A burbling controversy of Olympic proportions has found its way to Moscow via Lausanne. On one side the forces of evil are arrayed behind the stallion-riding Vladimir Putin and his “anti-gay” law (which sailed through the Duma in June). On the other are the forces of absolute equality, led by the bribe-swilling International Olympic...
Year: 2013
Post
Pardon, Sam: A Slight Amendment
Our lamented friend Sam Francis scored big when he labeled the Democrats as “the evil party” and the Republicans as “the stupid party.” These telling characterizations have appealed to many later observers, as have other of Sam’s apt phrases, like “anarchotyranny.” Sam was always in earnest but his comments were often laced with humour. He...
Post
Al Qaida in Perspective
Apparently, the threat is both serious and specific. The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens. The threat comes from Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization. “After Benghazi,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “these Al Qaida...
Post
Staring at Hiroshima From Babel
August 6 marks the 68th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima. One goal, many claimed, was to “weaken the resolve” of the Japanese to fight by inspiring terror (what we now call “shock and awe”) in the hearts of our enemies, combatant and civilian. Said Gen. George Marshall, “It’s no good to warn...
Post
Istanbul 2013 = Moscow 1937?
After a show trial that lasted for five years and would’ve made Josef Stalin and Andrei Vyshinsky proud, 354 opponents of Tayyip Recep Erdogan’s Islamist regime have been found guilty. The main defendant, Gen. Ilker Basbug, who led Turkey’s armed forces in 2008-2010 was given a life sentence. The head of the socialist-secular nationalist...
Post
Obama Saves America Again
The Obama administration, citing an ominous increase in online chatter in the terrorist community, has closed down 19 diplomatic posts in Muslim countries, and this morning (5 August) the State Department revealed that they will stay closed because of the continuing threat. It is perfectly possible that there the CIA has detected a...
Post
Snowden’s Asylum
“We’re extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. He added that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral...
Post
The Worst Republican Nominee Ever
John McCain is back in the news. The media is exulting that “The Straight Talk Express Is Back” because McCain has taken to denouncing members of his own party as “wacko birds” and to carrying water for Obama in the Senate. As bad as Obama has been, America is probably fortunate that McCain never made it to the White...
Post
Russia’s Illegal Immigration Problem Flares Up
Russian authorities set up a detention camp for illegal immigrants, after 4,500 of them were arrested in Moscow during raids on garment factories and markets. The arrested illegals were Vietnamese, Syrians, Egyptians, and Moroccans, along with the usual citizens of former Soviet Central Asian republics. Raids are now taking place in St. Petersburg, where...
Post
No Further E.U, Enlargement After Croatia
On July 1 Croatia became the 28th country to join the European Union, and on current form there will be no further enlargement for many years to come. A look at the glaring dysfunctions in Croatia’s accession, compared to the double standards Brussels imposes on Serbia and Ukraine, is indicative of the peculiar mitteleuropäisch view of what...
Post
Liberals, Liturgy, and Lattes
Making the rounds in the paste-a-link world is an editorial by a young religion blogger, Rachel Held Evans: “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church.” The reason for its frequent pasting is that she mentions how unimpressed the Millennials (those born from roughly the 1980’s into the 2000’s) are with the trappings of today’s hip...
Post
The Country Against the Empire
A prophet and a polemicist, David Gelernter displays anything but a light touch in this attack on “imperial academia” and what it has wrought. Like most prophets, Gelernter the polemicist hopes to be proved wrong. Perhaps, with our culture dismantled and the “Obamacrats” in charge, the contest is over—game, set, and match. Tennis was once...
Post
Of Rats and Men
There are people, in all likelihood a majority, who are by nature obedient. Their lot is to play Sid Sawyer to whatever Aunt Polly comes along, whether the authority in question is a democratically elected leader or an up-to-his-elbows-in-blood dictator. As though stuck in some epochal centrifuge, they go with the flow, tirelessly, unwaveringly, always...
Post
Moonglade
When Frank Bronkowski, my father, was alive, he’d read and reread his Polish newspapers, the Gwiazda Polarna, the Nowy Dziennik. He’d speak no English on Sundays and drink a Polish beer. His pocket watch—brought from the old country—stands in its place of honor on the dining-room table. Next to it, Ma has fresh peonies in...
Post
Books Are for Blockheads!
Back in April, my old friend D.B. “Dukie” Kitchens called to inform me that I should soon expect in the mail an invitation to the inaugural Patriot Book Awards ceremony, to be held in Atlanta in late May. “What did I do to deserve this honor?” I asked. “Nothing,” Dukie replied. “I got your name...
Post
Heartless Irony
What Maisie Knew Produced by Red Crown Productions Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel Screenplay by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright Distributed by Millennium Entertainment Some people should not have children. This is one way to read Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew. Another way, the way James preferred, is to marvel...
Post
Faith in the Dock
What was once known as the West—Western Europe and North America—has largely abandoned its Christian roots and fallen into apostasy. In fact, it has succumbed to neopaganism—a practical atheism that, similar to 18th-century Deism, relegates God (if He exists) to a peripheral role in one’s life. People in increasing numbers do not believe it is...
Post
Finding Beauty
Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky In the last five years, a heightened awareness of beauty and the mystery of beauty has played with my senses more than at any other time in my life, excluding, perhaps, my childhood, when the world so often...
Post
Living the Good Life
Many generations ago, when our country was very new in the political sense but very old still in respect of its general culture, many educated men and women kept what were in those days called commonplace books, mainly a compendium of quotations gleaned from their quotidian reading. The practice lapsed a century and a half...
Post
Too Much is Never Enough
Researchers report significantly increased rates of suicide among U.S. military personnel, college students, and baby boomers. Until now, suicide was most prevalent among teenagers and elderly persons. Journalists have suggested a number of explanations for the phenomenon, among the more plausible of them the structural collapse of the American family in which troubled, lonely, and...
Post
Pleasure-Marrying: The Next Human Right
In my recent piece “Hell-Bent,” one of my overarching themes was that the rush to approve same-sex marriage was really about self-identified “heterosexuals” seeking approval for themselves. Legally sanctioned “gay marriage” is a kind of public proclamation that the constraints of traditional morality do not apply. As if to prove my point, Time‘s new cover story is...
Post
My Big Brother
Not long ago, while reading A.J.P. Taylor’s impressively turgid English History: 1914-1945, I found, suspended in the tepid depths of all the fussily annotated tables and statistics, a sentence that all but knocked me out of my chair. It read, “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could cheerfully grow old and hardly notice the...
Post
Joking Through the Apocalypse
Mark Steyn is the only neoconservative who can still make you laugh. David Brooks could, when he and I worked at the Washington Times in the mid-1980’s; he was great with the jokes in person and in writing. But after Brooks was hired at the New York Times in 2003, he took on the High...
Post
The Culture War Crosses the Atlantic
The course of 2013 in France, Ireland, and Britain provides important lessons for those resisting the left’s attempt to remove Christian influence from public life in America. On April 23, the Socialist government of François Hollande succeeded in making France the 14th country to legalize gay marriage, something he had promised to do during his...
Post
I Was a Stranger, and You Deported Me
In early May, a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table (“EIT”) held a press conference and announced the unleashing of a $250,000 advertising campaign. The goal of this media blitz is to persuade American Christians to support the Gang of Eight’s immigration legislation (The Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013). The...
Post
Entitlement Devolution
As a friend of many years, who has often disagreed with Thomas Fleming, I especially appreciated his perspicacious article, “Topsy-Turvy” (Perspective), in the June issue of Chronicles. For in that article, amid his varied historical analogies and references, he prompted me not only to reconsider in a new light the formal constitutional language of Soviet...
Post
Halcyon Summer
Why is it that summers used to last so much longer back then? School would be out in early June, and by the time horrid September rolled around, it seemed three years had passed. What fun it was to be young, and for it to be summer! No homework, no need to stay in shape,...
Post
Goodbye to All What?
As far back as I can remember, I had the feeling that I had been born some time after the end of everything that mattered. Yes, there was still an abundance of material comforts and some vestiges of marriage and religion, but vanishing before our eyes—like the stars in the sky faded by street lights—were...
Post
Syria: Avoiding Another Quagmire
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned of the potential consequences of U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict. It could hinder humanitarian relief operations, he said, embroil the United States in a significant, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment, and strain relationships around the world. “And finally,” he...
Post
End of the World of Books
The morning after Thanksgiving I completed the manuscript of my last book, which will be published by Harvard University Press—a short book, and I still had some work on it. But I had a sense of accomplishment and a day of relief, whence I had a couple of stiff drinks in my cozy living room...
Post
Begging the Question
The Defense of Marriage Act is history—a development that should have surprised no one. I’m tempted to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” but the fact that passing DOMA in the first place was one of the most disastrously stupid moves the Republican Party has made over the past 20 years does not change the...
Post
Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
Post
Snooping Gets Personal
Washington is reeling from revelations that the NSA is turning the country into a virtual Panopticon. Americans are now learning that all our phone calls are turned over to the feds, who also have their tentacles in the servers of the major internet providers. The whistle-blower, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a remarkably articulate former CIA employee...
Post
Cuba: Distorted History, Different Rules
This past May in Newark, the FBI added former Black Liberation Army mercenary Joanne Chesimard to its Most Wanted Terrorists list at a ceremony held on the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s most infamous cop killing. Now known as Assata Shakur, the step-aunt of the late rapper Tupac Shakur became the 46th fugitive—as well as...
Post
What Is To Be Done About “Gay Marriage”?
I have filled enough pages on same-sex marriage to make a book, at least by the low standards of neoconservative publishing, and only one important question remains to be settled: What is to be done? It is an important question, not only because marriage is a vital part of ordinary life, but also because...
Post
Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin
Four-and-a-half months into Pope Francis’s pontificate, it’s become more than a little tiresome to hear both his admirers and his detractors compare him with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. “Benedict would never have done . . . ” rolls as easily off the lips of aging Call to Action types as it does off the...
Post
Egypt’s Crisis (II)
The U.S. policy on Egypt is in disarray, and both camps distrust America—the Muslim Brotherhood by default, its opponents from experience. Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as Morsi’s key foreign aider and abettor during his attempt to grab complete power in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, and with good reason. She came...
Post
College Students for Infanticide
American college students never cease to unpleasantly surprise us (hat tip to Mark Brennan). Dan Jordan of the Media Research Center circulated a petition on George Washington University’s campus, asking students to sign in support of fourth (yes, you read it right, fourth!) trimester abortions. Jordan explained to the students that “If you don’t know...
Post
Obama’s Moment – A Deal With Iran!
In his second term, Richard Nixon had Watergate, but also the rescue of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. In his second term, Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, but also a treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe, his “tear-down-this-wall” moment in Berlin and his lead role in ending the Cold War. In his...
Post
The Egyptian Crisis
The ongoing crisis in Egypt, prima facie, is a case of irresistible force (the army) meeting an immovable object (the Muslim Brotherhood, MB). The officers have declared that “the clock cannot be turned back” (i.e. Morsi will not be reinstated), while the deposed president’s supporters aver that they will settle for nothing less than the...
Post
Gay Times on the Right
Hardly a day goes by that someone does not email or telephone me with the news that some allegedly conservative writer has finally endorsed “Gay Marriage.” I’d rather not name names, but the most amusing so far has been an online screed declaring Andrew Sullivan the “most important political writer of his generation.” All...
Post
The Lincoln Worshippers Strike Again
The “resignation” of Rand Paul’s aide Jack “Southern Avenger” Hunter was another broadside cannon shot fired in the war between us paleos and the liberals and neocons over Abraham Lincoln, a war that started with the attack on the late M.E. Bradford. The mainstream howled in outrage over Hunter’s 2004 column “John Wilkes Booth Was Right”. Now,...
Post
Helen Thomas: 92 Years of Dhimmitude
Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas passed away last week at the age ninety-two. The most noticeable aspect of her media persona was her life-long support for Islamic terrorists. She openly supported the Shiite terror group Hezbollah, even proclaiming to a CNN cameraman: “Thank God for Hezbollah” and said that Israeli Jews “should go...
Post
A Small Miracle
It’s as if The Nation admitted Alger Hiss’s guilt, The New Republic discovered the virtues of evangelical Christianity, or National Review concluded that Barack Obama has been an outstanding president. Yesterday, Consumer Reports gave the top ranking of any sedan to the 2014 Chevrolet Impala, the first American sedan the magazine has rated best in 20 years. The disdain of Consumer Reports for American cars is...
Post
Leading From Behind Al Sharpton
“The First Black President … Spoke First as a Black American,” ran the banner headline of Sunday’s Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up? “A week of protests outside the White House, pressure building on him...
Post
When Is Barack Going to Get Over Trayvon?
Barack Hussein Obama can’t seem to get over the Trayvon Martin case. First, it was his statement that his son would look (and act ?) like Trayvon. Now, he says that “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago”. One wonders what next pearl of wisdom will escape the lips of POTUS: “I...
Post
George Zimmerman’s Acquittal: Live Not By Lies
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous admonition to “live not by lies” was the first thing that came to mind when the long-suffering George Zimmerman was finally acquitted. However, I am hesitant to engage to in jubilant ululation since justice would’ve truly been served if Zimmerman was not indicted and put on trial. Zimmerman’s ordeal reminded me of...
Post
Volhynia Massacres: Polish Sorrow, Ukranian Denial
Yesterday, Poland commemorated the 70th anniversary of the 1943-44 Volhynia and Eastern Galicia massacres perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) led by Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Bands of armed Ukrainians descended upon Polish villages in Galicia and Volhynia and massacred at least 40,000...
Post
Egypt: A Failing State
Mohamed Morsi’s removal from power is not a “massive blow” to political Islam, much less the proof of its failure. It is the result of the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to monopolize all power, coupled with the MB government’s gross economic and social mismanagement. The Army intervened because the stability of the state was threatened, and...
Post
Israel: Assad’s Not So Secret Ally
Just yesterday, according to the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency, a court in central Israel sentenced an Israeli Arab to 30 months in prison for joining the anti-Assad rebels in Syria. The defendant crossed over to Syria from Turkey and spent six days training with the Islamist rebels, who asked him to carry out a...