President George W. Bush addresses the American people on September 13, 2001 My fellow Americans, As the whole world is now aware, we have suffered the most devastating attack on civilians to take place on our soil since General Sherman destroyed Atlanta and Columbia in the later stages of the War Between ...
Year: 2010
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Despicable Tedium
I finally saw Inception. After seeing it, I can definitely state that I would much rather have seen Despicable Me for a third time. Of course, Hollywood produces mountains of immoral garbage, but even many Hollywood films that aspire not to be immoral garbage tend to be dreary or self-indulgent. Maybe the people who know...
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The Bonfire of the Qurans
Is there anyone who has not weighed in on the Saturday night, Sept. 11, bonfire of the Qurans at the Rev. Terry Jones' Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.? Gen. David Petraeus warns the Quran burnings could inflame the Muslim world and imperil U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton declares ...
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The Quran at Fahrenheit 451
By the end of this week, the air was so thick with pieties about the need for tolerance and respect for all creeds that one yearned for the Rev. Terry Jones, mutton chop whiskers akimbo, to toss those Qurans in the burn barrels outside his Gainesville church in Florida and ...
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What Good Is an Education?—September 2010
perspective Break out the Booze? by Thomas Fleming views Academic Sins by John Willson The Uses of a Liberal Education by Catharine Savage Brosman news Okinawa Occupied by Allen Mendenhall reviews An Unfinished Story by James Bissett [Srdja Trifkovic, The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia] Sustained Magnificence by Derek ...
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Just Asking Some More
Does it matter whether Obama is a Muslim or not? Would it make any difference? Is there any evidence that he has any religion at all? (Of course, that can be said about most major American politicians, whose only real faith is the religion of ME.) George ...
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Social Conservatives to the Back of the GOP Bus, Again
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who is chairman of the Republican Governors Association and who is also thinking of running for president, has now endorsed the call of another potential presidential candidate, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, for a campaign moratorium on social issues. Of course, there is no reason to believe that the GOP will take...
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Just Asking
Does it really make much difference whether Barack Hussein Obama (or anybody else) was actually born in the United States or not? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq justified under international law and the U.S. Constitution? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq an appropriate response ...
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Engaging Syria, Undermining Iran
In his comment on my latest on the Israeli-Palestinian saga, WGN host Milt Rosenberg notes that we are now dealing with Iran as much as with the PLO government: behind Hamas and Hizbollah, and alongside Syria and Lebanon, lurks the government in Teheran. “That elephant in the room must be named, confronted and undermined,” he...
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The Dread Specter of Economic Nationalism
As Greg Kaza recently noted here, the decline in American manufacturing is a serious problem, one that accelerated under Bush and is continuing unabated under Obama. You would never know that from reading Jonah Goldberg, who wrote this morning that inveighing against corporations moving headquarters or jobs overseas is a leftist phenomenon with historical roots...
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An Exercise in Futility
Never in the field of Arab-Israeli conflict was so little expected by so many from so few. That is the accurate and near-universal verdict on the opening of the latest series in the longest-running soap opera in the world. The three key roles are the same as ever. Two of them have been played with...
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Tyranny Over Religion
The ongoing flap—hardly a debate—over the Ground Zero Mosque has elicited the response (as predictable as it is erroneous) that to deny a building permit to Muslims would a) violate the First Amendment and b) abridge the freedom of religion that belongs to every human being by virtue of natural law, divine will, or whatever...
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General Pierre-Marie Gallois, RIP
General Pierre-Marie Gallois, who died on August 23 in Paris at the age of 99, will be remembered primarily as the architect of France’s nuclear deterrence doctrine in the 1950s. He was the last in a long line of European geopolitical thinkers—from Clausewitz and Jomini to Liddell Hart and Guderian—who have combined superbly honed analytical...
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Give Me Back My Frock!
Pastors are sinners in need of redemption, like everyone else. A pastor must forgive and be forgiven, and this is something that the flock must be taught and must embrace, or subtle Donatism will creep in with the latest gossip. Nonetheless, beginning with the Pastoral Epistles of Saint Paul, Christians have also been taught that,...
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Okinawa Occupied
Okinawa is a beautiful island in the Pacific. Although part of Japan, it is culturally and historically distinct, having a long list of diverse occupants and occupiers. The Allies won a decisive victory at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Following a massive amphibious invasion by U.S. forces, the battle was one of the bloodiest...
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Retreat From Eden II
Last summer the inimitable Taki and I were staying under the same roof at the London house of our friend Natasha. I have loved our angelically guileless hostess for a quarter of a century, Taki since she was a baby, but all this is just a pompous way of relating that, like I this fateful...
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The Uses of a Liberal Education
On September 1, 1939, an Englishman named Harry Hinsley, walking between two lines of Nazi soldiers, crossed slowly and nervously the bridge connecting Kehl in Germany with Strasbourg in France. He made it to the French side before the border was closed. He had been warned to leave. It was none too soon; German troops...
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Caring in Colorado (and Everywhere)
Not long ago I attended a dinner hosted by a Catholic laymen’s organization in the social hall of a church on Colorado’s Front Range. The meal was followed by after-dinner speeches and concluding remarks by an official representing the organization. “We are caring Catholics of Colorado” were almost the first words out of her mouth. ...
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Hanging With the Snarks: An Academic Memoir
There seemed to be little interest among audience members [at a scholarly meeting] in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only in whether their application would bring about results they liked. —Jason Jewell I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during...
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Sustained Magnificence
Sixty-five years after the last guns ceased firing on the last Pacific atoll, Britons of all political persuasions are still wallowing in tepid World War II nostalgia. For Atlanticists, neoconservatives, and classical liberals, the war was a great Anglosphere achievement, a landmark en route to social mobility plus mercantilism. For nationalists and romantics, there is...
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Advertising Himself
Inception Written and directed by Christopher Nolan Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers It took me a while, but I finally realized what Christopher Nolan’s Inception is all about. Simply put, it’s about how it got to be itself. Or, to be less gnomic, Nolan has undertaken to advertise his own moviemaking skills in...
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A Question of Dots
John Poindexter—Navy veteran and national-security advisor during President Reagan’s second term—resigned in disgrace after congressional hearings revealed that the United States, with Poindexter’s approval and with the help of an enterprising young lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, was selling arms to Iran and giving the profits to the Nicaraguan Contras to support their guerilla war...
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Manufacturing Bust
President Barack H. Obama, if current trends continue, will become the first Democrat to preside over a net national loss in domestic manufacturing jobs since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started reporting monthly employment data in 1939. Seven percent of manufacturing jobs nationwide (873,000) have disappeared since Obama took office. By contrast, manufacturing employment expanded...
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An Unfinished Story
Srdja Trifkovic is no stranger to Chronicles readers, many of whom have found his articles commenting on foreign affairs, with particular attention to the Balkans, to be insightful, penetrating, and written with authority. His latest book, The Krajina Chronicle, provides further confirmation of his extraordinary talent. The book is a history of the Serbian warrior-farmers...
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The Panic of 2011
If you’re old or sick and have a lot of money, I suggest taking a trip out of the country, away from your heirs, until January 1, 2011. And don’t tell them where you’re going. On that date, the death tax for rich folks goes from the current 0 percent to 55 percent. So your...
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Academic Sins
Frank: “They threw me out for plagiarizing.” Ernest: “You were stealing songs?” Frank: “No, I was taking notes.” —from a Frank and Ernest cartoon (Frank has been expelled from music school) A graduate student asked if he could take a reading course; sitting at my feet, I thought, talking with the rabbi. He was...
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Thomas Molnar, R.I.P.
On July 10, in Richmond, Virginia, the intellectual historian Thomas Molnar went to his reward, leaving behind an array of gorgeous ruins. By these I mean not his works, which were masterfully crafted and will endure. No, the ruins that Molnar used to guard are the temples, forts, and libraries of our previous civilization, the...
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The Quest for Certitude
I must thank you sincerely for your extremely thoughtful gift of Saturday by British novelist Ian McEwan. I have read the book with great interest and enjoyment. What is more, it has sent me back to “Dover Beach,” which it uses so creatively, and to Matthew Arnold in general, with a new perspective. You can...
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Adios, Rio Nido
I moved to Rio Nido, a tiny hamlet in the middle of a redwood forest, in the winter of 2008, just a day after the Big Crash. I had found my sanctuary in a world of trouble. What I didn’t count on was a new form of trouble. Rio Nido is a resort community, founded...
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Terminating an Unwanted Parentcy
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES On Writ of Certiorari to the Court of Appeals June 21, 2017 Justice Breyer delivered the Opinion of the Court. Sheila X is a single woman living in San Diego. Shortly after giving birth to a child, she received her Law School Admission Test scores. ...
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A Legend for Our Time
In the spring of 88 b.c., dozens of cities across Asia Minor united in a secret plot to kill all the Romans and Italic peoples—man, woman, and child—in their territories. How the plot was kept secret remains unknown, but the massacre was carried out successfully. Ancient sources indicate that almost all Roman and Italic residents...
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The Daughter of Time
There are many familiar signs that one is growing old, but I would like to propose a new candidate for the list. You know you have lived a long time when ideas and theories that would once have been regarded as fatuous nonsense suddenly become respectable and mainstream. Earlier this year, the British government finally...
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Aussie Election
Miss Julia Gillard (one takes particular pleasure in applying the honorific “Miss” to so stentorian and charmless a femocrat), the prime minister of Australia, faces an interesting challenge in her bid for reelection on August 21. Goodness knows, the Labor Party that she now leads—and which has been in office since 2007—should win at a...
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The Man Who Won the Revolution
Every history textbook has a paragraph or more devoted to Crispus Attucks, who, besides being half black and half Indian and one of those killed in the Boston Massacre, was of little historical significance. Nearly everything else said about him is a matter of speculation. In these same textbooks there is no mention of Timothy...
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Who’ll Stop the Rain?
Rebekah wants to be an algebra teacher. She announced this a few months ago, about the time she turned 15. “You do know,” I said, “to be an algebra teacher, you can’t just study algebra. You’ll have to be proficient in math at all levels, through calculus, including geometry.” Only six months before, she had...
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Sympathy for the Devil
His writing these last 40 years amounts to little more than a succession of malicious ad hominem attacks on people he disagrees with. His appeal is to those with a dirty mind, who want society to be as dirty as he is, and who are glad to erode barriers of decency. There is a coy...
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Break out the Booze?
No healthy boy has ever wanted to go to school. I know I did not. Parents who are confronted with a son who has played hooky or feigned a stomachache will sometimes try to reason with him, explaining why it is important to get a good education. These exercises never worked with me, and I...
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I Spit on Your Grave
Flamboyant William Stewart Simkins, during his professorial heyday at the University of Texas a century ago and more, was known for his long, white mane and his charisma as a teacher of law. He wrote standard textbooks on equity, contracts, and estates. But, dadgum, he took pride all his life (1842-1929) in helping, as an...
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Marxist Beaches
Although I know well all the disclaimers—a writer’s statement does not reflect the journal’s official position, a writer is entitled to his opinion in a “free” society, etc.—I must express my dismay at Justin Raimondo’s gratuitous and mean-spirited insult against a people who, at least on many social and not a few political issues, are...
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Manufacturing Bust
President Barack H. Obama, if current trends continue, will become the first Democrat to preside over a net national loss in domestic manufacturing jobs since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started reporting monthly employment data in 1939. Seven percent of manufacturing jobs nationwide (873,000) have disappeared since Obama took office. By contrast, manufacturing employment expanded...
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Can the Tea Party Deliver?
“There are only two men in America who can fill Yankee Stadium on three weeks’ notice,” a friend instructed me years ago. “Billy Graham and Louis Farrakhan.” Indeed, a decade ago, Black Muslim Minister Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” brought a throng of hundreds of thousands to the Capitol. But, last Saturday, Glenn Beck packed the...
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The War Within the War
With the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, as announced to the world by President Barack Obama, we can all sit back and smile, right? Not too big a smile, if you please. The war in nearby Afghanistan goes on, no path to victory yet discernible save the path of patience. Meanwhile the...
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VI Day
The war’s over! We won! Hurrah for our side–whatever side that happens to be! At every stage of the Iraq and Afghan wars, when I was asked by an interviewer or talkshow host, what should be done, I always gave the same answer: Declare victory and get out, whether slow and deliberately as I thought...
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The Panic of 2011
If you’re old or sick and have a lot of money, I suggest taking a trip out of the country, away from your heirs, until January 1, 2011. And don’t tell them where you’re going. On that date, the death tax for rich folks goes from the current ...
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The Myth of Equality
In 21st century America, institutional racism and sexism remain great twin evils to be eradicated on our long journey to the wonderful world where, at last, all are equal. What are we to make, then, of a profession that rewards workers with fame and fortune, yet discriminates ruthlessly against women; an institution where Hispanics and...
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How Aussies Lost Their Pride of Erin
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are ...
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The Creaturely Myth
James O. Tate reviews Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight • by Karl Rove • New York: Threshold Editions • 608 pp., $30.00 There is—there must be–all the difference in the world between an autobiography and a novel written in the first person. Are we clear? Hillary Rodham ...
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Secularism and the Mosque Flap
Let's say the mosque (you know what mosque) gets built, as it certainly might, public opinion notwithstanding. What's the next theological concession America's Christian churches get to make in the name of brotherhood, sisterhood, pluralism, world peace and amity, the reconstruction of America's image, etc., etc.? First it's one thing, ...
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An Unfinished Story
A review of The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia • by Srdja Trifkovic • Chicago: The Lord Byron Foundation • 250 pp., $20.00 Srdja Trifkovic is no stranger to Chronicles readers, many of whom have found his articles commenting on foreign affairs, with particular attention to the Balkans, to ...
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A Remembrance of Anne
Note to Readers: This is a condensed version of the eulogy delivered by Patrick Buchanan at St. Stephen Martyr in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18. It was December of 1965 that I first looked on the friendly Irish face of Anne Volz, outside the law office of Richard M. Nixon. Anne ...