The “Iran Nuclear Deal” was killed by President Trump on May 8, which came as no surprise to anyone who had heard a Trump campaign speech in 2016 or to those who were aware that Trump had recently hired John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Surprise or not, it was an imprudent move. Ever since the...
Month: June 2018
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Syria and Our Deaths of Despair
Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...
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Parry O’Brien
It’s difficult to explain today that, from the 1920’s through the mid-1960’s, track and field was a major sport in Southern California. There were several reasons for this. There was no Major League Baseball anywhere on the West Coast—Chicago and St. Louis were the westernmost cities to field teams. We had only a minor-league circuit,...
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Can We Talk?
A few months after we moved to Huntington, Indiana, I was inducted into the Cosmopolitan Club, one of the country’s oldest extant discussion societies. Chartered on January 18, 1894, the Cosmopolitan Club convenes on the fourth Tuesday of every month from September through May. The membership is entirely male and capped at 25, and all...
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Syria: A Deep State Victory
The latest escalation of the Syrian crisis started with the false-flag poison gas attack in Douma on April 7. It was followed a week later by the bombing of three alleged chemical-weapons facilities by the United States, Britain, and France. The operation had two objectives. The first was the Permanent State interventionists’ intent to reassert...
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Nothing to Protest
Bonjour, mes amis! Fifty years ago this month, I was living in Paris, and life was, shall we say, grand. Back then there was nothing like Paris in the spring and early summer, with formal balls galore, polo in the Bois de Boulogne, and late-night parties in Left Bank clubs such as Jimmy’s. At 30...
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Lessons From Libya: How Not to Ruin Syria
In the aftermath of the U.S.-led air and missile strikes on Syria for the April incident in which Bashar al-Assad’s government allegedly used chemical weapons against innocent civilians, calls are growing for the Trump administration to deepen U.S. military involvement for the explicit purpose of ousting Assad. Those pundits and politicians who advocate a regime-change...
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A Stretch and a Temptation
Next year marks the 900th anniversary of Roger of Salerno’s defeat at Ager Sanguinis, the Field of Blood. The battle raged near Sarmada, west of Aleppo, on June 28, 1119. Roger, regent of Antioch (for the child Bohemond II), led his smaller force against the larger Turkic army of Ilghazi, the Artuqid ruler of Aleppo. ...
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Monumental Stupidity
There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson). There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...
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Homesick in America
“Darlin,’” she said, “I’ll get that. Go ahead and take it.” She was a weathered-looking woman with mousy light brown hair drawn back in a bun and the plain, honest look of one of those faces you see in Depression-era photos from the Dust Bowl, faces that don’t smile—they are just themselves, making the best...
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California Dreaming
You never know what Lady Fortuna has in store for you next. Having quit college—after all, I knew what I wanted to do, and didn’t need lessons from some hippie in how to do it—I was shuttling between New York City and my parents’ house in the suburbs. I was 19, aimless, and living at...
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All About Trump
Today, all books by liberals really are about President Trump. Such is Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, by MSNBC far-left fake-news host Lawrence O’Donnell. This book’s proxy is Richard Nixon and his 1968 victory for president against Aunt Blabby, a.k.a. Hubert Horatio Humphrey. For Nixon, Humphrey, South Vietnam,...
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Adolf Busch & Colleagues
Some two decades ago, I found myself preparing for a trip to Niagara Falls, where I was to meet a lady. I had not been to Niagara Falls before, though I was familiar with the movie Niagara (Hathaway, 1953), which has sometimes been called the best Hitchcock movie not by Hitchcock. I didn’t want to...
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Cultural Marxists and the Stranglehold of “Race”
One of the subjects that most self-styled conservatives seem incapable of discussing in any depth—indeed, it is one they often flee from like mice before the hungry house cat—is race. The general feeling always seems to be that anything a prominent conservative might say on the topic—unless he is offering some sort of fearful confirmation...
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One Nation Divided
Since 1892, when the original text was composed, the Pledge of Allegiance has been revised three times. Viewed chronologically, the alterations appear to have aimed at a greater specificity, but also a wider and deeper self-assurance. The current text, dating from 1954, capitalizes “Nation” and adds “under God,” as if the editors (a committee, no...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I discovered only by accident a week ago a little book called Liberalism, by the English philosopher John Gray, published originally in 1986 and in its second edition in 1995. For many reasons, I wish I’d known of it earlier, as I’m finding it useful in my continuing pursuit of liberalism—and of the nastier and...
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Books in Brief
Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States, by Victor Bulmer-Thomas (New Haven: Yale University Press; 480 pp., $32.50). This excellent and timely book is of great interest as informed speculation on the future of the United States; at a secondary level, it is a meditation on empire in history. Bulmer-Thomas,...
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Going in the Wrong Direction
Of the more than 1,000 migrants from Central America who set out in “caravan” to traverse the length of Mexico to seek asylum in the United States, a couple of hundred arrived at Tijuana on the American border. As of this writing, only ten remain on the Mexican side of the line, the rest having...
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Impossible Dreams: The West’s Undying Love Affair With Marx
Is Marxism Dead? If the average citizen of a Western society were asked that question, it seems to me he would readily answer that Marxism is indeed a very dead idea surviving only in improbable boondocks like North Korea or Cuba, and even there losing ground, as has been happening in the last great country...
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Calling the Deomocrats’ Bluff
Rep. Adam Schiff knows something about impeachment. The California Democrat first won his seat in Congress in 2000, when he defeated a Republican incumbent, James Rogan, who two years earlier had been one of the “managers” acting for the House of Representatives in the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Now Schiff is the...
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Racial Follies
Band of Angels Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Raoul Walsh Screenplay by John Twist Hostiles Produced by Le Grisbi Productions Written and directed by Scott Cooper Distributed by Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures I had never heard of the 1957 film Band of Angels directed by Raoul Walsh until I came upon it...
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The Managerial Racket
Life in America these days has become a vast numbers racket. That is, most Americans are, cannily or not, ensnared in the numbers game called metrics, or what Jerry Muller in his latest book terms the “metrics fixation.” This fixation is founded on the assumption that “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” ...
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