“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Ben Franklin is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often...
Year: 2013
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They Don’t Like Hot Dogs And They Don’t Like Us
Much of the discussion over the immigration bill that just passed the Senate focuses on how it will deal with illegal immigration. But much of the financial backing for the bill comes from Silicon Valley, which wants to vastly increase legal immigration, particularly the H1B visa program, which allows American employers to import technical...
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Egypt: The Script Plays Out
The little piece on Egypt I scribbled out and I posted the other day could have been put up any time since the beginning of the Cairo protests, planned, supported, and subsidized by the US Department of State. If I can find a moment, I’ll revise and expand, but for now, I am just...
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A Modest Proposal for Speech Control
Can we be adult about this? Can we finally say publicly what so many people believe privately—namely, that the whole Bill of Rights thing was a nice idea in its day, but it’s time to move on? Now, before you take offense, let’s think practically about this. Yes, the Bill of Rights has all these...
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Giulio Andreotti: A Career (Full Article
Almost two months have passed since the death of Giulio Andreotti, arguably the most powerful politician in Italy’s post-World War II history. In recent weeks I have struggled with a draft obituary of this complex man who deserves to be better known abroad, but the task proved daunting. There are too many loose ends, strange...
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A Scandalous Presidency
“Unfortunately you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all of our problems,” President Barack Obama told students at Ohio State on May 5. Some of these same voices do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that...
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A Fine Kettle of Fish
If you thought comedy was dead, think again. There’s always John Podhoretz, the ferociously bellicose neocon who makes Patton and Rommel sound like popinjays when he thunders away, urging Uncle Sam to attack and crush his enemies wherever they might be hiding. Beating the war drums is very old hat here in the good old...
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Our Dangerous Foreign-Policy Freeloaders
During the late winter and early spring of 2013, yet another crisis involving North Korea occupied the attention of U.S. officials and much of the news media. Not only did Pyongyang conduct a nuclear test, but the government of Kim Jong-un issued shrill threats against both South Korea and the United States. South Korea’s new...
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Egypt–Playing By the Rules
It is almost as if Mohammed Morsi has been reading Chronicles–or at least studying Egyptian history. (And if he fails–as I hope he does–to take decisive action, he will soon be an unimportant piece of that history.) Nightmares like Egypt can be ruled in only one of two ways: either by a fanatical religious tyranny...
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Looking Backwards
Gil Santana had it all: He was the model conservative for the new millennium. Gil was born and reared in Southern California, naturally, and his given name evoked the rich diversity of the state that had once symbolized the American dream: Kim Kwame Kaplan Santana, each part representing one fourth of his Korean, African, Jewish,...
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Your Tax Dollars At Work
Last week, Fr. Francois Mourad, a Syrian Catholic priest, was brutally murdered by Islamist rebels in Syria. There is some uncertainty as to whether Fr. Mourad was beheaded or shot, although it seems more likely that he was shot. What there is no doubt about is that his killers are part of the armed rebellion trying to topple the...
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How Goldman Sachs Is Swindling America’s Cities
Who do you suppose would get the better of it if the mayor of your city made a bet with Goldman Sachs on the direction of interest rates? Would you be surprised if the mayor lost, costing the city’s taxpayers millions of dollars? Do you think betting taxpayer dollars is legal? In the years leading...
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Learning Lincoln
With reference to Clyde Wilson’s “Civil War Cinema” (Vital Signs, May), I have to admit that I liked the movie Lincoln, in spite of its 21st-century sensibilities. Still, even I thought it was straining credulity to the breaking point when the black soldier started lecturing Lincoln on the various racial inequities in the Union Army. ...
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No Apologies for Chávez
Having been married to a Venezuelan and a resident of Caracas for nearly 25 years, I was extremely disappointed in Justin Raimondo’s “A Revolutionary Who Wasn’t” (Between the Lines, May). Hugo Chávez was indeed a revolutionary, from his initial attempt at a coup d’état in 1992 through his interminable hours-long speeches, his friendship with and support of...
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Keeping Taxes Highest
A Stalinist show trial was held on May 21 by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Their aim was to investigate “how individual and corporate taxpayers are shifting billions of dollars offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.” In the dock that day, Apple CEO Tim Cook found...
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Killing the Invader
I first saw it lying right under the fence, stretched out a good eight to ten feet long. A rope? Did I put that there? In the next moment I realized what it was. When I moved out to Sonoma County’s “wine country,” I knew there’d be wildlife—you know, birds, and maybe a few raccoons,...
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Cigarette Holders, Nicotine Gum
Is President Obama a “change agent” on the level of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a New New Deal comparable to FDR’s New Deal? Michael Grunwald’s book details the enactment and operation of Obama’s almost $800 billion stimulus bill, officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Though he covers only the first months...
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The Post-Suburban Jesus
By a generous estimate, evangelical Christians are as much as one third of the U.S. population. In fact, they are the only Christian demographic that has shown exuberant growth in recent decades—a period during which church attendance overall has been steadily eroding. A significant part of this growth has taken place in the nondenominational or...
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Hell-Bent: Why Gay Marriage Was Inevitable
Like it or not, gay marriage is here to stay. The Supreme Court ruling matters little. That was the case well before oral arguments were heard, and not for legal reasons. Yes, the fact that some states had already recognized it played a part, but the real reason gay marriage is now a permanent part...
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The APA: Sanctioning the Sexual Abuse of Children
At its May 2013 meeting in San Francisco, the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Among changes from the previous edition is the renaming of what was formerly termed “gender identity disorder.” (The American Medical Association uses the term “gender disorder,” classifying it as a...
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The Era of Our Discontent
In scientific culture, every subject is accepted as a legitimate one for quantifiable study, including subjects no wise man would venture to approach in such a manner. Hence academic researchers, boldly rushing in where mystics and poets fear to tread, feel encouraged to establish themselves as experts in matters to which the concept of expertise...
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Jihad From Within
The last major outburst of Muslim terrorism in London was on July 7, 2005, when four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s buses and subway trains. Of late, Londoners had begun to think that they were safe and that these acts of Islamic terror now only happened in such faraway places as Mumbai, Toulouse,...
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Mick Jagger at 70
“Ooh ooh baby, I got a message for you,” Sir Mick Jagger croons, among other endearments, on the most recent Rolling Stones single, the aptly titled “One More Shot.” The creative muse may have gone south for Jagger and the boys sometime during the first Nixon administration, but the marketing machinery keeps these specimens of...
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Citizens, Then and Now
There was a time, within living memory, when the label American was highly respected—perhaps the most respected term of nationality in the world. Probably most Americans have yet to take note, but that is no longer the case. A libertarian writer complains that the Boston bombers are referred to by government and media as Chechens. ...
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Threats That Cannot Be Ignored
While some communities—such as Portland, Oregon, and Birmingham, Alabama—report making progress toward police and community mental-health cooperation to reduce incidents of deadly violence, the complexities of aberrant behavior will continue to vex us until citizens and public officials are willing to intervene to prevent the violence. That is especially true when evidence clearly demonstrates that...
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Turkish Muslims Versus Dutch Foster Care
A nine-year-old boy has caused the simmering tension between Western Europeans and Muslim immigrants to boil over once again. This latest incident has occurred in the Netherlands, which over the past decade has become the poster child for failed Muslim integration. A boy named Yunus, born in the Netherlands to Turkish-Muslim immigrant parents, lives in...
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Onscreen Mobsters – Then and Now
In light of the recent untimely passing of James Gandolfini, I could not help but contrast his character Tony Soprano with the cinematic mafiosi of earlier times, especially the main characters of Sam Francis’ and Pat Buchanan’s favorite “The Godfather”. In many ways, Tony Soprano was a broken man, like Gandolfini himself. After all, could...
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Do Homosexuals Exist? Or, Where Do We Go From Here?
In March of this year over a million Frenchmen demonstrated on the streets of Paris against the legal institutionalization of gay marriage. As far as the media were concerned, this event was practically confidential. It is hard to imagine a similar scene taking place in the United States, but if it did, it would be...
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A Vast, Vulgar, Meretricious Beauty
The Great Gatsby Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Baz Luhrmann Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce Why do studios keep trying to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a film? Fitzgerald’s extraordinarily vivid prose and his unmatched descriptive powers would seem to make it a natural choice,...
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Targets Are Where You Find ‘Em!
To put this volume in perspective, we have to know that the cartoonist was a young amateur who actually considered making a career of the art, but was then drawn to another mode of expression—one which transcended, perhaps, her cartoons, but also sublated them. They were always a part of her imagination; the habit of...
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The Palin Doctrine
On U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’ … I say let Allah sort it out.” So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is not infrequently the case, she nailed it....
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Politically Incorrect Speech In Federal Court
A judge in the Eastern District of Michigan held that a high school economics teacher violated his student’s free speech rights for kicking him out of class (hat tip to Mark Brennan). The student, Daniel Glowacki, dared to voice disapproval of homosexuality – a major offense in today’s educational institutions. This took place back in...
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The Senate Turns Its Back On Working America
Today, the Senate passed an immigration bill that promises amnesty to illegal immigrants and a massive increase in legal immigration. If this bill becomes law, one of its predictable effects will be to drive down the wages of Americans, particularly working class Americans. Indeed, many millions of Americans are either unemployed or underemployed. This week, the Cleveland Plain...
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Ukraine’s Dilemma
Speaking at the end of the meeting of the EU-Ukraine Cooperation Council in Luxembourg on June 24, European Enlargement Commissioner Štefan Füle warned Ukraine that “time is running preciously short” for the government in Kiev to meet all European Union conditions in time to sign a free trade and association agreement in November. “Ukraine has made...
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An Op-Ed Ode to Abortion
The NYT recently published a brief op-ed piece by one Judy Nicastro – a self-described “non-religious”, “old school liberal” from Seattle. In fashionably maudlin prose, Nicastro writes about aborting her son at 23 weeks. That repulsive little article is a good example of the worldview of abortion proponents. Now, what was the reason for Nicastro’s decision...
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The Revolution Is
It is all too easy to get lost in the hurly-burly of contemporary politics, which is mostly about appetite, and miss larger and more fundamental changes that are taking place. Ideas we have long been told were characteristic of the American regime no longer have any place in the body politic. For instance, the...
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£1.7m to get rid of an Islamist terrorist
Looks like the British government will finally be able to rid its long-suffering citizens of the Muslim terrorist preacher (what a string of redundant adjectives!) Abu Qatada. After almost a decade of trying to throw out this troublemaker, who called for the murder of Jews and apostate Muslims and their families, Britain and Jordan...
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Immigration Bait and Switch
Tonight media reports are hyping a deal to add a border fence to the Amnesty Bill currently being considered in the Senate. Only the gullible will believe that such a fence will ever be built. After all, Congress authorized building a 700 mile border fence in 2006, but only 36 or so miles of the type of fence...
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Liars, Children, and the NSA
Yesterday’s congressional performances by the head of the National Security Administration and the deputy director of the FBI deserve an award, but it is the KIDS awards handed out for best children’s TV programs. Even an American adolescent should be able to spot the lies and contradictions. First, we were informed that surveillance...
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A Reluctant Warrior Tiptoes to War
Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two...
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Film Review: The Sweeney
The Sweeney, directed by Nick Love, 2012, 112 minutes. British crime dramas are often well done, but that is not the case with this movie knockoff of a popular 1970s television series about an elite London police squad. This is one of the most unintentionally (I think) silly films I have seen in a while. ...
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USA Against America: Arming Jihad
Living in America these days is something like being a character in a Philip K. Dick novel: Instead of learning from our mistakes and moving on, our leaders continue to hit the replay button, over and over and over. Syria is using chemical weapons against the rebels, so we are told, and leading...
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Home Truths Again
“Liberalism” is the predominant form of snobbery in our time. A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat. A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican. Nothing fails like success. But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action. The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August. I can...
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Sequester Semester 2013
In the summer of 2011 the US Congress voted to raise the national debt ceiling on the condition that a “super committee” of six democrats and six republicans would meet and hammer out a way to reduce the national deficit. If they could not come up with a plan by November 2012, automatic tax...
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Electing a New People
A bill that the media is touting as providing “comprehensive immigration reform” is currently making its way through the Senate. In essence, the bill will provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and vastly expand legal immigration, while doing nothing to prevent future illegal immigration. In fact, we know from past immigration amnesties that they...
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Turkey: The AKP Regime Is Not in Trouble, But Erdogan Is
Hundreds of Turkish police officers backed by armored cars moved in on Istanbul’s Taksim Square early Tuesday morning and reclaimed the site after pulling out on June 1. By midday bulldozers had removed barricades of paving stones and corrugated iron. The crackdown surprised protesters, hundreds of whom had been sleeping in a makeshift camp...
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Another White House Globalist
Whenever it is polically expedient, Barack Obama criticizes free trade. He did it in 2008, when he told Ohio primary voters that he would renegotiate NAFTA. He did it in 2012, when his campaign saturated the industrial Midwest with ads criticizing Mitt Romney for outsourcing jobs to China at Bain Capital. But these noises are...
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The Least Bad Option in Syria
Until a few weeks ago, political leaders in the United States and Western Europe had claimed with monotonous regularity that the government of Syria was on the verge of collapse. “Assad’s rule is coming to an end. It is inevitable,” Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told a Senate committee in...
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Outside Agitators
A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years...
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Gay Marriage, Before the Ruling
Justice [Antonin] Scalia: [W]hen did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? . . . Has it always been unconstitutional? . . . You say it is now unconstitutional. [Theodore Olson, attorney arguing that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional]: Yes. Justice Scalia: Was it always unconstitutional?...