Chelsea, otherwise known as Bradley Manning, has petitioned the US Army to give him transgender procedures that will enable him to spend his 35 years pretending to be a woman in a woman’s prison. Apart from the surgeries and hormone therapy involved, it sounds like a great idea. I mean, imagine the film version starring...
Author: Thomas Fleming (Thomas Fleming)
Boredom in the Leisure Class
In Duncan Oklahoma, two black “teens,” driven by a white teen driver, murdered a complete stranger–an Australian student and baseball player. The only motive given so far is that they were bored. Since the victim was white and at least one of the three a devotee of the racist thug doggerel known as rap, there...
Voting Wrongs
At The Nation someone named Ari Berman is foaming at the mouth over North Carolina’s sensible decision to require official identification documents to register voters and permit them to vote. This “voter suppression law,” he positively shrieks, is “the worst in the nation.” Nearly everyone who is not a leftwing faddist is aware, first, that North...
Obama Saves America Again
The Obama administration, citing an ominous increase in online chatter in the terrorist community, has closed down 19 diplomatic posts in Muslim countries, and this morning (5 August) the State Department revealed that they will stay closed because of the continuing threat. It is perfectly possible that there the CIA has detected a...
Goodbye to All What?
As far back as I can remember, I had the feeling that I had been born some time after the end of everything that mattered. Yes, there was still an abundance of material comforts and some vestiges of marriage and religion, but vanishing before our eyes—like the stars in the sky faded by street lights—were...
What Is To Be Done About “Gay Marriage”?
I have filled enough pages on same-sex marriage to make a book, at least by the low standards of neoconservative publishing, and only one important question remains to be settled: What is to be done? It is an important question, not only because marriage is a vital part of ordinary life, but also because...
Gay Times on the Right
Hardly a day goes by that someone does not email or telephone me with the news that some allegedly conservative writer has finally endorsed “Gay Marriage.” I’d rather not name names, but the most amusing so far has been an online screed declaring Andrew Sullivan the “most important political writer of his generation.” All...
Egypt: The Script Plays Out
The little piece on Egypt I scribbled out and I posted the other day could have been put up any time since the beginning of the Cairo protests, planned, supported, and subsidized by the US Department of State. If I can find a moment, I’ll revise and expand, but for now, I am just...
Egypt–Playing By the Rules
It is almost as if Mohammed Morsi has been reading Chronicles–or at least studying Egyptian history. (And if he fails–as I hope he does–to take decisive action, he will soon be an unimportant piece of that history.) Nightmares like Egypt can be ruled in only one of two ways: either by a fanatical religious tyranny...
Looking Backwards
Gil Santana had it all: He was the model conservative for the new millennium. Gil was born and reared in Southern California, naturally, and his given name evoked the rich diversity of the state that had once symbolized the American dream: Kim Kwame Kaplan Santana, each part representing one fourth of his Korean, African, Jewish,...
Liars, Children, and the NSA
Yesterday’s congressional performances by the head of the National Security Administration and the deputy director of the FBI deserve an award, but it is the KIDS awards handed out for best children’s TV programs. Even an American adolescent should be able to spot the lies and contradictions. First, we were informed that surveillance...
USA Against America: Arming Jihad
Living in America these days is something like being a character in a Philip K. Dick novel: Instead of learning from our mistakes and moving on, our leaders continue to hit the replay button, over and over and over. Syria is using chemical weapons against the rebels, so we are told, and leading...
Topsy-Turvy
Titles shall ennoble, then, All the common councilmen . . . Peers shall teem in Christendom, And a Duke’s exalted station Be attainable by competitive examination. “Oh, horror!” cry the addlepated young noblemen in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Horror, indeed. Their world will be turned upside down if the Queen of the Fairies carries...
Treason From the Top Down
French police have arrested a suspect in the knife attack on a French soldier. The suspect is 22 year old male “fairly recently converted to Islam.” The attack in a Paris suburb recalls the recent beheading of an English soldier in the London suburb of Woolwich, where the attacker, again, appears to have been...
Boys Will Be Toys
Only in America. Only in America could religious conservatives get worked up over the Boy Scouts’ decision to admit openly homosexual boys to their ranks. We all knew this decision was inevitable, if not this week then next year. What possible difference can it make? The mere fact that there was a debate...
I Need to Take a Fifth
If we lived in a real (not to say free) country, then we would be reading something like the following exchanges: Congressman Issa: So, Ms Lerner, how and when exactly did you learn that your department was illegally targeting conservative and pro-life groups. Lerner: Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I...
After the Fall
Obama administration officials have convenient ways of evading responsibility. Hilary made her getaway before some of the truth about Benghazi began to ooze out from the cracks, and Holder not only has recused himself from the investigation of the AP story but he blames subordinates for all his woes. Best of all, perhaps, is...
Ella, again
Let me second Tom Piatak. I think the best way to start appreciating Ella is by getting (off iTunes, for example) the various songbooks she recorded–Cole Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart. In these she sings mainly straight without a lot of jazzing around. My wife generally dislikes most jazz (except George Shearing and a...
Classical Christian Marriage
You can almost always rely on conservative politicians to surrender their principles, even before the first shot is fired. Within a month of President Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were already selling out on the marriage issue. When the GOP leadership contrived the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), I said at the time that in making...
Chechen Surprise
Last night’s shoot-out in Boston must have brought as much joy to the Kremlin as it has dampened the spirits of the White House. Thrilled with the announcement that the primary suspects in the Boston Marathon Massacre were white, anti-American leftists were hoping for the big score, another Tim McVeigh to prove that Tea...
Fiat Values
I have never spent much time thinking about money, perhaps because I have never had enough to worry about keeping or losing it. Ignorance, however, is no serious obstacle to the hardened pontificator, who, armed only with coffee, tobacco, and access to the errors of Wikipedia, feels up to tackling any subject. The American publishing...
Conservatives Back Gay Marriage
A great deal of ink is being spilled on the two Supreme Court cases taking up same-sex marriage, but the effect is rather like the ink released by a cuttlefish to cloud the vision of its enemies. To anticipate my conclusion, let me go on record as saying that family-values conservatives have done vastly...
The Cowboys and Wyatt Earp
Arrayed against the Earps in Tombstone was a loose and constantly shifting set of alliances known as “The Cowboys.” Eastern journalists, looking for sensational material, followed the Cowboys’ enemies and rivals in describing them as an organized gang, but no one could quite figure out who the gang’s leader was—Ike Clanton, Bill Brocius, or...
RSO: Antidote to Rockford’s Misery
On Saturday night, my wife and I were guests of our friends Jim and Betsy Easton, at a performance of Handel’s Messiah. The concert was a joint production of the Rockford Symphony Orchestra and the Mendelssohn Club chorus. The four professional soloists from out of town sang beautifully, but it was the orchestra and chorus that made greatest...
Immer Drummer
Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance. Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song: Illegitimum non carborundum that...
Unpatriotic Liars
Here is poor David Frum pretending to have second thoughts about the Iraq War for which he shilled. Obviously, the only people who are capable of having second thoughts had to have first thoughts, and there is no sign that Frum has ever done anything but pound a keyboard and recycle other people’s lies....
Wyatt Earp Turns 165
Wyatt Earp, saloonkeeper, professional gambler, profligate, and alleged procurer of women, was for all his faults a great American hero. Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, home of Monmouth College, the alma mater of our friend and colleague, the late James Stockdale. Living in Iowa he was repeatedly in trouble, principally for keeping a...
Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men C—Women and Men
I said at the beginning that man is a mammalian species. From this one simple fact flow many important consequences for the human race. As the word “mammal” indicates, our females nurse their young, which requires diversification of the roles played by males and females, but even those words males and females tell us...
No Left-Wing Christians
Does the Left-Wing Christian really exist? I think not, if we mean someone who equates leftism with Christianity. People like Garry Wills are not now and probably have never been Christian in any meaningful sense of the term. They simply put a veneer of Christian imagery on the banalities they have picked up from...
Facts and Opinions
“I think it’s been very hard for Speaker Boehner and Republican Leader McConnell to accept the fact that taxes on the wealthiest Americans should go up a little bit, as part of an overall deficit reduction package.” This haplessly phrased bit of Obamaspeak is one out of many illustrations of a confusion between fact and...
Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men A
I have been arguing for decades that any conservative point of view, to be usable or even defensible, has to be grounded in an understanding of human nature derived from observation of man’s nature and history. In an age where a Church may dictate morality, this understanding may be less necessary, though it must...
Thoroughly Modern Millies
So I spurred my mule, and I went riding on down the road Minding my own business, ’n’ I wasn’t bothering a soul. So finally I rode into town, And I seed the man standing at the window, pulling off his clothes. Every time he’d pull off a piece, he threw it out the window....
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...
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...
Christmas: Some Caveats
I endorse enthusiastically my friend and colleague Tom Piatak’s defense of Christmas. As a curmudgeon, however, I am inclined, this time of year, to gloomy reflections. Perhaps they go back Herbert W. Armstrong’s annual diatribe against Christmas, which I never missed in my teens. Armstrong, the founder of The Worldwide Church of God (and...
Kerry Dancing
I do hope someone will remember that I suggested that the threatened nomination of Susan Rice might have been a trick to lure gullible Republicans (a redundant expression) into breathing a sigh of relief when she withdrew. They are now leaping on the John Kerry bandwagon. For the honor of the country which some of...
Back to the Stone Age II G: A Trip to Alsatia
Let us develop this point a bit. Classical liberals like to complain about federal subsidies to agriculture. They are quite right to denounce programs whose effect is to reward agribusiness while harming smaller farming operations, as if it were the government’s business to pick the winners in advance. But they are equally opposed to...
Back to the Stone Age II F
Property is the broadest term and the one most likely to be misused. In English, we can use property to refer to everything we possess, including our personal characteristics, or more narrowly as the things we own, such s real estate, or to the more abstract notion promoted by Locke, that as human beings we...
Rice: The Evil of Two Lessers
Even before Barack Obama’s second inauguration, the impending retirement of Hilary Clinton is providing Republicans with their first opportunity to challenge the President. It appears to be no secret that the shortlist of candidates the President is considering for his next Secretary of State includes John Kerry and Susan Rice. Can the President...
Freedom From Religion
As the presidential campaign came to a close, religious questions sneaked surreptitiously into the national debate. The Democrats had an easy target: Governor Romney’s unusual religious affiliation, though since few Democrats know anything about any religion, particularly Christianity, they found it difficult to distinguish Mormonism from other not-quite-so-strange semi-Christian sects. Watching national commentators fumbling for...
Back to the Stone Age II D: Capitalism
It is conventional to refer to the great tycoons of our own and earlier times as capitalists. The term has a complicated history, heavily influenced by Marxist diatribes against the accumulation of wealth and the influence of those who possess it. Today, though capitalism is defended stridently by neoconservatives, the first generation of neocons...
Voting for Monarchy
Presidential elections in the United States sometimes seem more like the Wars of the Roses than political contests. The resemblance to dynastic conflict goes beyond the predictable acrimony between two sets of political interests: the taxpayers of the Republican Party and the tax consumers on whom the Democrats rely. It is true, of course, that...
Back to the Stone Age IIC
The Price of Free Markets One point on which Old Right and traditional conservatives could generally agree with Libertarians is the high value they put upon economic freedom and a deep distrust of government regulation. In our free-wheeling discussions, Rothbard and I struck a bargain. Since we agreed on eliminating about 90% of the...
Back to the Stone Age IIB
The Pernicious Myth of the Individual Part and parcel of the counter-factual theory of natural liberty is the myth of the individual. If man were in fact naturally free, it would be because he is his own person, because, as some libertarians say, he owns himself. Pure and utter hogwash that only a self-blinded...
Back to the Stone Age II A: The Price of Freedom
Classical Liberalism and its stepchildren—socialism and libertarianism—are founded on error, and no error of the liberals is more manifest than their credulous faith in individual liberty. It is summed up in Rousseau’s famous declaration (which begins The Social Contract) that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Any normal person who has...
Back to the Stone Age I: One Last Addendum
Defenders of Bill Bennett and George W. Bush had only one real counter-argument: Big government and deficit spending may be bad, but sometimes they can be put to good uses, so long as good people, i.e., “one of our guys” is making the decisions. Though conservatives of this type are fond of pretending that...
Back to the Stone Age I: Conclusion
The American Tradition As Americans we owe much of what we are to the ancient, Medieval, and post-Renaissance Europeans who proceeded us. Nonetheless, we are not simply generic Europeans. We have our own peculiar traditions, some of which go back to Britain or even to the Anglo-Saxons, while others are more uniquely American. ...
Back to the Stone Age I: Addendum
This added section, which goes between the discussion of Machiavelli and the discussion of reason and tradition, is intended to sketch out a few operating rules for how conservatives should approach a question. 2B Coherence and Casuistry Most conservative movements and initiatives fail and fail badly… Failure is often the result of betrayal,...
Poems of the Week
Horace Odes II.10 translated by Maria Frances Cecilia Cowper Horace. Book II. Ode 10 Sail not too rashly out to sea, My friend, nor, fearful of the roar Of winds and waters, hug too close The rocky shore. Who loves the golden middle way, Escapes the poor man’s wants and cares, Escapes the envious...
Back to the Stone Age I D 2: Progressive Regression
There is nothing irrational about accepting the moral, political, and cultural traditions that have been handed down to us as part of the conditions of life in the European-American world. Many of these traditions—washing before eating, respecting parents, working for a living—have been tried and tested for thousands of years, while the opposite—bad hygiene,...