Harold Wilson was right: A week is a long time in politics. The one just behind us—the longest of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far—has provided a mix of drama, bravado, mendacity and stupidity unseen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. That crisis was a more serious affair than Obama’s Syrian gambit—thermonuclear war was a...
Year: 2013
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Looking for Mr. Republican
Previously here I impertinently suggested a revision to Sam Francis’s brilliant and justly famous description of the Republicans as “the stupid party.” Republicans always abandon their positions and surrender to the enemy. This behavior is presumably stupid because it damages and weakens the party by betraying its base. This happens to some degree but...
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Christian Punishment
Timothy Broglio is Archbishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services. Early this year, he attracted a great deal of media attention, mostly negative, for a letter he issued condemning the Obama’ administration for requiring Catholic institutions to include contraception in its insurance coverage. An adroit diplomatist, Broglio reached a compromise with the Pentagon, and...
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Liar’s War
John Kerry has pinned his case for killing Syrian civilians on an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, written by “Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy,” a 20-something researcher who turns out to be a propagandist for the Syrian opposition without the sacred Ph.D from Georgetown that got her a job at a propaganda mill masquerading...
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America Says ‘No!’ to a Beltway War
Last week, hell came to the tiny Christian village of Maaloula where they still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. “Rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra,” the Al Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist group, writes the Washington Post. The AP picked up the story: One...
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Australia: The Evil Hypocrisy of the Jewish Establishment
Even before the recent victory of rightwing Catholic Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition in Australia, the previous Labor government was instituting measures to stem the flow of mass immigration. Outgoing leftist PM Kevin Rudd said of the new measures: “Asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia.”...
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History and the Mime
Emperor, directed by Peter Webber, 2012, 98 minutes Hyde Park on Hudson, directed by Roger Mitchell, 2012, 94 minutes Anything not older than a half century past is not history but current events, a fact often lost on Hollywood. So perhaps we should be grateful for these two interesting though flawed dramatizations of the World...
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A War on Syria Is a War on Christians
Ten years ago, Chronicles was one of the few American publications pointing out that the American invasion of Iraq would be a disaster for Iraqi Christians. And so it proved to be. Since our invasion of Iraq, half of Iraqi Christians have fled, and those who remained have been targets of murder, extortion, and kidnapping by Islamists, who...
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Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites
From 1920 to 1936, Syria’s Alawites enjoyed their own separate autonomous state in French-ruled Syria. First, it was known explicitly as the Alawite State and from 1930 to 1936, as Latakia Governorate. In response to pressure from the Sunni majority, France dissolved the Alawites’ state and forcibly incorporated it into the Sunni-dominated areas. Needless to...
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Syria: Idiocy Meets Mendacity
To be charitable to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry et al, their case for starting war against Syria now is no worse than Bill Clinton’s and Madeleine Albright’s excuse for attacking Serbia in 1999 or George W. Bush’s and Colin Powell’s justification for attacking Iraq in 2003. It is slightly better than...
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Mass Immigration Bad for America Bad for the Church
This Labor Day, elite opinion is pushing a piece of legislation that poses a clear threat to the interests of working Americans, the immigration bill supported by President Obama and passed by the Senate. By massively increasing legal immigration and regularizing illegal immigration, this bill promises to further depress wages and to throw more Americans...
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Learning to Hate George Zimmerman
The 2013 Summer of Race has come to a close, and thanks to endless badgering from the media, America remains sharply divided. We’re told that on one side are those who care deeply about the plight of blacks in America and, on the other, are racists of varying degrees who are glad that George Zimmerman...
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Amnesty, for the Record
It is not a stretch, perhaps, to regard the Senate vote of over two thirds (68-32) in favor of a mass amnesty of illegal immigrants as signaling the eclipse of the historic American people, those brave and liberty-loving folk who created the United States out of a continental wilderness. The bill has the Orwellian title...
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The Solipsistic State
The New York Times’ headline for Thursday, July 4, 2013, printed above a nearly page-wide photograph showing a spectacular eruption of fireworks in the nighttime sky above Cairo, read Egypt Army Ousts Morsi, Suspends Charter. Almost an earth’s half-turn apart, Egypt celebrated the downfall of her year-old “democracy,” while the United States of America memorialized...
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The Pike
The French wordsmith Romain Rolland, himself no slouch at being derivative as a thinker, likened his Italian contemporary Gabriele d’Annunzio to a pike, the freshwater predator famous for lying still and snapping at whatever comes. What stood for prey in this simile were the ideas of d’Annunzio’s immediate literary predecessors or near coevals, which made...
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Democracy Is Overrated
If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word democracy where Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life. (Just kidding: I shall wait for the...
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A Difficult Decade
James Patterson’s controlling idea is that the 60’s became the 60’s in 1965, and that this represented an “Eve of Destruction.” One struggles for about 300 pages trying to find out . . . destruction of what? The title comes from a long-forgotten song by a long-forgotten singer, Barry McGuire. “Eve of Destruction” did get...
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Persecutions to Come
“The only true spirit of tolerance consists in our conscientious toleration of each other’s intolerance.” —S.T. Coleridge Consider the unfortunate case of Prof. Thomas Klocek, whose story is one of many examples of intolerance recounted in D.A. Carson’s most recent book. Klocek engaged in a brief debate with a group of Palestinian student activists at...
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The Best Schooling Money Can Buy
Well, the jury, they see their facts. My thoughts of the jury, they old, that’s old-school people. We in a new school, our generation, my generation. Poor Rachel Jeantel has been ridiculed for her diction, elocution, and irrationality, but in her interview with Piers Morgan she makes a valid point in contrasting “old-school people” who...
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Lynchings and Litmus Tests
When it comes to race, life in America resembles nothing so much as a reenactment of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” That story, you’ll recall, depicted a town that seemed normal—except that, once every year, there would be a lottery, and if you picked the one black stone among so many white ones, the...
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Strong State, Strong Schools? The German System
Anglo-Americans habitually disparage the “socialist” Europeans, as if it were just or fair to lump all Continental economies under one pejorative label. Rather than relying on epithets, however, would-be economic and educational reformers should take a closer look at Germany, where the combination of regulated markets and the welfare state (what the Germans call the...
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Slavery, or Not
Joseph E. Fallon’s assertion (in “The North’s Southern Cash Cow,” Vital Signs, June) that the reason the South seceded “was the tariff, not slavery” is simply wrong. The loss of revenue from the American System of tariffs may have been one of the reasons the North waged war against the South. But the South’s main...
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Iron Lady
Englishman Michael Stenton’s article “Margaret Thatcher” (Correspondence, June) never once mentions Thatcher’s hatred of the Irish, especially Catholics, which caused her to commit war crimes in Northern Ireland—crimes for which she should have been tried at The Hague. These include gladly allowing ten IRA hunger strikers to starve themselves to death at Long Kesh prison...
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Old Route 66
Now, I’m a poor Oakie and I’m heading out west. I’m pulling a long trailer and my car’s doing its best. We hit a long mountain and she began to boil. She blew a head gasket and it started dripping oil. The wheels is out of balance, she shimmies and she shakes. But it keeps...
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The College Bubble
The university graduation season this past spring dumped another seven million job seekers onto the sputtering economy. A June headline in the New York Times painted a dismal picture of their likelihood of finding employment: “Degrees but No Guarantees: Faltering Economy . . . Dims Prospects for Graduates.” In response, the mortarboard horde took to...
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A Tale of Two Islamists
Two waves of popular protests against Islamist regimes, one in Turkey and the other in Egypt, have produced notably different outcomes. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has weathered the storm, while President Mohamed Morsi was removed from office by the military. In view of the similarities between Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) and Morsi’s...
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The Other Dylan
I enjoyed Dr. Thomas Fleming’s “Topsy-Turvy” (Perspective, June). But I thought his gratuitous denigration of Jakob Dylan both unnecessary and ill informed. I am not some Jakob Dylan “fanboy”; in fact, the only album I had owned is the Wallflowers’ 1996 Bringing Down the Horse, which is a fine piece of pop music. Dr. Fleming’s...
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Old Heresies Die Hard
The NAACP of North Carolina has seen to it that the moribund century-old teachings of theological liberals are still given voice in state politics. Although few people in the 21st century specifically invoke Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel, it is very much alive and well in North Carolina with “Moral Monday.” A creation of the North...
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Forever 1965
In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Under the formula, states or their political subdivisions are “covered jurisdictions” if they maintained in the 1960’s and early 70’s tests or devices (e.g., a literacy test or moral character requirement) as a prerequisite...
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Gay Marriage: The Last Chance
“A Cinderella moment,” gushed a gay-rights advocate when the Supreme Court announced its two landmark decisions in June. California’s Proposition 8—an amendment to its constitution—went down (Hollingsworth v. Perry), as did the federal Defense of Marriage Act (United States v. Windsor). The New York Times saw a “huge and gratifying” victory for equal rights. The...
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Horses and Carriages
I don’t know whether I buy completely into Mary Eberstadt’s arresting title. How does anybody “lose” God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth (as the Nicene Creed impressively denominates Him)? He just kind of went south? Let that go. We get the general, and indisputable, idea, which is that relationships between God and...
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Running Numbers
In William J. Quirk’s essay “How Goldman Sachs Is Swindling America’s Cities” (American Proscenium, July), Professor Quirk evidences profound misunderstanding of what is happening in an interest-rate swap. An interest-rate swap for a borrower is a way to remove or reduce interest-rate risk from a transaction. This was described adequately in Professor Quirk’s article. The...
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Reason’s Enemy
Copperhead Produced by Swordspoint Productions Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Bill Kauffman Distributed by Brainstorm Media What makes a good war story? Cannons, bombs, bloody bodies, and bounding heroes? Stephen Crane’s short story “An Episode of War” demonstrates it can be achieved by other means. It fully registers the madness, horror, and folly...
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Obama: The Audacity of a Dope
Author John Lott of “More Guns, Less Crime” fame had this to say about a personal encounter with the future POTUS during his time at the University of Chicago law school in his latest book (hat tip to Mark Brennan and David Gordon): “I first met him in 1996, shortly after my research on concealed...
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Six Paragraphs In Search of an Author
And a point. Everyone I know is asking me why we are going to bomb Syria. There is a rarely a simple answer to such questions, but if we look closely at the would-be bombers–the leaders of Turkey and France for example, perhaps we can gain some insight. The latest coalition of the willing might...
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The Labor Shortage
The New York Times is suddenly concerned about declining birthrates in continental Europe, and especially in Germany. Having beaten the drums for decades on the dangers of overpopulation (not to mention the threat of resurgent neo-Nazism ever lurking below the surface of polite German society), the Times might reasonably be expected to rejoice at the news that, “In...
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Syria: A Classic False Flag Atrocity
Whenever there is a widely publicized atrocity in a country gripped by civil war, followed by an orgy of the pornography of compassion, it is sensible to ask cui bono and to examine all evidence in minute detail. When an incident is immediately used as grist for the interventionist mill, it is reasonable to assume...
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Reflections from Aruba
Last night I came back from a marvelous six-day sojourn in the tropical paradise of Aruba, where I pondered the future of paleoconservatism over many a glass of (Beefeater) gin and tonic. The first thing that stood out in that tiny island of Caribbean Europe (Aruba only became an autonomous part of Holland in 1986)...
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Meandering and Craven
Last Friday, Commonweal published an essay by former First Things editor Jody Bottum entitled “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage.” The reaction of National Review’s Michael Potemra was to pronounce Bottum’s piece “fascinating and brave.” A less apt description is hard to imagine. Bottum’s essay is so meandering that it is...
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Dead Souls of a Cultural Revolution
Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell. Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The latter said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.” As...
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Lincoln and the Chelsea Girl
Chelsea, otherwise known as Bradley Manning, has petitioned the US Army to give him transgender procedures that will enable him to spend his 35 years pretending to be a woman in a woman’s prison. Apart from the surgeries and hormone therapy involved, it sounds like a great idea. I mean, imagine the film version starring...
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Death in Oklahoma
Earlier this week, Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player, was brutally killed in Duncan, Oklahoma. Police have charged James Edwards and Chancey Luna with first degree murder for killing Lane. Lane was white; Edwards and Luna are black, though an accomplice, Michael Jones, charged with being an accessory after the fact, is white. Australian papers...
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Boredom in the Leisure Class
In Duncan Oklahoma, two black “teens,” driven by a white teen driver, murdered a complete stranger–an Australian student and baseball player. The only motive given so far is that they were bored. Since the victim was white and at least one of the three a devotee of the racist thug doggerel known as rap, there...
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Who Owns the Future?
In the near term, bet on the men with the guns. The Egyptian Army, being slowly squeezed out of its central role in the nation’s life by Mohammed Morsi, waited for the moment to oust the elected president and crush his Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi was deposed and arrested, and the Brotherhood leaders rounded up and...
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Detroit’s Bankruptcy and The New York Times Idiocy
Like a broken clock taking its twice-a-day victory lap, the New York Times weighed in this morning on Detroit’s bankruptcy. The reason? It’s finger-pointing time. And, when money is the issue, the Times’ ink-stained fingers reflexively point to banks, all of which are big, bad, and beyond the reach of regulators. And now it looks...
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The Brotherhood’s Just Deserts
The really important news from Egypt is not the “martyrdom” of some hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and underage human shields set up for sacrifice by their leaders. It is not the brutality of the security forces fighting the emergence of a Khalifate within the state. It is the targeting of dozens of Christian churches, institutions and...
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Voting Wrongs
At The Nation someone named Ari Berman is foaming at the mouth over North Carolina’s sensible decision to require official identification documents to register voters and permit them to vote. This “voter suppression law,” he positively shrieks, is “the worst in the nation.” Nearly everyone who is not a leftwing faddist is aware, first, that North...
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Sweeping Away the Unwanted Babies
The left-wing media painted the legislation restricting abortions in Texas with the broadest brush. “Sweeping” was the most common adjective. As in “’It is a very happy, celebratory day,’” Perry said before signing the sweeping antiabortion measure” (Salon); “Gov. Rick Perry signs sweeping abortion bill” (ABC News); or “Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed sweeping new...
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Do We Really Want a Cold War II?
“There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking,” said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin. The reason: Putin’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at...
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The Stillborn Political Career of Australia’s Sarah Palin
Twenty-seven-year-old Stephanie Bannister was running for office in Australia’s state of Queensland as a candidate for the rightwing One Nation party that takes an admirably strong stance against mass immigration. Several days into her political careers (48 hours according to some reports), Bannister gave an interview in which she made several statements that showed...