Category: American Proscenium

The Westboro Baptist Church and its bizarre octogenarian pastor, Fred Phelps, won a major victory at the Supreme Court in March.  In an 8-1 decision, the Court reversed a multimillion-dollar award to the family of Marine L.Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed while serving in Iraq. In 2006, Westboro members showed up outside the fallen...

At CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) cited the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as the cause of the financial crisis.  He has a point: As long as Glass-Steagall was in place, we had no systemic collapse. Banks that were busy underwriting crazy subprime securities—synthetic CDOs, synthetic CDOs squared,...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boasted on December 16 that 2008’s $700 billion bailout of an assortment of private enterprises would ultimately cost taxpayers less than congressional analysts had predicted.  The green eyeshades had calculated that the enormous wealth transfer would end up docking us taxpayers a mere $25 billion.  Without providing further detail, the secretary...

The diversity and overall quality of U.S. diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks on November 28 is breathtaking.  A quarter-million confidential communications between 274 missions and the State Department will eventually be released—16,000 of them marked “Secret”; 100,000, “Confidential.”  The trove’s 261 million words exceed the entire Foreign Relations series, packed with almost two centuries of...

In the run-up to the November elections, Republicans comforted themselves by passing around an analysis by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office showing that spending on the Iraq war so far has been “only” $709 billion.  They pointed out that President Obama’s wasteful stimulus actually cost $100 billion more. And they touted the $709 billion number...

In late August, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the Obama administration’s first Universal Periodic Review (UPR) to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.  The purpose of the UPR is to give the United Nations “a partial snapshot of the current human rights situation in the United States, including some of the areas where...

California has long been called the land of fruit and nuts.  Now a decision by a federal judge stands in the way of anyone who might wish to challenge that description. In Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn R. Walker held that the 6.8 million Californians who voted in favor of Proposition 8, which amended the...

If you’re old or sick and have a lot of money, I suggest taking a trip out of the country, away from your heirs, until January 1, 2011.  And don’t tell them where you’re going.  On that date, the death tax for rich folks goes from the current 0 percent to 55 percent.  So your...

The Bush-Obama financial-rescue plan is premised on saving the big banks that caused the trouble.  The theory is that we need to help Wall Street to help Main Street.  Government would make money available, and the banks would make loans to business, which would revive the economy.  “Once you assume,” Michael Lewis, author of The...

On October 26, 1881, a gunfight erupted in a vacant lot on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, that would go down in history as the Shootout at the OK Corral.  Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday stood on one side, and Tom and Frank McLaury and Ike and Billy Clanton on the other. ...

Goldman Sachs buys and sells securities for customers and also trades for its own book.  It’s the world’s biggest derivatives dealer.  CEO Lloyd Blankfein told a British magazine in late 2009 that they were “doing God’s work.”  Now we know what that entails. At an April 27 Senate subcommittee hearing, Carl Levin (D-MI) quoted from...

That cry you heard on the night of March 21, when the 216th vote was cast in favor of President Obama’s “healthcare reform,” was the sound of insurance executives rejoicing before lighting their cigars with $1,000 bills.  As Time reported on March 24, “Health insurers have long argued for tougher government mandates that would require...

It is a strange world in which allegedly conservative politicians will go to great lengths to demonstrate their politically correct bona fides.  For years, we have witnessed this tendency within the Republican Party.  A recent example is the new Republican Party website (www.gop.com), which one might confuse for the websites of the NAACP or La...

The world is so messy, and the schedule so cluttered, what with the diverse man who shot all the pitiable unarmed military service­persons, not to mention the Winter Holiday panty-­fizzle-bomber, and there was an inappropriate, unauthorized earthquake in Haiti, and yet even more entropically, there was a problem about Americans watching television, or should I...

The University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development has declared that all prospective teachers must be taught that some teachers are too white, too rich, too privileged, and too oppressive. This announcement recalls the shenanigans at the University of Delaware, reported in these pages last year.  The students there were being taught that...

The bodies were barely cold at Ft. Hood when Slate.com writer William Saletan unlimbered his guns.  It is, he announced, time for the military to lift its policy exempting women from combat.  His reason?  A female civilian cop, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, took down Maj. Nidal Hasan and stopped the shooting spree that left 13 dead...

Homosexuals coast-to-coast have been doing the slow burn in the past few months because their jug-eared leader, Barack Obama, has delayed fulfilling a key campaign promise: to scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.  The policy is actually federal law, and it’s very simple: Keep your mouth shut, and you can serve.  Ten months...

According to The New Yorker (September 27), “America did not plunge into an economic abyss” because of the government’s “bold stroke” guaranteeing money-market funds and flipping Goldman Sachs into a bank holding company.  “The reprieve bought enough time for the reemergence of reason over unbridled fear.”  Massive government spending and guarantees are now propping up...

On July 15 Goldman Sachs reported that its second-quarter profits were the highest in 140 years.  It netted $3.4 billion on $13.4 billion in revenue (78 percent of which came from trading and principal investments and 11 percent from investment banking).  Exactly which trades brought in such large profits is said to be proprietary.  It...

For years, the United States and East Asian nations have proceeded on the assumption that a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is feasible.  A settlement would entail Pyongyang’s renunciation of its nuclear ambitions in exchange for diplomatic and economic concessions by the other participants in the six-party talks. But what if the...

Pat Buchanan is one of our favorite people and is certainly a source of inspiration for many of our readers.  However, in a recent column entitled “Obama Avoids the Crocodile,” he defends Barack Obama’s decision not to release the horrendous Abu Ghraib photos (some of which show rapes of prisoners by American and Iraqi soldiers)...

“This conversation doesn’t exist.”  Those were the last words spoken by U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) as she concluded her 2005 chat with “a suspected Israeli agent,” as Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly put it, during the course of which she agreed to sell her country down the river in exchange for 30 pieces of...

Despite professions of friendship and cooperation in Washington and Beijing, U.S.-Chinese relations in the Obama era are off to a rocky start.  The most prominent cause of tension was an incident in early March in the South China Sea.  U.S.S. Impeccable, a “survey vessel” (spy ship) was conducting operations some 30 miles off the coast...

The disastrous denouement of the Iraq war, and the revelation that we were lied into invading a country that represented no credible threat to us, had supposedly discredited the authors of that reckless adventure—the neoconservatives centered in and around the American Enterprise Institute.  AEI served as the headquarters of the neocon network in Washington, a...

The best-seller The Perfect Storm tells a true story of a ship caught in a vortex created by a continental low-pressure system, a tropical hurricane, and an arctic cold front off the shores of Newfoundland.  This complex disaster comes to mind when trying to describe the nature of the crisis that nearly closed down the...

According to the Washington Post, a senior diplomat from a major European country, a Middle Eastern ambassador, and an Asian ambassador—all of whom represent “major, big-league countries”—have been getting lots of messages from their home offices wondering how exactly President Obama will exert his influence over the contracting American Empire. Apparently “Barack Obama’s folks aren’t...

In modern America, the absurd is forced on everyone with the full coercive powers of an omnipotent state—all in the name of “rights.” Same-sex “marriage” first was “legalized” in 2003 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court drove matrimony off Chappaquiddick’s Dike Bridge and let it drown.  In October 2008, Connecticut’s Supreme Court did the same....

We have just survived eight years of the worst American presidency in modern times.  For conservatives, the reign of Bush II was far worse than anything we had to endure previously, but at least in the case of outright statists like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we knew what we were getting into.  In the case of...

I wish I had a dollar—oops, better make that a euro—for every recent obituary marking the political death of neoconservatism.  I would have been able to bail out the grand financial house of Lehman Brothers and avert the tragedy of one more Wall Street fat cat being forced to lay off another maid in his...

On August 26, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Washington has sharply criticized Moscow for this, while the European Union has threatened sanctions.  Russia and Georgia have signed a cease-fire agreement stipulating that Georgian forces must move back to their bases, while Russian troops are supposed to withdraw to...

Having listened to recent statements made by President George W. Bush and his presumptive heir, John McCain, I am impressed that these two carriers of the neocon torch expect the opponents of their disastrous military misadventure in Mesopotamia, including presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, to crawl on all fours before the War Party’s leaders,...

The California Supreme Court, in striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race.  Progressives have inevitably compared it to the legalization of interracial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the legalization of cross-species marriage as the next giant step for mankind. ...

When Texas Child Protective Services seized the children of mothers belonging to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, I wondered if the Independent Republic was turning Yankee.  The seizure was an abuse of power against the fundamental institution of all human societies—the family.  Fortunately, the ruling on May 23 by the state’s Third Circuit...

These are bad times to be an eater in America, as anyone who has suffered sticker shock at the supermarket can tell you.  The cost of necessities such as bread, milk, and eggs has risen steadily in the last two years—by as much as 30 percent in some parts of the country.  Vegetables, fruits, meats,...

I first read about it in the newspaper: a new concept in speeding up airline security called Clear®.  The idea is to pre-inspect, via extensive background checks, passengers traveling by air so that bottlenecks in the security lines can be eliminated, and “cleared” passengers, whisked through. I may not be nuts about being “inspected,” but...

“Concern in Jerusalem: Obama Is Getting Closer to the Presidency” was the headline on the front page of Ma’ariv, an Israeli daily.  “Sources in Jerusalem are worried over the erosion in the support for Hillary Clinton who is considered more supportive of Israel,” the paper reported after the Iowa caucuses, reflecting the rising sentiment among...

Not so long ago, Rudy Giuliani was the consensus front runner for the Republican presidential nomination.  He had won the first beauty contest of the primary season, from the nation’s most self-important electorate, the neoconservative punditariat: George Will, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz, David Frum, and Richard Brookhiser all lined up behind Giuliani, together with an...

There is an element of cognitive dissonance in the way that many members of the reality-based community in Washington tend to approach U.S. policy in the Middle East.  Many of my colleagues in Washington have urged policymakers to adopt a sense of realism about the American ability to achieve reconciliation between the ethnic and religious...

Though Democrats in Virginia are generally more fiscally conservative than their brethren in such tax-and-spend environs as Massachusetts or New York, some issues require them to adopt the boilerplate liberal platitudes and positions.  Immigration is one of them.  Islam is another.  Together, the two are a ticking time bomb, perhaps literally.  The governor of Virginia...

The very idea of a War on Terror is preposterous.  (Everyone remembers the War on Aviation after Pearl Harbor, right?)  It is so preposterous that our elites have had a difficult time figuring out how to name the enemy, which is illustrated perfectly by the pathologically p.c. final line of a short article from the...

The central character in the little morality play spun out by the Bush administration in making the case for “staying the course” in Iraq is Gen. David Petraeus, commander of our forces in Iraq and the savior of the neocons’ war.  His much-vaunted report was to elucidate the conditions for “victory” once and for all,...

In the fourth Democratic presidential debate (July 23), the candidates were united on the need for the United States to withdraw from Iraq.  But most of them (with the notable exception of Bill Richardson) were equally convinced of the need to intervene in Darfur.  Sen. Joe Biden was out front on that issue, arguing that...

If Rupert Murdoch gets his way, all Earthlings will read one newspaper and watch one television station.  And Murdoch will own both.  So even before the Media Monster That Ate New York and London had the Wall Street Journal for dessert, the liberal-media elite flew into a rage worthy of the Tasmanian Devil.  He’ll interfere,...

The plight of Iraq’s Christian community—as followers of the Prince of Peace flee from the country they have lived in since ancient times, their homes and churches burned, their children kidnapped and raped, their priests murdered—has elicited barely any reaction from either the White House or the Muslim government it supports.  The destruction of the...

The Bush administration says that Iran has “proliferated weapons of mass destruction.”  This time, Condi will make sure they can find some. On March 28, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Henry Paulson, and Alberto Gonzales determined that Iran’s military-industrial complex, the Defense Industries Organization (DIO), has contributed to the spread of “weapons of mass destruction.”...

The shootings at Virginia Tech inaugurated a new round of debates not only over such obvious issues as campus security and gun control but of the more fundamental questions of who we think we are as American and who we would like to be.  The debate, as much as the killings, gives testimony (though not...

With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery.  And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...

Who should determine whether alien enemy combatants captured in Iraq and Afghanistan are properly in the custody of the U.S. government at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay?  The President and Congress have set up special military tribunals to make such determinations, but some federal judges and some critics of President George W. Bush...

A college professor who is planning to teach a course on imperialism contacted me recently, asking for my recommendations for the course’s reading list.  If I had only one item to suggest for his class on empire and its discontents, it would not be an essay in history, political science, or economics.  Instead, I would...