Ever since Hugo Black succeeded in incorporating his anti-religious prejudices and Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” into Supreme Court jurisprudence, Americans have known how a story like this is supposed to end: A parent who comes into a community objects to expressions of that community’s religious traditions in its schools. There is no indication that...
Year: 2011
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Campus Love
How often have you heard “Don’t make a federal case of it”? What in the world could that mean? Everything’s federal these days—not least female modesty, or whatever passes for that once-prized commodity. Here’s Wendy Murphy, sharing her delight that the White House has—finally!—come around to combating sexual violence on college campuses. Miss Murphy, I...
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Who’s Number One?
I was puzzled by Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s “Who Cares Who’s Number One?” (What’s Wrong with the World, May). No reasonable person can disagree with his contempt for our country’s endemic America Number One philosophy, especially when we routinely fall so short. But given the decadent reality of life in most of Europe these days, it’s...
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An American Family Covenant
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” —Louis Auchincloss, interview with Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times, September 21, 2007 In January (one year after his death at the age of 92),...
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Back on the Air
A few weeks ago, I hosted a local program on WNTA Radio for our new friend Paul Youngblood. Paul has invited me to join him every Friday at 3. Call (815) 874-8255 to take part in the discussion. I’d like to help Paul make this the liveliest talk show from Chicago to Madison. Listen Live...
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More Ugly Questions
Did you enjoy your “peace dividend”? Did you enjoy your “stimulus” money? Do you think its wonderful that our Congresspersons and other federal officials constantly strive to make “our” lives better? Isn’t a great example of bipartisan statesmanship that all our leaders got together to save “our” economy by giving billions to the New York...
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The Death of Moral Community
“The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.” So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state. Now, given that no nation in 20 centuries of Christendom legalized homosexual marriage, and, in this century, majorities in...
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Say Goodbye to Los Angeles
Centuries before William James coined the phrase, men have sought a “moral equivalent of war,” some human endeavor to satisfy the jingoistic lust of man, without the carnage of war. For some, the modern Olympic Games have served the purpose, with the Cold War rivalry for medals between the United States and the Soviet...
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Libya: A Non-Hostile War
Only one spectacle in recent weeks proved more nauseating than the Commander-in-Chief fine-tuning the Afghan drawdown to suit his re-election timetable. It was Barack Obama’s attempt to justify continued American participation in the illegal and unnecessary war in Libya by claiming that—far from being a war—it does not even merit the designation of hostilities. Back in...
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The ICC Orders Qaddafy’s Arrest
The Libyan affair became a choreographed farce on June 27, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafy, one of his sons, and his chief of military intelligence. This move is a carbon copy of The Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicting Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at...
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The Conservative Movement Raises the White Flag, Again
Unless you live in a cave, you know that New York’s legislature recently passed a bill recognizing homosexual marriage, a bill that was quickly and enthusiastically signed into law by the latest loathsome member of the Cuomo clan to govern the Empire State. The mainstream conservative movement’s reaction to this event was only slightly...
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What This Country Needs
A better class of illegal immigrant. A good three-dollar cigar. A Presidential contender who has once in his life done something that is truly worthwhile, notable, patriotic, or unselfish. Fewer people who know what is best for other people. (This may require giving the Deep North back to Canada.) A Presidential candidate who is...
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Is Obama Only Postponing the Inevitable?
In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year’s end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves. He has, however, well served his political interests. A larger drawdown would have risked the gains made...
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More Cheap Shots
The restoration of a McDonalds in Alabama is a signficant step in the progress of civilization, writes a prominent Misesian, who was struck with awe by the beauty of it all: “I snapped a dozen images of their newly restored interior, which is absolutely beautiful.” Absolutely, let us remember, means ultimately and without exception. McDonalds...
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Obama’s Retreat
I listened to a bit of President Obama’s speech. Why am I disgusted? After all, I have said from the first day of our war against Afghanistan that it was a futile operation that might kill a lot of Afghans and a few Americans but that it would would accomplish nothing. Whenever I have...
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Music for Today
History contains many tragedies, and one of these is the early death of Mozart. For those of us who enjoy Mozart’s choral music, it is particularly poignant to reflect on the fact that, before his death, he had been appointed assistant Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Thus, had he lived longer, Mozart would...
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The Return of the Mossback—With a Few Ugly Questions
Do you look forward to living in a majority nonwhite country, which the U.S. is predicted to be in a few decades? Will you take a lie detector test about this? Do you look forward to your descendants living in such a country? Have you ever thought about your descendants at all? Did your...
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Wages Stagnate, Even Neocons Notice
Farsighted conservatives have warned for decades that globalization was leading to wage stagnation in the United States. This was, for example, a major theme in Pat Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal, published in 1997. The less farsighted are beginning to catch up. Recently, David Frum published a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on his website, which was then picked up...
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Can Any of These Republicans Win? Can Obama Lose?
They’re off and running! Last Sunday saw the first debate for the Republican presidential nomination. (Actually, there was an earlier “first Republican debate” in South Carolina on May 5, but none of the big guns showed up, so it’s been erased from the history books.) Anyway, this one was in New Hampshire. In the...
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Fed Up With Freeloaders
“The most successful alliance in history,” it was called at the end of the Cold War in which NATO, for 40 years, deterred the Red Army from overrunning Berlin or crashing through West Germany to the Channel. And when that Cold War was over, Sen. Richard Lugar famously said, “Either NATO goes out of...
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The Transnistrian Solution, Lost in Kievan Translation
On June 14 I was the keynote speaker at a press briefing in Kiev organized by The American Institute in Ukraine on the problem of Pridnestrovie (Transnistria). The Russian and Ukrainian majority of that self-proclaimed republic straddling the eastern bank of the Dniestr declared secession from Moldova after a brief but bloody conflict in...
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Colette Baudoche by Maurice Barrès
Maurice Barrès is hardly a name in the United States, even to American conservatives who could learn a great deal from his fiction and essays. A collaborator of Charles Maurras, Barrès had a deeper understanding of blood-and-soil conservatism than most Americans can grasp, and his celebration (in this book) of Metz under Yankee—I mean...
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Cheap Shots
Lebron James really knows how to motivate a team. Unfortunately, it was not the Dallas Mavericks. Mr. James says “the Greater Man upstairs know when it’s my time.” Is he referring to the Almighty or to Shaquille O’Neal, who is three inches taller and once lived three floors above him? (I made that up.)...
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Cardinal Stepinac: Another View
It pains me to disagree with a writer I like and admire, but Srdja Trifkovic’s piece on Cardinal Stepinac makes no attempt to explain, much less understand, why Catholics respect and admire this brave Croatian martyr. Trifkovic takes umbrage at Pope Benedict’s treating Stepinac as a “saintly figure” and of saying this about him: “Precisely because...
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Three Score and Ten: A Meditation
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready. The children are OK....
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Shades of Grey: The Record of Archbishop Stepinac
As a long-time upholder of friendship and alliance between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditionalists, I am disheartened by Pope Benedict XVI’s uncritical portrayal of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (1898-1960) as a saintly figure during his visit to Croatia earlier this week. In a homily at the Zagreb Cathedral the Pontiff called Stepinac “a fearless pastor and an example...
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Return of the Anti-Interventionist Right
Late last month, when U.S. air strikes caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan, an angry Hamid Karzai issued an ultimatum. If future U.S. strikes are not restricted, we will take “unilateral action” and America may be treated like an “occupying power.” That brought this blistering retort from one Republican hawk. If President Karzai...
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Where Your Tax Dollars Go
Forbes has a list out this morning of America’s five richest counties. Unsurprisingly, four of the five are in the Washington, D.C., area. Washington’s prosperity is completely detached from the fortunes of the rest of the country, since Washington continues to suck in tax dollars even when other parts of America suffer or even decline economically....
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The King James Bible at 400: Love’s Labor’s Lost
I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl. Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year. We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO). Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were...
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Order No311
The document I am reading is public. It is an official directive of the Russian government to the ministries responsible for directing the country’s electronic industry, dated August 7, 2007, identified as “Government of the Russian Federation Order No311,” and entitled “Strategic Development of Electronics in Russia 2007-2025.” Last February, totalitarian power in the person...
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A Need for Stewardship
Sissinghurst, in the Kentish part of the Weald, is the estate that prose author and poet Vita Sackville-West bought in 1930 after it became clear she would not inherit the lease on Knole, her family property. (It went instead to an uncle.) Though Sackville-West is notorious for her liaisons with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis...
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The Problem of Industrialism
Many years ago, on a train trip from New York City to Philadelphia, a friend (a city girl, actually) remarked to me, as we passed through the Jersey industrial swamps, that she would happily cancel the Industrial Revolution, supposing only that modern dental technique could be rescued for the benefit of a restored pastoral society....
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Muslim Sex Crimes in Northern England
In Britain there have been 17 recent prosecutions of gangs of Muslim rapists and child molesters involved in the “on-street grooming” for sex of victims as young as 11 in several towns and cities in northern England. In the most recent case, members of a gang of Muslims from Derby were convicted of rape, false...
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Throughly American Healthcare
You would have thought that, at 17 percent of the U.S. economy, the healthcare industry would be much better understood than it apparently is by our Washington brethren. I can’t help but look back and smile at the image of Nancy Pelosi standing at a podium and opining on how she couldn’t wait to get...
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The Robot’s Focus
By the time Tony Blair stood down as prime minister to give his rival Gordon Brown the opportunity to lose office ignominiously, he had become as unpopular on the left as he had always been on the right. A Journey is his attempt to explain himself, not so much to what he calls, alternately, “the...
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The First and Final Command
Of Gods and Men Produced by Why Not Productions and Armada Films Directed and written by Xavier Beauvois Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Director Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men quietly, one might say austerely, meditates on the faith and courage of nine French Trappists who faced death at the hands of Muslim fanatics...
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A Unifier at Number Ten
This is a state-of-the-art British political biography. D.A. Thorpe has written biographies of Home, Eden, and Selwyn Lloyd, as well as shorter studies of Lord Curzon, “Rab” Butler, and Austen Chamberlain. His knowledge of the principal political actors, particularly on the Conservative side, is prodigious; he convincingly claims to have interviewed “all the prime ministers...
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Our Antiwar Opportunity
The politics of U.S. foreign policy are governed by the tides of partisan warfare, the ebb and flow of the constant struggle between “left” and “right.” Which means that, every decade or so, the political spectrum switches polarities: Witness the transformation of the “isolationist” Old Right of the 1940’s into the warmongering conservative movement of...
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Airport Frisking
How many terrorists share a surname with a 19th-century American plutocrat famed for starting one of the country’s first investment banks and founding a technical university in the City of Brotherly Love? How many terrorists hail from the Bluegrass State? And finally, how many terrorists have yet to reach their seventh birthday? If you answered...
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A Saint Is Born: An Interview With Roland Joffe
Unless he is an exorcist or a pedophile, the chances of a priest being the main character in a Hollywood movie are sinfully scant. Giving star treatment to a real-life priest who would become a saint, however—and presenting him truthfully—seems as improbable as Dan Brown donning sackcloth and, as penance for miscasting Opus Dei as...
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The Triumph of Nice
Imagine reading an interview with the founder of a new Christian church. As the interviewer points out, new denominations are scarcely a surprising story, so what makes yours so different and noteworthy? Well, explains the prophet, we have a totally different attitude toward the Bible. Our focus groups tell us that many modern people do...
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Kings Row Revisited
The first paragraph of the first chapter of John Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990) concludes, “A conservative will profess a preference for and a trust in Ronald Reagan; a reactionary will not, and not because Reagan was a Hollywood actor but because he never stopped being one.” The reactionary in me agrees with...
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Chuck Older
Recently, a younger acquaintance of mine, an actor on stage and screen, mentioned with disgust the circus-like atmosphere that pervaded the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife. I noted that early on in the trial, Judge Lance Ito simply lost control of the proceedings, and the “Dream Team” of defense attorneys...
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General Mladic: The Facts
The circumstances surrounding the arrest of the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, General Ratko Mladic, seem puzzling. On May 26 he was captured in the house of a close relative with the same surname in a village north of Belgrade. Prima facie this means either that Mladic was entirely left to his own devices...
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Our Interest in Turkey
Trying to spread democracy in the Middle East has always been a bad idea. The quagmire in Iraq is largely thanks to George W. Bush and his team extending the original mission from depriving Saddam of his (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction to the establishment of a democratic Iraq as a first step to transforming...
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Arabian Limbo
Zack Shahin, an American, was arrested in Dubai in 2008 and held in isolation for months on end. Shahin still remains in jail on what appear to be spurious charges, with no trial date in sight. All this is happening in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which purport to be the forward-looking showcase of Arab...
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New York State of Mind
Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist antisemite and left the house in a fury. P.J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven’t figured...
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Jerks in CyberSpace I
Vitaly Borker thought he had found a new way of making money on the internet. On his website DecorMyEyes.com, Borker marketed cheap knock-off sunglasses as the real thing and added insult to injury by providing the worst possible customer service. As he anticipated, the tidal wave of negative comments boosted his site to Google’s...
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Our Sacred Anticanon
I arrived a few minutes late for the meeting with the hippie roofer. Two many DUIs had cost him his driver’s license, and I had to take him to the home-improvement store. “Been to church?” he asked. Dressed in a suit at 10:30 on Sunday morning, I was forced to admit the fact. “I’ve read...
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The Bull in the GOP China Shop
There is little in Donald Trump’s record to inspire confidence in conservatives. He supported John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008, and the list of candidates to whom he has given money—which includes Rudy Giuliani, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Newt Gingrich, and Hillary Clinton—contains not a single bona fide conservative. Trump has embraced...