Category: Editorials

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Politics and Sports

When people compare politics to sports, they do not mean the comparison to be flattering.  Voters, we are told, treat politics as irrationally as sports fans do football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.  (The less said about soccer, the better—a good principle for life in general.)  In this analogy, the Democratic and Republican parties are the...

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Trump, Putin, and America

The only way the American political class will ever accommodate itself to the reality of post-Soviet Russia would be if that country succumbed to the second leftist revolution it has been trying for years to incite.  Whether the revolutionaries called themselves communists or “liberal democrats” would make little or no difference so long as the...

Back in the Cowboy State
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Back in the Cowboy State

On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office.  That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President...

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A Victim Must Be Found

Gilbert & Sullivan’s enduring operetta The Mikado is funny because it skewers Victorian British society by allowing us to laugh at the absurdities of the fictive Japanese town of Titipu, where flirting is a capital offense, according to the autocratic rule of the emperor (Mikado).  Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum, who is pledged to Lord High Executioner...

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Carrier, Congress, and Cronies

“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States.  When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...

After Castro
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After Castro

November was a bad month for the left.  First, Hillary Clinton was defeated in the presidential election by Donald Trump.  Then, Fidel Castro died at 90 after a long illness that had forced him some years before to surrender the presidency of Cuba to his brother Raúl. So far as Cuban politics goes, Fidel might...

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Team Donkey in Rebuild Mode

In the immediate aftermath of their drubbing on November 8, and following Hillary Clinton’s career-ending injury, the Democrats faced the question every rebuilding team faces: Who is the quarterback of the future? DNC interim chairperson Donna Brazile is not the answer.  She’s still undergoing the concussion protocol, after a helmet-to-helmet collision with WikiLeaks in October,...

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Election Overload

The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history.  Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides.  Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...

A Confederacy of Dunces
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A Confederacy of Dunces

In the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, as our modern-day Madame Defarge’s poll numbers declined slowly but steadily in rhythm to the drip-drip-drip of purloined emails by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign settled on a strategy and clung to it for dear life.  No one from the campaign would confirm or deny the...

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A P.C. Little Christmas

Christmas is a time of wonder, when the best and the worst of our sputtering culture is on display.  For every magnificent four-part rendition of Stille Nacht, we seem destined to endure umpteen episodes of godless grinches screaming about tolerance and diversity in order to keep authentic Christmas symbols out of the public square during...

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It Just Did Happen Here

Whichever candidate wins the presidency on November 8 (this issue went to press on November 2), the American political establishment—the Democratic and Republican parties combined as America Consolidated—will have decisively lost the presidential elections.  That is the meaning of the director of the FBI’s public decision to reconsider the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email...

Trumped-Up Document Dump
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Trumped-Up Document Dump

“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported, by several sources, to have asked in a meeting at the State Department in 2010.  The “guy” in question was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and after the stunt he pulled in the early morning hours of October 4, Donald Trump and Hillary...

To Drone or Not to Drone
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To Drone or Not to Drone

Reactions to the revelation that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, may have seriously considered launching a drone strike against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have predictably been divided along partisan lines.  Supporters of Donald Trump have seen it as one more strike (no pun intended) against a presidential candidate whose entire career of “public service”...

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One of a Kind

On September 22, a giant of Catholic journalism died—and genuine Catholic journalism might well have died with him. Paul Likoudis was a crack reporter for The Wanderer, America’s oldest national Catholic newspaper—founded in 1867, published in German until 1954, and banned by Hitler in the 1930’s. Likoudis joined the paper in 1986 and immediately began...

Hillary’s Postmodern Job Interview
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Hillary’s Postmodern Job Interview

Laws passed by men are funny: No matter how precisely they’re worded, they don’t enforce themselves.  They need someone to do the job of enforcing them.  And the scope and magnitude of the laws in question don’t alter this existential reality; even the Constitution requires someone to execute its provisions. Some may recall from civics...

Race and the Elections
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Race and the Elections

In a year of blatant political lies (and what presidential election year isn’t?) the calumny against Donald Trump that he is a fomenter of racial divisiveness may be the most unconscionable.  The Republican candidate has never said that all Mexicans are rapists and criminals of various sorts, only that some illegal immigrants from Mexico are—a...

Immigration: Deferred Courage
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Immigration: Deferred Courage

The Supreme Court, tacitly acknowledging that the great Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead, refused on October 3 to reconsider United States v. Texas.  The tie remained at 4-4, same as it was in June when the Court first polled itself, but a petulant Obama Department of Justice asked for the case to be reconsidered. ...

Wages of Arrogance
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Wages of Arrogance

A quarter-century of American diplomatic arrogance toward Russia, and the exploitation and temporary ruination of the Russian economy by the combined forces of Washington, Wall Street, and the Harvard Economics Department, are currently reaping their just deserts.  (See “Wreckers and Builders,” by Anne Williamson.)  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the possibility...

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Dos to Tango

Donald Trump’s surprise visit to Mexico on August 31 has been analyzed every which way, except for one—the one that may, in the long run, prove most important.  While every journalist and political pundit felt compelled to speculate on what Trump hoped to gain from the visit, and whether it would help or hurt him,...

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Love’s Brexit’s Loss

British marriage is on the rocks.  No, this is not a press release from James Dobson.  Rather, it is the consensus of the entire media establishment of the U.K.  What is harming the most fundamental institution in the history of humanity—the very basis of civil society? Is it divorce, infidelity, loss of faith, pornography, drugs,...

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No Surrender

People whose families did not arrive in America yesterday or the day before yesterday are likely to discover, some time or another, among their parents’ and grandparents’ effects small, faded campaign buttons advocating Coolidge for President, or FDR, and later larger and more elaborate buttons promoting Eisenhower-Nixon, or Stevenson-Kefauver, Kennedy-Johnson, Goldwater-Miller, Reagan-Bush, and perhaps Clinton-Gore. ...

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The True Source

Phyllis Schlafly, in the spring of 1973, squared off in debate at Illinois State University against archfeminist Betty Friedan.  The subject was the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, at the time just a few states short of ratification.  Those were the years when feminists went out of their way to look bad: frumpy clothes;...

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In Another Country

A vast, under-populated Western country.  A densely populated neighboring one and member of the quasi-Third World immediately south of the border.  Human labor in demand in the north, an overabundance of it in the south.  A lazy, somewhat dissipated and decadent, aging northern population facing an energetic, youthful, and entrepreneurial one southward across a riverine...

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Taking Care of Business

Starting January 1, every abortion clinic in Illinois will be required to refer those who come seeking its services to one of the many nonprofit pregnancy-care centers in the state, established to help pregnant women understand that there are alternatives to abortion, and to provide those alternatives.  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the bill into...

Bleep You, Liberals!
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Bleep You, Liberals!

Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture.  Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...

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Merely a Pretext

Liberals say they believe in democracy, meaning government that represents and listens to the people whose instrument it is supposed to be.  Yet democratic governments today clearly do not listen to the people, if “listening” means trying to understand what they have to say. The most obvious current example of Western politicians’ willful deafness to,...

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The Racists and the Flag

The Southern Baptist Convention finally had its Appomattox, surrendering the flag of its ancestors at its annual meeting of messengers (representative delegates) held in mid-June in St. Louis.  Reportedly, an overwhelming majority of messengers voted in favor of Resolution 7, in which they determined to “call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the...

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Now There Will Always Be an England

The tenor—and temper—of the debate leading up to the British referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union on June 23 hardly suggested the rhetorical and emotional violence of the response by the proponents of Remain to their substantial defeat by a margin of 52 to 48—a figure some of them pounced...

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Supremely Uninterested

In every presidential election since 1992, complaints about subpar Republican candidates (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney: The names speak for themselves) have been met with a common refrain: This is the most important election in our lifetime, because of the Supreme Court!  Hold your nose and vote for...

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Abortion’s Triple Crown

For four decades now, pro-life voters have been wedded to the national Republican Party by the vows of politicians whose actions, upon election, have proved that they had no intention ever of fulfilling them.  Every two or four or six years, they would swear to defend the lives of the unborn, and then, after taking...

Obama’s Atomic Wedgie
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Obama’s Atomic Wedgie

April may be the cruelest month, but this year May took the cake.  It was then that we were reminded that human life is a political football, and that players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When word came that President Obama was scheduled to appear at...

That Bloody Woman
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That Bloody Woman

Margaret Thatcher, one of the most successful British prime ministers of modern times, was known to her enemies and detractors as “That Bloody Woman” (see Derek Turner’s review in this issue).  America’s equivalent for Republicans and conservatives for the past 30 years has been Hillary Clinton, so much Mrs. Thatcher’s inferior in intelligence, talent, and...

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Qin, Hadrian, Trump

A frequent English correspondent from Stratford-upon-Avon who contributes regularly to this magazine wrote recently to express the frustration mockers of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall have been causing him.  Hadrian’s Wall, he pointed out, begun in a.d. 122 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts and other barbarians from invading England from the...

A Big Beautiful Horse
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A Big Beautiful Horse

As an experiment in social reconstruction, ObamaCare was nothing compared with what’s coming down the line as a result of the Obama administration’s Friday the 13th diktat that all public schools in the United States must allow every student to use the bathroom of his/her/zis/zir choice, or risk federal civil-rights lawsuits and the withholding of...

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The Devil You Know

One of the ways in which Bill Clinton presented himself as a “New Democrat” was his insistence that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.”  Twenty-four years after Clinton’s election to the presidency, the national Democratic Party has given up any attempt to claim that they believe abortion is anything other than a...

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Just Don’t Tell the Truth

Well, shootfire: That didn’t work. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is against requiring women to register for Selective Service in our Brave New Military.  Accordingly, he proposed an amendment to the 2017 defense-spending bill that accomplishes the opposite of what he believes. The idea, Hunter claimed, was that he didn’t want the executive branch to...

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Trump and His Enemies

To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed.  And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...

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Sometimes a Flower

A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.”  She is fired, and the story goes viral. Just another battle in the never-ending culture war, right?  Yes—but not in the way you might think....

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How the World Works

The Panama Papers appeared in April, promising to be the biggest bombshell dropped on the international community since Nagasaki.  Combing through the 11.5 million documents that were (what follows is a euphemism for stolen) leaked by a purported whistleblower to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, an international team of journalists has connected a lot of...

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The More the Merrier

Almost since the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, critics of American immigration policy have been suspicious of the political advantage the Democratic Party was taking of this crucial piece of legislation.  Though Congress’s motive in passing the bill was, in political terms, more symbolic than partisan and tactical, the replacement of...

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Had at the Souq

Brussels has been cackling like a hen that has just laid an Easter egg, but the cackling will stop when the egg cracks and a turkey buzzard sticks its red rubbery head through. In accordance with the agreement that was reached between the European Union and the Turkish government last winter, Greece and the E.U....

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Un Hombre, Un Voto

“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”  This line from Section 2 of the 14th Amendment must have seemed fairly straightforward to its authors.  In light of the first section’s elevation of blacks to full citizenship...

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Moral Regress

David Daleiden, the “mastermind” behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos of the Summer of Gay Marriage and Caitlyn Jenner, and fellow activist Sandra Merritt face a grand-jury indictment in Harris County, Texas, as of this writing.  Both are charged with violating Texas law pertaining to “perjury and other falsification,” for having used phony drivers’ licenses...

NR Trumped
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NR Trumped

National Review’s February 15 number, “Against Trump,” carries a leading editorial condemning the Republican presidential candidate as a man who “would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”  A subsequent article by Ramesh Ponnuru and Richard Lowry, “Toward a Conservative Populism,” effectively suggests a...

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The Incredibles

In January, two astronomers announced that, following the recent demotion of Pluto as the ninth planet, they may have discovered a replacement for it in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit.  If they are right, according to their calculations the “new” planet’s orbit would take it as close as 20 billion miles to the sun...

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Trump Vindication

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I have consistently said that I do not expect him to win the nomination, or, if he does capture it, to win the election.  My reasoning has had nothing to do with whether Trump actually believes in the positions he has adopted...

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Iowa’s Odds

Six coin tosses.  Six separate wins.  And thus was Hillary Clinton crowned the Democratic winner of the Iowa Caucuses. Not surprisingly, people immediately cried foul, citing the “impossible odds” of winning all six coin tosses in six different precincts at six different times—a feat that is statistically surprising only to those who don’t understand statistics. ...

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Keep Your Powder Dry

President Obama’s latest executive order, announced as we send this issue to press, is hardly surprising.  Having failed to convince Congress three years ago to pass new gun-control laws requiring background checks on all gun purchases, the President had used every mass shooting since—including the jihadist attack in San Bernardino—to rail against the current state...

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Dropping the Ball on Us

The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...

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Radical in Chief

American politicians and media people have been making much of what they perceive as a profound distinction between “radicalization” and “self-radicalization.”  While they consider both to be Bad Things, the perception seems to be that, as a rule, “radicalization” is the badder of the two, as it implies that foreign jihadists are able to exert...