Author: The Archive (The Archive)

Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by President Bush and the “mainstream media” about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that...

Obama is by nature a booster—like the first stage of the missile lofting its payload into the upper atmosphere. A huge bang, a mighty whoosh and then a few miles up, a fizzle as the Obama-booster burns out and drops back to earth. Who knows what happened to the payload? He doesn’t seem to have...

PERSPECTIVE Remembering Who We Were by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Exporting Political Correctness by Justin Raimondo Through force of arms. Obama's Right-Wing Cheerleaders by Leon Hadar Rah-rah government intervention! NEWS Dissolving Britain by Mary Ellen Synon The Lisbon Treaty's Eurojustice. REVIEWS Supernova by Derek Turner Charlotte Mosley, ed.: In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor Matthew A. Roberts on Dora L. Costa's and ...

In August, the Georgian navy seized a Turkish tanker carrying fuel to Abkhazia, Georgia’s former province whose declaration of independence a year ago is recognized by Russia but not the West. The Turkish captain was sentenced to 24 years. When Ankara protested, he was released. Abkhazia has now threatened to sink any Georgian ship interfering...

You know—you must—you can’t help it—aren’t you alive?!—that the marketplace isn’t perfect. Haven’t we all been told often enough, amid the political chatter concerning how to crack down on Wall Street? Bad, bad bankers whose pay should be regulated and selfish brokers—not to mention negligent directors of corporations—are among the current targets. John Maynard Keynes...

It helps to read history. We know, or should, that American life shows us nothing like the social and political conniptions that Germany experienced in the 1920s, France in the 1790s and the United States in the 1850s. But something is cooking. Indignant people—I’m sidestepping the adjective “angry” so as to avoid connotations—don’t mysteriously materialize...

The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them. The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the...

Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down. Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs. The tale of Cooper Tire and what it portends is told in last week’s Washington Post...

“You may all go to Hell; I will go to Texas,” said David Crockett to the voters before departing for San Antonio and the Alamo, where he, Jim Bowie, Buck Travis, and 186 other brave Americans gave their lives for liberty. As the entire United States seems bent on following Davy’s instructions, a few brave...

If the aphorism holds—the guerrilla wins if he does not lose—the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in Afghanistan. Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more provinces than ever and controlling more territory than ever. And their...

The end of Ted Kennedy’s long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it’s time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back. The late senator’s eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas...

America is a strange place. Liberals get emotionally distraught that the Founding Fathers stuck Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. For American citizens to possess firearms is considered to be dangerous. Yet, it is quite all right for Americans to possess deadly green mambas. Mambas are large, fast and very poisonous African snakes whose bite...

The “Prince of Darkness”—aka Robert Novak—who died this week of a brain tumor, was the Hunter Thompson of the right, albeit with predictable differences. Thompson, like Rimbaud, espoused a total disordering of all the senses—with materials as varied as ayahuasca, LSD, cocaine and tequila whereas Novak stuck to booze. Thompson blew his brains out, whereas...

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PERSPECTIVE Stepping Backwardby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Deconstructing Miss Dixieby Michael HillEducating for the planetary community. Educating for Faith and Communityby Thomas J. KorcokA Lutheran success story. The School of Historyby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.California, here we come! NEWS Berlusconi’s Will To Fightby Alberto CarosaBetter late than never. REVIEWS An American Prophetby George W. Liebmann Lee Congdon:...

“We just can’t afford it!” Not long ago, every America child heard that, at one time or another, in the home in which he or she was raised. “We just can’t afford it!” It may have been a new car, or two weeks at the beach, or the new flat-panel TV screen. Every family knew...

Recently at NRO, Mark Krikorian drew critical attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal which described how minor league baseball teams are now importing foreign players.  According to the Journal, “For decades, minor-league rosters seemed the essence of the American heartland.  But thanks to growing numbers of foreign players . . . the...

“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.”—R.L. Bushman “Rapidly you are dividing into two classes—extreme rich and extreme poor.”—”Brutus” Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The...

What with baby boomers running our instruments of communication, what were we going to talk about this month but, yes, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Lay it on me, man! Peace! Love! All that ’60s stuff! Or some of it. The marginality of Woodstock as a Great American Event will grow more obvious as—I hate...

White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society, which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatter plot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as...

“Taliban Are Winning: U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties.” Thus ran the startling headline on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal. The lead paragraph ran thus: “The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict...

Wake Island (1942)Directed by John Farrow, B&W, 88 Minutes Go Tell the Spartans (1978)Directed by Ted Post, Color, 114 Minutes Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983)Directed by Stephen Frears, Color, 106 Minutes Americans learn their wars primarily through the movies. Who, except for the few who were actually there, can imagine World War II without...

To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are “mobs” of “thugs” whose rage has been “manufactured” by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives. Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount. But is it wise for the White...

This is a brief note to introduce the next formal Booklog, which will be a discussion of Euripides’ Orestes, a rather strange play that pits the claims of family not only against each other but against those of friendship.  I hope that it can be used to highlight certain older ideas about kinship and friendship...

PERSPECTIVE Johnny Rocco’s Worldby Thomas Fleming VIEWS “Vampire-Loving Barmaid Hits Jackpot”by James O. TateThe commodification of culture. Unpalatable Valuesby Andrei NavrozovCulture as gastronomy. Watching the Moneyby George McCartneyBrought to you by NokiaTM . NEWS The $15 Trillion End Runby William J. QuirkAn “oligarchy of interests.” REVIEWS Decline and Fallby Tom Piatak Theodore Dalrymple: Not With...

With “controlling costs” a primary goal of Obamacare, and half of all medical costs coming in the last six months of life, “rationed care” takes on a new meaning for us all. London’s Telegraph reported Sunday that the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, known by its Orwellian acronym NICE, intends to slash by...

“ . . . and bank-notes will become as plentiful as oak leaves.” —Thomas Jefferson “They [the people], and not the rich are our dependence for continued freedom.  And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.  We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion...

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it. Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, was listened to attentively, but will not be decisive....

The day before Thomas Fleming offered his reflections on the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, I offered mine at Takimag.  My focus was different from Dr. Fleming’s.  I used the anniversary to reflect on how and why America had declined since Neil Armstrong took that famous step onto the moon, and wished that “we could...

Last week on NPR, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT explained that what is really at stake in the health-care bill is the U.S. government’s ability to borrow. In other words, the bill is about cutting health-care costs, not about providing hard-pressed Americans with health care. The professor said that if...

“The sound alone was worth the $24 billion!” So said fellow Nixon speechwriter Ray Price as the mighty Saturn V rocket lifted Apollo 11 and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins off the launch pad, three miles away, on the start of their voyage to the moon. It was a splendid moment in that first year of...

You should not drink and bake at the same time. —Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom . . . —Owen Wister His best companions, innocence and health,And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. —Oliver Goldsmith Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the...

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the United States was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy....

When Republicans were warned not to give Sonia Sotomayor the drubbing Democrats gave Robert Bork and Sam Alito—lest they be perceived as sexist and racist by women and Hispanics—the threat was credible, for it underscored a new reality in American politics. The Supreme Court, far from being the last redoubt of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...

Despite our high expectations, Vice President Joe Biden’s first months in office were disappointing. This, remember, is the man who opened the more recent of his two futile runs for the presidency by saying of Obama that he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I...

There is no economy left to recover. The U.S. manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free-trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.” The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real-estate bubble, and by “free market”...

The Soviet Union in 1964 was about the last place on earth where anyone could find respect for traditional ways and reverence for ancestors.  For the most part, the thuggish bureaucracy controlling that unlamented establishment exuded an almost eager desire for drabness that was downright studied in its gleeful love ...

The overarching flaw of the neocons is arrogance.  It was arrogance that led them to believe that we could remake the Mideast when we invaded Iraq.  It was arrogance that led Catholic neocons to lecture John Paul II on Catholic just-war teaching as they lobbied the Vatican to endorse our disastrous invasion of Iraq.  And...

The Rockford Institute’s 12th Annual Summer School, “The American West,” is under way at Chronicles headquarters in Rockford, Illinois.  The first lecture, delivered on Tuesday evening, July 7, was by Thomas Fleming: “Print the Legend: Clantons Versus Earps in Myth, History, and Film.” Here is a portion of Dr. Fleming’s talk, in which he addresses...

“Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity,” ran the headline in the Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post‘s opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. “Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this...

Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica. The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another...

There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week—Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina. Politics, entertainment—you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other takes up....