James Webb, a genuine war hero and author of a worthy book (Fields of Fire) draws no interest as a Presidential candidate, but numerous Republicans who have never been anything but parasites and cannot even read, much less write a good book, are considered promising statesmen. I am told we must be a multicultural country....
Month: November 2015
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Abortion Delusion
Planned Parenthood Dominatrix Cecile Richards sat defiantly before a congressional panel on September 29, making little effort to conceal her disgust at the perfunctory speeches made in front of her. She exuded a fierce confidence that dwarfed the resolve of her Republican opponents, presaging the House’s passage the very next day of a gutted stopgap...
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Who Hates Trump?
Politics is all about hatred. Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts. And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant. Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media, the leadership of both parties, the entire...
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Dining With The Donald
When Donald Trump started making noise about running for president, I knew next to nothing about him. Since I don’t watch television, I’m not sure whether I could even have identified him in a lineup. I knew only that he was a New York-based real-estate mogul and had a series of beautiful wives. So it...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
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Sharpening the Swords
On June 25, one day before the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Louise Melling, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Miss Melling’s announcement that the ACLU would no longer support the...
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Syria: Time for Maturity
A successful strategist is able to balance costs and benefits in the attainment of clearly defined objectives. This task demands prioritizing: Primary and secondary political goals need to be articulated, and military resources allocated accordingly. The Obama administration’s strategy for defeating the Islamic State (aka ISIS) has failed so far because a secondary objective—Washington’s a...
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After Obergefell: What Now?
I have previously suggested in these pages that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the five-to-four decision which declared that two Americans of the same sex have a constitutionally guaranteed right to marry each other—may be the worst in the history of the Court. First, there was no adequate legal or constitutional basis...
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Our Special Middle Eastern Friend
As everyone knows, when you cross a camel with a mule, you get a member of the Saudi ruling family. A camel crossed with a snake produces a Qatari ruler, and, finally, a camel that’s made whoopee with a pig conceives a Kuwaiti sultan. Mind you, I’m being a bit rough on these animals, which...
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America’s Best Friend, R.I.P.
A funeral can sometimes seem like a going out of business sale, an occasion for taking stock, not so much of the deceased as of your friendship with him. It is strange that, presented with such an opportunity, pastors and friends usually do so poor a job of evoking the life of the departed. One...
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Playing the Trump Card
In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year. The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...
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Bigger Barns
Where capitalism is “relatively benign of itself,” as Chilton Williamson, Jr., wrote when commenting on Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Church and State,” Editorials) in the September issue, it is inaccurately named. The word capitalism means that what matters most to capitalists is capital. Capital is wealth used to gain more. That suggests that what...
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The Worst State
Things are pretty dismal all over the country, but some places are worse than others. Usually, published rankings of American states are compiled by liberals who value such things as high-school and college graduation rates, personal income, internet speed, and the availability of abortion clinics. That’s why Massachusetts and Minnesota commonly come out on top. ...
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Beautiful Apologetics
Art and literature are powerful mediums to convey timeless truths. In the Introduction to Catholic Literary Giants, Joseph Pearce declares the power of art to evangelize, a defense of the Catholic Faith he terms the “apologetics of beauty.” He cites Dante, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Tolkien, and Waugh as a Catholic’s literary “weapons” to wield against the...
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Crescent Moon Over Europe
Jean Raspail, the French novelist and explorer, now 90 and living in a suburb of Paris, must be experiencing the eerie feeling of living inside The Camp of the Saints, his most famous work, as he follows the contemporary news reports from across the Continent. The tens of thousands of Third World migrants are arriving...
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The First American Pope
Americans invented modern advertising, publicity, and celebrity, three dubious accomplishments of Homo sapiens rapidly adopted by the rest of the world. St. John Paul II was the first pope to recognize its immense power and put it to work, but it has been left to Pope Francis to perfect the papal technique. In this sense,...
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The Truth in Plain Sight
After decades of massacres on the school grounds of America, theories advanced to explain them come down to two: the ready availability of guns in this country, and the number of “angry white males” among student bodies (though in the case of the Virginia Tech killer, the perpetrator was Asian). These explanations fit nicely into...
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Identity and Appearances
Seen from certain angles, Dover Castle looks like the most formidable fortress in the world. Far below, the English Channel is a vision in ozone and aquamarine—the deeps dotted with shipping, the Pas-de-Calais shimmering with memories, the chalky cliffs ant-tunneled with ancient emplacements, a pristine Cross of St. George snapping in the breeze from the...
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Italy’s Donald Trump
Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye. In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order. Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would work together against the political ambition and military might of Crassus and Julius Caesar. Neither...
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The Incomparable Max
Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872–1956, was a famous caricaturist with a style very much his own. He was a successful author, too, though not a prolific one: a book of stories (Seven Men), a set of parodies (A Christmas Garland), and one fantasy novel (Zuleika Dobson) make up the sum of his output for most people. ...
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We Asked For It
For almost two decades, or ever since Tony Blair became prime minister, the British have moaned about a lack of opposition in politics. All our politicians “sound the same,” we say—and they do, it’s true. Our parliamentary system may be designed for confrontation, but so far this century the Labour and Conservative parties seem to...
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Top of the World, Ma
Black Mass Produced by Cross Creek Pictures Directed by Scott Cooper Screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, based on the book Black Mass, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill Distributed by Warner Brothers Ever since The Great Train Robbery flashed on the screen in 1903, Americans have been enthralled by gangster movies. They not...
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Boundaries
On a flank of the White Mountains not far from the Maine state line lies a small New Hampshire town called Albany, population 735. Every seven years, town officials arrange for a surveyor to walk the boundaries of the town, clearing brush, cleaning up markers, and checking to see whether a neighboring, larger town might...
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Trump and the Culture of Political Correctness
Why would the much-married Donald Trump, billionaire, self-promoter, real-estate developer, and leading figure in the world of flashy entertainment, a man who until recently apparently accepted the views of his class on hot-button political and social issues, suddenly become the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination? The man’s been successful in a variety of...
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Henry Radetsky and Fritz Kreisler
Tossing around a word like music is problematical—and culture is even harder to deploy meaningfully. Nevertheless, I am going to give both a try in a revealing juxtaposition that was brought to my attention by that world-traveling anthropologist Henry Radetsky, an academic colleague and a valued friend. Henry is a cultured man I have learned...
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