From his perch at FOX News, Tucker Carlson was beating back criticism from liberals and neoconservatives at the same time. The subject was immigration. “The point of our immigration policy, the point of all of our policies is to help Americans,” he told viewers. “Watching out for our citizens is the only reason we have...
Author: W. James Antle (W. James Antle)
Candidates and the Image of Reagan
With the presidential election still a year away, Bill Kristol decided to throw in the towel. “It seems clear that 2012 isn’t going to be another 1980,” Kristol lamented on the website of The Weekly Standard. Neither the Republican nominee nor the next president of the United States will be another Ronald Reagan. Kristol arrived...
A Kinder, Gentler Amnesty
By the time Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the shift in policy, it was hardly a surprise. In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer an “enforcement priority” of the...
Glenn Beck, the Straight Dope
A few years ago, I was invited to appear on Glenn Beck’s television show. We were scheduled to discuss the nonsecurity spending Congress had stuffed into the supplemental appropriations bill being used to pay for the Iraq war: money for peanut farmers, spinach growers, etc. (The Iraq occupation itself should probably fall into the category...
Which Way for Rand Paul?
Of all the Republican successes in the midterm elections, perhaps none has the potential to be as consequential as the elevation of Rand Paul to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. Paul was the biggest and most genuine Tea Party triumph in November. As the son and ideological heir of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), he...
The Tea Party: A Mixed Bag
In January, when Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill the remainder of the late senator Edward M. Kennedy’s term, the activists who helped make it possible traced their political lineage back to the Boston Tea Party. Jubilant supporters dubbed it the “Scott heard round the world.” This Tea Party wanted to dump into the...
Great Cooptations
Two politicians get conservative fundraisers’ juices flowing like no others. One, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was surely mourned as much by ambitious Richard Viguerie imitators as by teary-eyed, Camelot-addled liberals. The other, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, they hope will be a gift that keeps on giving for many years to come. Conservatives...
Ubuntu!
William Murchison gets right to the point in his eloquent account of mainline Protestantism’s near-terminal degeneration, written poignantly from an Anglican’s perspective: Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more laxity and less permanence in belief. Don’t...
Kennedy Funeral(s)
Eunice Kennedy Shriver died less than two weeks before her brother Edward, beginning a month of tributes to the Catholic left’s first family that reached a crescendo when Senator Kennedy was laid to rest. But there was a difference between the two Kennedy siblings that was seldom mentioned in the encomiums: Mrs. Shriver’s Catholic liberalism...
True—or New?
“My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement . . . ” —George Washington “It’s not you, it’s me” has become a popular phrase with which to terminate a romantic relationship. It is considered a more polite...
Kennedy Catholicism
The indifference of Catholic elected officials to Church teachings is so common that it rarely attracts attention, but there are occasional exceptions. When at least five fervently pro-abortion politicians took Communion at papal Masses this April, from the hands of the Pope’s representative to the United States, even the New York Times and the Washington...