Student Union is upset about the media's usage of such terms as Islamist and extremist. (They are
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The Prisoner of Gen. Petraeus
President Obama is being hailed for toughness in his firing of Gen. McChrystal and brilliance in his replacing him as Afghan field commander with Gen. David Petraeus, who managed the George W. Bush “surge” in Iraq that saved this nation from an ignominious defeat. Herewith, a dissent. By firing a fighting general, beloved of his...
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Strange Words for Strange Days
Charity. Old version: Open-handedness toward our neighbour in need. New version: Getting the government to spend other people’s money on politically favoured groups, at home and abroad. All Men are Created Equal OV: We are all made in the image of God and deserve respect. (Besides, an Englishman over here is just ...
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If I Could Turn Back Time
Here's the bottom line of today's SCOTUS decision regarding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, which amounts to an explicit rejection of traditional federalism on the part of the conservative majority. (Full disclosure: I'm of the Hestonian
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Conservative Credo: Abortion Rights
ABORTION AS SELF-DENIAL In a rationalist system of ethics, every basic principle must be stated in universal terms in which “I” am denied a privileged perspective. I may not, for example, make rules that apply to everyone but me–only the Congress of the United States is free to do that. If I advocate an unrestricted...
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You Say FIFA, I Say WWE
Ah, glorious soccer. The sport where fat and tall and tough guys don't get a pass, unlike those other statistic-driven, 'roid marinated, jingoistic sports Americans love on a more regular basis. But what really makes FIFAball the sport of conservative spectators is that it combines the Grecian ideal ...
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Mitregate 2010!
If you're the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, and you're asked to preach at the C of E's Southwark Cathedral, and Archbishop Rowan Williams asks you not to wear your mitre, what do you do? Answer: You carry it defiantly by your side and bring the fire about how ...
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MacChrystal’s Stunt
This came from C Bowen, as we were working the bugs out: Fallon pulled the same stunt with Esquire but he at least gives the appearance of respect. Gen. McChrystal may well be one of the best and at least he has no Waco in his past like that Boykin character, but he has the...
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Nazis and Other Delusions: A Response to Hoppe
Recently, VDARE.com published Hans Hermann Hoppe’s 2010 address to his Property and Freedom Society in Turkey. Hoppe’s speech included his account of the 1996 meeting of the John Randolph Club, the last at which there was an organized libertarian presence, and a broader attack on the ideas of Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis. Hoppe’s account...
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Obama’s McChrystal Gaffe
A skillful political leader, faced with embarrassing statements made by a general or political subordinate, has two moves that can work: He can take the high ground and declare. ”It sounds as if General McChrystal has lost his faith in my administration. We haven’t lost our faith in him. He’s the best man for the...
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Hot Rod Lincoln
He knew that he was destined for greatness. The son of uneducated manual laborers, immigrants to Illinois, he was never much of a student, but he would become a successful lawyer. From a young age, though, his sights were set on political power. Through his political connections, ...
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Good For You, Joe Barton
Say it's not so, Joe—that you're actually sorry for mussing up the Obama administration over its treatment of BP. Congressman Barton, sir, never mind what the party leaders made you say in riposte to your own verbal thrust last week. You were right the first time—right to call out the White ...
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More Cultural Revolutions
A military friend told me that General McChrystal was among the most highly regarded senior officers in the American military. Now, according to a Washington Post story, it seems he has to play McClellan to Obama’s Lincoln, that is, an intelligent and effective officer forced to work with immoral and incapable political leaders. Our esteemed...
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Credo for Conservatives IV: More Abortion Debate
Two more Arguments, from God and from rationality. GOD Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions. [Cf. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature III.12 ) From the Christian perspective nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true...
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A Man of One Idea
(A review of The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, by Viktor Suvorov; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press; 384 pp., $38.95) The Russian edition of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? sports a blurb on the back, quoting a review of the English translation of the book published in...
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What Price Afghanistan?
“The narrative . . . has been too negative.” So says Defense Secretary Robert Gates of political and press commentary about the war in Afghanistan. It reminds him of the pessimism of June 2007, before the Iraqi surge began to succeed, said Gates. But the narrative is coming now not just from critics of the...
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Still the Metric System in Short Pants
Yahoo has decided to promote the World Cup by prominently featuring scores to games on its home page. Last night, I saw a World Cup game playing on some of the TVs at a local sports bar. Thus does an event that used to receive as much coverage in America as spelling bees in Uzbekistan...
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Devil’s Brew in Dixie
The Dutch Fork of South Carolina Our small but proud State can't seem to stay out of the political spotlight. We had barely recovered from the exposure of our present Governor's exotic extra-marital affair when we made the headlines again as a result of the ...
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Conservative Credo IV: The Abortion Debate
The Abortion Debate In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view. Few debates have been so heated as those involving the decision to terminate...
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Bailing Out Politicians Now?
Even lifelong Democratic pol Steny Hoyer, majority leader of the U.S. House, is balking at Barack Obama’s latest bailout proposal. “I think there is spending fatigue,” said Steny. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.” Hoyer was referring to Obama’s weekend letter to Capitol Hill calling for a $50 billion bailout of state and...
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What’s the Mama Grizzly Up To?
When Sarah Palin, in a rambling lakeside announcement last July in Wasilla, said she was quitting as governor of Alaska because of the abuse she and her family were taking from petty politicians and a feral press, she was written off as dead by the pundits. “A quitter, can’t take the heat,” was the Beltway...
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An Anniversary Ignored
Tuesday was the 43rd anniversary of an event that many want to see vanish down the Memory Hole. On June 8, 1967, Israeli airmen and sailors killed 33 American sailors and one civilian during their attack on the USS Liberty, and wounded another 171 American sailors. Even though the Secretary of State, the CIA Director,...
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Hans Hoppe Welcomes You to his Fantasy Island
I have often observed that libertarian principles can corrupt the character even of good men. Whether that is the reason or simply personal vanity, but Hans Hoppe’s account (on VDARE) of the departure of Libertarians from the John Randolph Club, while it is filled with many intelligent and useful insights, is founded on an historical...
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Conservative Credo IVb: Abortion
Life as Property There are many ways of looking at human life; some emphasize the benevolence of the Creator; others our inheritance from and similarity to other primates. One approach favored by some liberals/libertarians is to treat life as property. But if the life of a child, born or unborn, is a property or possession,...
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Lift the Siege of Gaza
In June 1948, our wartime ally imposed a blockade on Berlin, cutting off and condemning to death or Stalinist domination 2 million Germans, most of whom, not long before, had cheered Adolf Hitler. Harry Truman responded with the Berlin airlift, in perhaps the most magnanimous act of the Cold War. For nine months, U.S. pilots...
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The Sound and the Fury
“Never let a crisis go to waste”—a watchword of the present administration—finds its deepest, as it were, meaning in the offshore oil rig crisis. There, the idiocy of modern politics impatiently waits discovery. We’re sure to find it. The idiocy of modern politics is that politics has less to do with solving problems than with...
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Katyn 2
When, in 1934, Stalin had a Leningrad party boss killed—and then wept at the man’s funeral, railing at the enemies of Russia—a uniquely modern phenomenon, which I shall call state vendetta, was born. State vendetta is somewhere between conventional warfare and mafia violence. Where the narrow aim of the former is to suppress a specific...
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Let’s Cheat on Our Taxes
As I write, April 15 is still fresh in the mind, and the sting of death remains, combining the current pangs of tax extraction with the promise of a greater burden to come, thanks to the Barackification of heathcare. So imagine my delight when I read in a back issue of a leading Christian magazine...
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Not a Live Tribe
Alphabetical order is useful for miscellaneous collections of items such as indexes, directories, dictionaries and encyclopedias, address books, and musings and bits of lore (Voltaire’s Alphabet of Wit, for example). Elsewhere it serves a pedagogical purpose, as in children’s readers and old collections (medieval bestiaries, botanical compendia). John Ashbery’s latest volume, Planisphere: New Poems, contains...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...
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The Bishops’ Quest for Amnesty
In January, when the Catholic Church in the United States was supposedly devoting all of Her efforts to preventing taxpayer funding of abortion in ObamaCare, America’s Catholic bishops took a distracting detour, announcing a nationwide “Justice for Immigrants” campaign. Their goal: to distribute millions of postcards to parishes throughout the country so Catholics could demand...
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Past, Present, and Future
Transaction Publishers has a long history of producing first-rate scholarly works, among them a series of books under the title Cuban Communism, indispensable for the study of post-1959 Cuba. The present one, by the editor of the series, covers a half-century of Cuban Marxism and introduces us to many of the major issues related to...
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Winning Is Everything, Isn’t It?
Vincere Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio Produced by Offside and Celluloid Dreams Distributed in America by IFC Films Feminists began proclaiming that the personal is the political during those dreamy 70’s of the last century. This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is a proposition that every sane person must resist. Those who accept it...
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Immigration: A History Lesson
“The United States is a nation of immigrants” is a meaningless statement, but that is not to say that it has no meaning. It is one of the lead lines for the Democratic/liberal/progressive agenda, and has been ever since Israel Zangwill used the mythic term “melting pot” as the title of his thankfully forgotten play...
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A Few Simple Queries
If I could ask our young President a few questions, they would run something like this: “At what point would you say, ‘There. We finally have as much government as we need. To give it any more power would be tyrannous and would diminish our God-given rights’? I sense that you have never asked yourself...
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Attack of the Hyphenates
The immigration debate is often framed in terms of ethnicity, and the arbiters of permissible expression are appalled that anyone would approach the issue in terms of cultural identity and a reasonable desire for homogeneity. Permit me, however, to raise a quite different objection to the unchecked flood of immigrants who have been deluging our...
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Silence the Opposition
The Socialist Greek government is crafting and carrying out policies that appear to have come straight from the Soviet playbook in efforts to repress the conservative opposition, which came out of last October’s elections heavily wounded. Those who oppose Greece’s immigration law, which grants citizenship to practically everyone (Al Qaeda has found a new gateway...
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Designed to Fail
Over the past year, American elites have spent a vast amount of time discussing proposed reforms in healthcare, arguing about the social and financial costs of producing an apparent social good. In March, Congress approved a law that many observers see as a potential catastrophe, in terms of its devastating effects on our economic future,...
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Deo Vindice
No sooner did Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell issue his proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month than the ideological canister fire began. The proclamation is “incendiary,” huffed the Washington Post. “Obnoxious,” sniffed historian James McPherson. “Mind-boggling,” griped former governor Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves and the first black governor in America. And it was all...
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In Darkest London, Part 2
This is the second part of a two-part article written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatsoever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and...
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Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should...
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You Say Ásátru, I Say Shoresh
In these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, the surprising thing is that there was so little controversy when the board of School District 205 awarded a $40,000 contract to revisionist historian Michael Hoffman, author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America and...
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We Did It to Ourselves
In June 2009, Alberta’s former minister of finance Iris Evans commented to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto that, “when you’re raising children, you don’t both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise.” Essentially, Mrs. Evans suggested that parents might need to sacrifice financial well-being for stable families. Needless...
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Animal Planet
Like the songs tell us, June is busting out all over, and love is in the air. Unlike humans, dolphins can never get enough of love. They are constantly nuzzling and staring into each other’s eyes. And they are known to make love—up to 43 times in half an hour. That beats Tiger’s record by...
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Cursing the Darkness
Her mother said she had been brainwashed. Her daughter had never liked who she was and was always looking to become someone else. Mother is quick to reassure reporters she is not prejudiced: “I’m not against Muslims. I married one.” Jihad Jamie, as the press has dubbed her, is only 31, but she has lived...