In the 2012 election, same-sex marriage made gains at the ballot box for the first time—however narrowly—in all four states where “marriage equality” was presented to the voters for decision. Have the American people been successfully fooled? Maybe the more germane question is, Are large numbers of the American people self-deceived about homosexuality? We must...
Year: 2013
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Death Becomes Him
When 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 people, most of them children, after killing his own mother at home, the nation went into one of its periodic orgies of recrimination—mostly directed at the National Rifle Association, which had to shut down its Facebook and Twitter accounts thanks to the...
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Institutionalizing Compassion
Writing in the mid-1980’s, Forrest McDonald observed that America’s founders would have recognized their handiwork as late as the early 1960’s, but not after. Despite technological changes, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and two world wars, the governments most Americans dealt with were state and local. Except for the draft board...
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Big Brother’s Big Plans
Some people have no sense of humor. In the summer of 1998, Eric Rudolph, bomber of two abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, was on the run from the law in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Scores of FBI agents and other officials, trailed by reporters and television crews,...
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Götterdämmerung, Eight Decades Later
Eighty years ago today, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Germany’s Chancellor. The old Marshal, a Junker through and through, did so unwillingly. He disliked “that Austrian corporal”—he seldom uttered Hitler’s name—from the moment they first met, in October 1931. The antipathy was mutual, with Hitler often referring to Hindenburg—in private—as “that old fool.”...
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Fallacies
Probably all societies work better with a certain quantity of comfortable delusions, but America seems to operate with nothing but delusions. Large policies have been and continue to be based on an imaginary view of the world which trumps common sense: • You can have a First World economy and military with a Third...
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The Lessons of In Amenas
Last week’s attack on the Algerian gas facility at In Amenas was the most elaborate jihadist assault ever conducted on African soil. It was also the most spectacular action of its kind since November 2008, when Islamic terrorists carried out a series of coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Bombay (aka “Mumbai”), India’s largest...
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A Band of Brothers No More
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon was largely eliminating restrictions on women serving in combat units. This is perfectly consistent with the egalitarian ideology to which the Obama Administration is committed. However, it ignores the reasons why Western armies have never included women in combat units, apart from a few exceptional circumstances. ...
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Is Algeria Next?
On January 16 Islamic militants staged an audacious attack on a major natural gas complex in southeastern Algeria, 800 miles southeast from the capital. A jihadist group calling itself the Masked Brigade—led by Moktar Belmoktar, the fierce one-eyed veteran of the Afghan war and a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—claimed responsibility...
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Back to the Stone Age II E
What is the alternative to respect for responsible authority? If we assume that all foods, recreations, forms of music, and manners of life are equal, then Liberals are right to demand social, political, and tax neutrality on traditional sauerkraut and on every other issue that might involve government control, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and...
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An Albanian Travelogue
I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...
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Petitioning Satan
Talk of secession is in the air. A number of internet petitions from several states, asking to be allowed to leave the Union, have garnered tens of thousands of signatures. Unsurprisingly, Texas leads the list, and Ron Paul has endorsed the idea. According to him, “secession is a deeply American principle.” True enough, which is...
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The Folly of Propositional Democracy
California continues its essential role as the proving ground for bad ideas. The latest is the demolition of “popular” initiatives to decide important issues. Of the 11 initiatives on the ballot last November in the Golden State, 8 were funded primarily by multimillionaires, according to MapLight, which tracks election funding. And Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry...
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Enemies
Skyfall Produced by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Eon Productions Directed by Sam Mendes Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan Distributed by Columbia Pictures Lincoln Produced by 20th Century Fox and Dreamworks Pictures Directed by Steven Spielberg Written by Tony Kushner Distributed by Touchstone Pictures No less an authority than Vatican City’s daily newspaper,...
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The Joys of Winter
On the North Slope: Poems by Catharine Savage Brosman Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 129 pp., $17.00 The poems in this ninth full-length collection by Catharine Savage Brosman could have been composed only by a poet who has lived, studied, and written well through the spring, summer, and autumn and now on into the winter...
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Portrait of Lincoln, With Warts
The publication of the last volume of William Marvel’s four-volume history of “Mr. Lincoln’s War” completes one of the more remarkable historical works of our time. Marvel is an “amateur,” nonacademic, historian. That is not a remarkable, but rather an old and honorable, thing. This is what is remarkable: I can think of no active...
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High Times for Democracy
When George McGovern died, aged 90, two weeks before the last general election, the obituaries rightly praised his long and fitfully distinguished record as a U.S. representative and senator, his years of military service, his plucky presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, and his principled opposition to the Vietnam War, among other such causes. Unlike the...
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Shadow of a Shade
The cover of this book describes the late Joseph Sobran as “one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century” and notes that he has often been compared with G.K. Chesterton and H.L. Mencken. As a lifelong admirer of Mencken and his work, I must say that I find the comparison an unfair one—unfair to...
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Handgun Culture
Bob Costas fired off a lecture during prime-time NBC coverage of the NFL that outraged some political commentators and fans. The speech was in response to a murder-suicide committed by Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, 25, who killed Kasandra Perkins, 22, the mother of his infant daughter, before kneeling, making the sign of the...
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A Penny for Your Chomsky
“O chom kolonka?” asked my son on the telephone. We’ve always spoken Russian to each other, he and I, even though Nikolai was born in London and never so much as visited the country of his father’s birth. “What’s your column going to be about?” I must admit I hadn’t known the answer till he’d...
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Predators
In an earlier phase of my career, I researched the subject of serial murder. What struck me repeatedly was how many of the cases defied the common stereotype of the lone Jack the Ripper figure, always a white male. In fact, multiple homicide is an equal-opportunity career: Many offenders are female, and all ethnic groups...
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What Was Not Lost
The name of this book’s subject doesn’t appear in the text proper until page 14, and then as that of an adult attending the opening in London’s Bloomsbury of the Poetry Bookshop on January 8, 1913. The celebratory crowd was salted with poets, beginning with the proprietor, Harold Monro, who intended to use the store...
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The Polish Question
In his review of Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, by Frank Costigliola (“Diplomacy, Good and Bad,” December), George W. Liebmann writes, “Czechoslovakia had outflanked Poland in 1939 . . . ” Fascinating. It is especially fascinating in view of the fact that the Munich Pact of 1938 had dismembered...
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Making More of the House
Throughout the 2012 political season, attention was fixed on the contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney. A few other races garnered some media attention, but Americans treated the presidential election as the Super Bowl of politics. The winner, we were told, would chart the nation’s future. Largely lost in the presidential hype were the...
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How Conservatives Could Win
Republicans, after their comprehensive defeat on November 6, have been going through an identity crisis. Defeated Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown said, “We need to be a larger tent party.” A Republican aide adds, “We need candidates who are capable of articulating their policy positions without alienating massive voting blocs.” The Economist advised that, if the...
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It Will Be Sudden, It May Be Soon
The Roswell Alien Museum and Research Center is on Main Street, an avenue dotted with trinket shops and ads featuring a big-eyed “alien” hawking hamburgers, gasoline, and the wares of various convenience stores. At the north end of Roswell is the New Mexico Military Institute, while the flat, brown-gray expanse of the staked plains surrounds...
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The Flexible Second Term
The presidential election of 2012 was no ordinary contest. The University of Colorado’s political-science department had developed a model, based on the state of the U.S. economy, that had accurately predicted the outcome of every presidential election between 1980 and 2008. This year, the model predicted a Romney victory. The explanation for Obama’s victory lies...
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Sunday Dinner for the Boys
Once the airbase was operational, the streets were overflowing with uniforms, particularly on weekends. Most, like Stella Pegram’s husband, Mark, were Army Air Corps. A few were British. They would wander the streets on Sunday mornings, staring into the windows of closed shops, hoping to be hailed and invited to dinner by some local family. ...
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Plane Crashes
Before World War II, airplanes were something of an oddity in the skies over Framalopa. We would stop and gaze at a Piper Cub chugging along through air, occasionally cutting its motor and gliding for a few seconds while we held our breath. I can’t recall ever seeing a commercial airliner winging its way from...
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Dead Souls
Barack Obama’s second presidential triumph has left many American conservatives feeling stranded. It is as if they have become aliens in their native land. Are conservatives simply sore losers, or does their sense of alienation correspond to a seismic disturbance in America’s political terrain? It is hard to say, but this much seems clear: When...
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One Crisis Averted
Barack Obama’s re-election, while socially, culturally, and morally disastrous for the country, may prove the lesser of two evils when it comes to foreign policy, according to some pundits. Perhaps, but only because Obama’s primary focus is on irreversibly changing the character and ethnic composition of the United States. Republicans, in the meantime, learn nothing...
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Cops on Camels
This is the best news I’ve had since both the governor of the state of New York and a congressman from the depraved city of New York had to resign because of sex scandals. The latest good news is that Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer. Unfortunately, the kicking...