The Holy Grail of modern political journalism is a fallen dictator’s gold taps. Mind you, the bloodsucking hypocrite need not be actually dead when the assorted hacks and hackettes barge into what, until the new government sent out its press release, had been his bathroom; it is quite enough if the villain of the piece...
Year: 2014
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An Optional Crisis for the U.S., an Existential Threat for Russia
In his latest RTTV interview our Foreign Affairs Editor discusses the developments in the Crimean Peninsula and elsewhere in Ukraine. Srdja Trifkovic: Ukraine is getting closer to disintegration, or at least a form of federalization to which the Russians can make a stabilizing contribution. Any attempt by the mobocracy that has gained power in Kiev...
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Brown Revolution in Ukraine: Vitali Klitschko, A Profile in Opportunism
The Brown Revolution leader most known, recognized, and respected by the West is former heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko. Unlike his allies Yatsenyuk and Tyahnybok, Klitschko’s past makes him an unlikely participant in the neo-nazi led overthrow of legitimate rule in Ukraine. Vitali “Dr. Ironfist” Klitschko was born to an exclusively Russian-speaking family in Soviet Central...
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Guvment Lookin’ Out for Me and You
Recently I ordered a bit of merchandise from a Carolina town about 30 miles away. It took some time to arrive. With a little research I discovered that the package had been sent by the USPS to Baltimore! And then to Charlotte, 90 miles from its destination and 120 miles from it place of shipping....
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I scream, you scream, we all scream for Ukraine
“Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?” is a line from the bad guy, played by John Travolta, in the 1996 action flick “Broken Arrow.” Not a great addition to our national culture, but slightly enjoyable at the time. The line keeps popping into my head during this Ukraine crisis. According to the...
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Sans-Culottes in the Subway
Taking the subway a few days ago, a subway ad grabbed my attention. Usually, the ads on the Big Bunelo/Big Burrito (formerly known as the Big Bagel) subway involve such gems as: “The Alliance for Gay, Lesbian, Queer, Confused, and Bi Asian Youth”, or “Addicted to Marijuana: Join This Confidential Study”. Well, there is a...
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Hating Your Own
Last May, an unnamed friend of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron was quoted referring to the Conservative Party’s base as “mad, swivel-eyed loons.” This extraordinary outburst illustrates the extent of the rift between Cameron and a large section of his party. Cameron and his progressive followers have never been a good fit for the Conservative...
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Leftist Culture, Leftist Memory
This book’s lugubrious title, Franco’s Crypt, indicates its partiality. Written in a fluid style befitting its author, who has published in the New York Times Book Review and served as editor for The Times Literary Supplement, the book draws on multiple sources, including necrology, photography, monuments, museums, art, literature, memoirs, histories, and school curricula. The...
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True Tar-Heel Tales
Uncle Bud “Now take this here Trayvion business,” said Uncle Bud. He stopped and took a sip, just like he always done before delivering his wisdom. Uncle Bud worn’t axtually my uncle. In fact, he worn’t no blood kin at all. He had once been married to Mama’s cousin. She had run off with a...
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Middle-Class Pretensions
When I was growing up in England 50 years ago, the newspapers still periodically caused a certain amount of mirth by “outing” a national figure as not some impeccably Eton-reared patrician, as his public image seemed to imply, but a horny-handed son of the soil who had gone to the local state school and taken...
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Muslim Murder in London
Last May, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two Muslim converts, both Christian apostates, deliberately ran down an off-duty British soldier, Lee Rigby, in their automobile on a main street in the London suburb of Woolwich. In front of eyewitnesses, they then repeatedly stabbed him and tried to behead him with a machete. Their trial and...
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The Way of Perfection
Paradoxically, Westerners of every faith and political opinion seem perennially unhappy with Western society, despite the West’s assurance that it is the best, most fair, most free, most enlightened, and most humane way of life in human history. The left faults Western institutions because they seem to it insufficiently fair and progressive, too much influenced...
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Up and Down in Palermo
The American billionaire Elon Musk, lately much in the news on account of his ambition to send apple pie, solar energy, PayPal, and Ninja Turtles to other planets in our galaxy, was once a cash-strapped college student. The experience, as he boasted to the Los Angeles Times, had taught him frugality: “I tried various experiments...
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The Poet Malgré Lui
Over 30 years ago, when I was a seminarian in Rome, one of my professors exclaimed, “John Ford is the Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century.” Fortunately, at Columbia University I had studied under Andrew Sarris, the famed “auteur” film critic, so I knew the context. In any case, Ford’s reputation as certainly one of...
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Pregnant With Meaning
Her Produced by Annapurna Pictures Written and directed by Spike Jonze Distributed by Warner Brothers Inside Llewyn Davis Produced by StudioCanal and Anton Capital Entertainment Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by CBS Films Her is directed by Spike Jonze, the inscrutable nom de cinema Adam Spiegel has adopted for himself. Set...
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A Corrupt Bargain
Careful readers have long suspected that the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was about something more sinister than bureaucratic ineptitude and Department of Justice stonewalling. The ATF allowed arms dealers in Arizona and New Mexico to sell weapons to individuals working for Mexican drug cartels in order, the DOJ claimed, to trace the movement of...
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Polemics on Polemics
When I delivered Liberty: The God That Failed into the hands of my publisher, I did so with no little trepidation. Supported entirely by Protestant, secular academic, and other non-Catholic sources, including the work of numerous historians of the first rank, its detailed, 700-page counternarrative of the rise and fall of what the moderns call...
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Upstarts Like Shakespeare
I’ve no more desire than the next Anglophile with a framed colored engraving of the queen-empress on his office wall to pull down the aristocracy; to take away their estates and paintings and seats in the Lords and ancient Rollses resting on blocks in stables where the racing stud used to breed. And yet I...
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In Search of the Bourgeoisie
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
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Did You Hear the One About Syria?
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
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In Praise of Geopolitics
The noun geopolitics and the adjective geopolitical are increasingly present in media discourse on world affairs. In principle, this is a good thing. Relating political power to the immutable imperatives of space and resources is essential to an analysis of world affairs that is free from the ideological baggage of American exceptionalism, whether Wilsonian or...
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The Russians Are Coming!
When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union imploded shortly afterward, the world breathed a sigh of relief—except in the faculty lounges of our more exclusive universities, the last bastion of Marxism in the developed world. But these hothouse exotics weren’t the only losers. Their opposite numbers, the professional anticommunists, had far more to...
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Never-Ending War: An Economic Policy
Contrary to the assertion of official historians, April 1865, which saw the fall of the Confederate States of America, was not the month in which the “Union” was saved or a “nation” was forged. It was the month that saw the transformation of the republic into an oligarchy, and the expansion of government subsidies into...
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Suicide State
“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
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Light From Elsewhere
In the beginning, the poetic birth of the city becomes visible in the Iliad in the warrior camp of the Achaeans, in what Pierre Manent calls—in one of his most striking formulations—the “republic of quarrelsome persuasion.” We are not, of course, concerned here with the city as defined by, say, urbanology or archaeology, but with...
Issue
March 2014
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Brown Revolution in Ukraine: The Neo-Nazis’ Charm Offensive
The radical organization “Right Sector” is the hidden force behind the armed overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych. Even the openly neo-nazi political party “Svoboda” led by the urologist-turned-aspiring fuhrer Oleh Tyahnybok seems almost respectable, compared to the militant thugs of “Right Sector”. That has not prevented such diverse media outlets as New York Times and Steve...
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Ukraine’s Uncertain Future
To understand the ongoing crisis in Ukraine it is necessary to take a look at two maps: the distribution of votes between Viktor Yanukovych (blue) and Yulia Tymoshenko (yellow) in the presidential election of January 2010, and the linguistic divide between the mostly Ukrainian-speaking western and central regions (red, pink) and the predominantly Russian-speaking...
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Liberty, Prudence, and the Freedom of Association
A recent blog post by Thomas Fleming cut to the heart of a current issue—as Fleming usually does. I have learned a lot from Mr. Fleming over the years. The issue: should business owners have the freedom and liberty to refuse service to homosexuals. Almost weekly Americans learn of some situation where a business owner...
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Texas and Heterosexual Marriage
Barely eight years ago, 76 percent of Texas voters affirmed by constitutional amendment their commitment to heterosexual marriage as the proper relational norm. But, hey, so what, when a federal judge informs Texans that “[S]tate-imposed inequality can find no refuge in the United States Constitution”? Accordingly, Texas joins the melancholy parade of Southern states—Virginia, Kentucky,...
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Brown Revolution in Ukraine: The Cowardice of Viktor Yanukovych
The most surprising thing about the ongoing Brown Revolution in Ukraine is neither the West’s support for neo-nazis, nor its immediate acceptance of the armed, violent overthrow of a legitimate president, whose election four years ago was deemed valid by the Eurocrats and the State Department. The most stunning aspect of the neo-nazi putsch is...
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Lincoln’s Slaves
A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying: “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....
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Who’s the Boss?
The local “authorities” and the corporate media have tried to hide and then minimize the facts, but the blessed “alternative” sources got the news out. In the urban county just over the river, the sheriff’s department has been having “joint maneuvers” with elite Army units from Fort Bragg. The curriculum includes helicopter insertions and home...
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Six Californias?
California is a preposterously large state, with 38 million dwellers stretching toward 138 million. So it’s not surprising a new idea to split it into six states has gurgled up from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, who’s holding a press conference today, Feb. 24, at 6 pm EST. His divorce initiative just received the...
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Hooters Against Misogyny: The Paradox of Femen(ism)
First came the whirlwind Pussy Riot American tour. And now the Boobish Invasion continues, with the Eastern European “topless sextremists” known as Femen threatening to descend on the United States like a Satanic Swedish Bikini Team. The picture that accompanies this article in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast is a little “NSFW,” and the interview that...
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Brown Revolution in Ukraine: The Triumph of the Neo-Nazis
The cowardly collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s legitimate government and the triumph of the violent, bloodthirsty neo-nazi-dominated revolutionaries may spell the last throes of modern Ukraine. After all, it is an artificial, amorphous country, created by Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev and doomed to failure and fragmentation. As I’ve described at length exactly four years ago, after...
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Ukraine’s Crisis, Not Ours
Richard Engel of NBC, reporting from Maidan Square in Kiev, described what he witnessed as the Feb. 19 truce collapsed. Police began to back away from their positions in the square, said Engel. And the protesters attacked. Gunfire was exchanged and the death toll, believed to be in the dozens, is not known. In short,...
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Sochi Olympics: P***y Riot Gets Whipped
To the joy of traditionalists everywhere, the obscene-named punk feminist band’s exploits in Sochi came to an inglorious end. The bandmembers gained worldwide celebrity status after yelling out Christophobic slogans on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral. After being pardoned from their two year sentences by Vladimir Putin, they made a whirlwind tour...
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Ukrainian Protests Degenerate from Hooliganism to Terrorism
RT: In Ukraine there have been accusations of the use of live ammunition by both sides in the conflict. Protesters are well armed but it is unclear just where they’ve sourced their firearms from. They were also using grenades, fireworks and Molotov cocktails against law enforcers. Others threw rocks, wielded baseball bats and metal rods....
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Who Decided? And When Did They Decide?
That collecting “the wretched refuse of the earth” was a good thing for the country? (Certainly, the Founders of the U.S. did not think so.) That some people should receive special rewards and preferences because of the assumed sufferings of their ancestors? (Most of our ancestors suffered. And many of the beneficiaries, not surprisingly, are...
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Kansas Bleeds Again
The politically correct are breathing a sigh of relief. A proposed piece of Kansas legislation that would permit businesses not to provide services to same-sex “married” couples has been pronounced “dead in the water.” At least we’ll be spared another round of mindless name-calling between the “libtards” and “wingnuts” who prowl the internet seeking the...
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Sochi Olympics, Ukraine, and the Media
One of the biggest accomplishments of the Sochi Olympics has been its role in dousing the fires of the unrest in Ukraine – a fiery sequence of events that took the woefully unstable country to the brink of civil war. Crowds of bloodthirsty hooligans, goaded on by the terrible trio of anti-Yanukovych leaders (Tyahnybok, Yatsenyuk,...
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Stop Clowning Around
Now the numbers are declining for clowns – beside those holding political office. Seriously, if possible, the NY Daily News reports: “Membership at the country’s largest trade organizations for the jokesters has plunged over the past decade as declining interest, old age and higher standards among employers align against Krusty, Bozo and their crimson-nosed colleagues.”...
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Letter from Bosnia: A Fraudulent “Spring”
There is more than meets the eye to the wave of ostensibly “non-ethnic” anti-corruption demonstrations in several majority-Muslim cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which started on February 6 and largely fizzled out a week later. The Nulandesque agenda became obvious within days, as protest leaders and various NGO activists, journalists and politicians all over “the international community”...
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Sochi, Putin, and Vlad the Drag Queen
In the Dead West, our heroes are no longer cowboys but those creepy weirdos who slink around the alleyways of red-light districts. One such warrior for righteousness is described by the Associated Press as “Vladimir Luxuria, a former Communist lawmaker in the Italian parliament who has become a prominent transgender rights crusader and television personality.”...
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Wendy
Look, the Wendy Davis candidacy for Texas governor isn’t going anywhere. (Ain’t goin’ nowhere, Bubba, as we might say in Texas.) What’s with the New York Times Magazine cover story on Feb. 16 – Wendy looking sleepily seductive, blonde tresses streaming down to her shoulders; the headline inquiring in pseudo-provocative fashion, “Can Wendy Davis Have...
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What Goes Around Comes Around
In the Netherlands, Els Borst has been found dead in her garage. A few hours earlier, the 81 year old physician and former deputy prime minister had attended a meeting of what is described by the Telegraph as her center-right political party. In the Netherlands, apparently, any party to the right of the Maoists can be...
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Sochi Olympics: About Russia With Hate
The American mainstream media’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics has been more concerned with bashing Russia and Vladimir Putin than with analyzing the performance of athletes and teams. Even previously non-political magazines like ESPN started coming out with vehemently anti-Putin articles. As if on cue from the White House, the American media started an anti-Russian...
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Russkies Jibe at American Loss of Freedoms
A great way to attack somebody is to mock hypocrisy over a perceived strength. During the Cold War, anti-communist writers like yours truly would scribble something like this about the Soviet Union: “In the workers’ paradise, only the bosses have cars and a washing machine is your babushka (grandmother).” Payback time. In recent decades, Americans’...
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Barry O. and Franky H. Cozy Up With a Few Friends
Some Americans are wondering, “Why all the hoopla over Hollande’s courtesy call on Obama?” Is there something sinister or even serious going on? The obvious answer—and even some journalists are aware of it—is the natural affinity of two Marxist political hacks. “Dear Barack,” as Hollande now refers to the American President, would like nothing better...