Your Excellency: This past season of mortification was my most wretched of Lents. The Ash Wednesday promises made to myself and to God lie behind me like spiritual road kill. If you were marking me on my Lenten practices, you’d rightly give me an F—a low F—and tell me to repeat the class. Such failure...
Year: 2010
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Parallel Lives
Nicholas Thompson, the grandson of Paul Nitze, chose to write a biography of his grandfather, but with a restriction. Thompson thought it best to describe and compare his grandfather’s public career together with that of another public personage, George Kennan. I wonder why. Perhaps for the sake of an extensive biography. We ought not attribute...
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Land of Obama
“A corrupt society has many laws,” observed the Roman historian Tacitus. The Founding Fathers knew this aphorism, and their work reflects it, from the Articles of Confederation to the Federalist to the Tenth Amendment. They designed these documents to save this country from the plague of “many laws.” And the inaugural addresses of nearly all...
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Middle Eastern Hijackers
Have the Israelis gone crazy? We have recently witnessed a number of incidents in which Israeli hostility to the West has been made manifest. Yet the Western world has been the biggest—indeed, the only—supporter of the Zionist project outside the Jewish Diaspora. First, consider the ambush of Joe Biden in Israel, where he went to...
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Persecuting Ann
Ann Coulter did not enjoy her stay in the land of Dudley Do-Right. “Since arriving in Canada,” she wrote on her website on March 24, “I’ve been accused of thought crimes, threatened with criminal prosecution for speeches I hadn’t yet given, and denounced on the floor of the Parliament (which was nice because that one...
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A Poverty of Spirit
A little-known federal program called Supplemental Security Income (SSI) fosters dependency and destructive behavior among our nation’s poor. SSI was begun in 1974 with the intention of helping aged, blind, and disabled people of little or no economic means. The disability part uses the same medical standards for determining disability as does Social Security, which...
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Ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
If you want to know why it isn’t a bright idea to permit homosexuals to serve openly in the military, consider the subject of “snorkeling.” That, according to The Atlantic, was one of Rep. Eric Massa’s occupation specialties as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. You might have heard of Mr. Massa. He quit...
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Dominion Mosque
If the definition of a liberal is a person who won’t take his own side in a fight, Adam Ebbin and Kaye Kory, Democrats who represent Virginia’s 49th and 38th districts in the commonwealth’s House of Delegates, should have their pictures next to the word in Webster’s. Ebbin, a homosexual Jew, invited Johari Abdul-Malik, a...
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In Darkest London, Part I
The following is written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatever, 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 which was spent mostly among people...
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Lucky Lindy
Nearly everyone knows that in 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, lifting off from a field on Long Island and touching down in Paris 33 hours and 3,600 miles later. He instantly became an American hero of proportions never before seen. He was termed “Lucky Lindy,” but luck...
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For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so...
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Insuring Profits
That cry you heard on the night of March 21, when the 216th vote was cast in favor of President Obama’s “healthcare reform,” was the sound of insurance executives rejoicing before lighting their cigars with $1,000 bills. As Time reported on March 24, “Health insurers have long argued for tougher government mandates that would require...
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New From Israel
The dispute over settlements has “transformed the American-Israeli connection and forced Israel to face new international realities.” Israel and the United States are facing “the worst split” in decades, a former Israeli foreign minister asserted, and the tremors may turn very soon into an earthshaking shift, “unless the Israeli government moderates its position on settlements.” ...
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Jewish Antisemistism
“The only thing missing is the sign Arbeit Macht Frei,” said an English friend as we watched a British-made documentary on the children of Gaza. My wife, a German, winced. I did not. Watching a Palestinian father break down and cry while an Israeli official refuses him an exit permit so his seven-year-old son can...
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Save the Children
Modern Americans are going to live forever. We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry. Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it...
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Texas Rebellion
You must have noticed that the National Education Association, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, left-wing bloggers, and even the Dallas Morning News went ape in March over the outcome of textbook deliberations in Texas. It seems that the state board of education, dominated by political and social conservatives, prescribed changes in model curricula...
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Obama Versus the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court’s power has become virtually unchecked: Amending the Constitution to reverse an erroneous Supreme Court decision is nearly impossible, and Congress has proved too timid to use the other weapons the Constitution provides to check the Court, including its power to restrict the jurisdiction of the federal courts. As a result, the Supreme...
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How Do You Make $100 Million Per Day?
How do you make $100 million per day? Goldman Sachs did it—and still does it. It even brags about it. Goldman’s net revenues for 2009 were over $45 billion. Most of this—$34.37 billion—came from trading. During the second and third quarters of 2009, Goldman made over $100 million per day on 82 out of 130...
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Adopting Indecency
A sentence from a recent New York Times Magazine profile clings to the mind, like lint. The profile is of Scott Brown, whose sudden ascent to the U.S. Senate fascinated America a few months back. In 2001, the story relates, when a colleague of Brown’s, a lesbian state senator in Massachusetts, “announced that she and...
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Under the Glass
Catharine Savage Brosman’s critique of The New Yorker (“The New Yorker Under the Glass,” Vital Signs, March) is a welcome respite from the nasty, nonsensical scribbling of today’s cultural critics. I’m sure Dr. Brosman is aware that infantilism and mediocrity prevail not only among popular literary editors and “American consumers of print, electronic media, and...
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Filmlog: Laila’s Birthday and The Lemon Tree
I hold with Washington and Jefferson—it is dangerous folly for our government to get involved in conflicts among different bunches of foreigners. But that wisdom was long ago trashed by our rulers, who imagine themselves Masters of the Universe of Global Democracy, and their court intellectuals, who imagine themselves to be prophets when they are...
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Stand Up for Arizona
Major demonstrations are to be held in 70 cities on May 1 to protest the new Arizona law to cope with an army of half a million illegal aliens now living there. Since Gov. Jan Brewer signed that law a week ago, Arizona has been subjected to savage attack as the modern embodiment of Jim...
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Getting Real
Increasingly, I find it impossible to read a newspaper, listen to NPR, or even to check out what my favorite columnists are opining these days. Part of my lack of interest stems from my cultural, moral, and spiritual detachment from life in these United States. But this personal secession is only a part of my...
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Time for an Election!
What this country needs is . . . an election! Didn’t we just have one? Yes. Can’t we see through the windshield a follow-up election just down the road? Yes. None of which obviates the present point: Never in recent memory has confusion over the course of public affairs been so dense, so impenetrable. A...
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Whose Country Is This?
With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there. Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America’s immigration laws....
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A Mortal Blivet
A review of The Edge of Darkness (produced by GK Films, Icon Productions, and BBC Films; directed by Martin Campbell; screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell from the original television script by Troy Kennedy Martin; distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures). In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six...
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Tears of a Clown
Watching the finals of the Australian Open was a revelation. The worthy loser, Andy Murray, praised the winner, Roger Federer, by saying that he, Murray, could cry like Roger, but as yet could not play as well. He then broke down and wept in front of thousands. The crowd loved it and cheered Andy to...
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Too Good To Be Untrue
The amoeba. You remember it from biology class; it’s your long-lost relative. Don’t believe it? Well, you’re probably one of those pro-life Christian homeschooling losers. You don’t play nice with others. You are socially maladjusted. “Amoeba are essentially everywhere and have probably existed . . . ...
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Bringing Back the Old Economy
In 1960, my father attended what was then Case Institute of Technology. Even though it was the most expensive school in Ohio, he was able to pay his tuition with his summer jobs. When he graduated, mechanical engineers were in demand; American manufacturing was booming, and the jobs being offered to good young engineers generally...
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Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
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The Eclipse of the Normal
Nearly a century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote of “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” Today the very word normal is almost taboo. Perish the thought that there is anything abnormal—let alone sinful, vicious, perverted, abominable, sick, unhealthy, or just plain wrong—about sodomy. (Unsanitary? Let’s not go there.) As...
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It’s the Jobs
Which presidents of the United States have done a job of work? This little survey is limited to those born in the 20th century. Before that, everybody worked. Let’s start with our present leader. He has never lifted a shovel or driven a truck or had to make a payroll. He has never grown a...
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On Being America’s Red-Headed Stepchild
Are you puzzled and irritated by the viciousness and falsity of most of what is being published these days about the South and Southern history? The beginning of all wisdom on this subject is to know that in American public discourse and so-called scholarship there is usually no effort to understand the South, like any...
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A Cold and Distant Mirror
A review of The White Ribbon (produced by Canal+ and Wega Film; written and directed by Michael Haneke; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics). German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be...
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Divide and Conquer
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The Unfairness of Income Tax
A congressional proponent of the nation’s first federal income tax law, enacted in 1894, was, to say the least, beside himself over the wonders he and his colleagues had wrought. “The passage of this bill,” burbled Congressman David Albaugh DeArmond, “will mark the dawn of a brighter day, with more of sunshine, more of the...
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The Art of Spanking
So, thanks again for the love in the cradle and all of the changes that kept me dry. And thanks again for the love at our table and tannin' my bottom when I told you a lie . . . It’s a tear-jerker of a song, and the only thing that rescues Ricky Skaggs’ “Thanks Again” ...
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The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family ...
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Bring on the GOP!
The awful Obama is pushing terrible things on our country like socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. He must be defeated so the Republicans can get in and push socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama ...
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Katyn and ‘The Good War’
The decapitation of the Polish government last weekend, including President Lech Kaczynski and the military leadership, on that flight to Smolensk to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, brings to mind the terrible and tragic days and deeds of what many yet call the Good War. From Russian reports, the Polish pilot ...
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The Mental Time Machine
The Metropolitan Opera has a new production of Bizet’s Carmen, which premiered in New York City last New Year’s Eve. I read the review by Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times’ most competent music critic, who understands singing as well as he knows operatic literature. Mr. Tommasini raved over the production, the work of the...
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Don Quixote at West Point
A recent incident at West Point involving my wife and our little daughter has given us much to ponder. The initial responses, and later silences, of the military authorities were both surprising and perplexing. I became even more reflective and pensive, however, after my own well-informed and honest and very candid West Point classmates further...
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Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
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Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
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The New Intolerance
“This was a recognition of American terrorists.” That is CNN’s Roland Martin’s summary judgment of the 258,000 men and boys who fell fighting for the Confederacy in a war that cost as many American lives as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined. Martin reflects the hysteria that seized Obamaville on hearing...
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The New Yorker Under the Glass
The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif. Whatever tastes, affectations, or snobbery the artist, Rea Irvin, wanted to suggest, it...
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For the Children—May 2010
perspective Save the Childrenby Thomas Fleming views Adopting Indecencyby William Murchison For the Childrenby Scott P. Richert news How Do You Make $100 Million Per Day?by William J. Quirk reviews Soulcraft as Leechcraftby Derek Turner [A.N. Wilson, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II] Parallel Livesby John Lukacs [Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove:...
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From Good War to Bad Social Engineering
The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for more than eight years. That is longer than our involvement in both world wars combined. Yet the end of the conflict appears to be further away than ever. It is not even clear what would constitute victory. Afghanistan began as the “good war,” receiving near-unanimous...
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Anti-Catholicism and the Times
“Anti-Catholicism,” said writer Peter Viereck, “is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.” It is “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people,” said Arthur Schlesinger Sr. If there was any doubt that hatred of and hostility toward the Catholic Church persists, it was removed by the mob that has arisen howling “Resign!” at Pope...
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What War with Iran Means
“Diplomacy has failed,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told AIPAC, “Iran is on the verge of becoming nuclear and we cannot afford that.” “We have to contemplate the final option,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., “the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.” War is a “terrible thing,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham,...