Category: News

Harold O.J. Brown fell asleep, as Our Lord puts it, on July 8, just two days after his 74th birthday. This magazine’s religion editor since 1989, he was a contributor before that. The title of my column in Chronicles was inspired by ...

The media are silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran. U.S. Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. U.S. Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases in countries bordering or near to Iran. U.S. B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted...

“Mexico does not end at its borders. . . . Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.” That astonishing claim, by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in his state of the nation address at the National Palace Sunday, brought his audience wildly cheering to its feet. Were the United States a serious nation, Calderon’s claim...

My late friend Sam Francis often wrote about the need for Americans to defend their “culture.”  Most assuredly Americans have lives, families, land, and property that they need to and have every right to defend and preserve (which they are not doing a very good job of).   But “culture”?  I always wondered exactly what Sam...

A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...

The execution-style murder of three African-American college students in Newark, N.J., forced to kneel and shot in the head—allegedly by an illegal alien from Peru who was out on bail for the serial rape of a 5-year-old—has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008. Newark, like New York, is a “sanctuary city,” where...

“For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth with darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness.”—Ecclesiastes 6:4 “Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?”—Ecclesiastes 8:4 “Our” President says that those of us who blame Islam for terrorism are as bad as...

The Ultimate Homeschool. “ . . . redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”—Ephesians 5:15 “Go day, come day. Lord, send Sunday.” My paternal grandmother could be counted on to say these words at least once per week. Whether burdened with some mundane task or confronted with the evidence of human frailty, the prospect...

Mr. Brooks Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer StudiosDirected by Bruce A. EvansScreenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon Last month, the Wall Street Journal gleefully doted on billionaire wonderboy Stephen Schwarzman of the aptly named Blackstone Group, a firm dealing in private equities and leveraged buyouts. Schwarzman, George W. Bush’s roommate at Yale and...

As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are ...

The war in Iraq has left many casualties; Social Security reform is one of them. For so long, Democrats surrounded the issue with demagoguery. And now that the Democrats control Capitol Hill, Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront, Social Security’s impending financial collapse. And yet the need to confront the problem has never...

“And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted,he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.”—Exodus 32:17 Poor Phil Spector. He may be a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the producer of a string of hits from “Be My Baby” (The Ronettes) to...

For several years now, professional baseball has been pouring millions of dollars into developing black players. Evidently, the number of black players, at least American blacks, has been in decline. NASCAR is funding programs to develop black drivers after fielding complaints that the sport is too white. Similarly, the NHL now has a “Diversity Program”...

PERSPECTIVE Connoisseur of Chaos by Thomas Fleming Worth doing badly. VIEWS Liberality, the Basis of Culture by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. The ultimate homeschool. Wall of Sound by Aaron D. Wolf Noise as the basis of culture. Social Security’s War on Families by Doug Bandow A current crisis and a coming disaster. REVIEWS A Humble Love...

Why did Bush do it? Why did he suddenly barge into the legal process and erase the entire 30-month sentence of Scooter Libby? For, from his own statement, Bush found the act deeply distasteful. In that statement, Bush calls Libby’s crimes “serious convictions of perjury and obstruction of justice.” He praises Patrick Fitzgerald as “a...

Scott P. Richert remembers local historian Jon Lundin. We’re about 50 miles east of Toledo, cruising along the Ohio Turnpike on our way to Cleveland for the wedding of longtime Chronicles contributor Tom Piatak. Satisfied from a lunch of cabbage rolls, ...

Ryan Henry, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, held a briefing on April 23 about the future opening of the new Africa Command (AFRICOM). It will join other U.S. commands that coordinate military and interagency operations for the Middle East, ...

Justice is the central preoccupation of Greek moral and political thought. The basic word is dike, a cosmic principle that makes things right, from which is derived such words as dikaios, just, and dikaoiosyne, the quality of being just. Dike, justice, means originally something like the way things have always been, are now, and ought...

The Hoax Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed by Lasse Hallstrom Screenplay by William Wheeler With The Hoax, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom and his screenwriter, William Wheeler, have at long last given Clifford Irving his due. They have done so by portraying their subject with about ...

The struggle for Kosovo between Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians dates back to 1389, when the Serbs were defeated by, and their lands annexed to, the Ottoman Empire. Muslim rule lasted over four centuries and resulted in several waves of forced migrations of Serbs from Kosovo. The ...

During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an ...

Atheists are feeling their oats these days. Three militant unbelievers—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—have recently hit the best-seller lists and talk shows. Not since Bertrand Russell have we seen atheism so prosperously married to celebrity. Why now? Since the ...

In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity by Patrick J. Buchanan • July 3, 2007 • Printer-friendly “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” said a cocky George W. Bush in Bulgaria, when he heard the Senate had just fallen 15 votes short of voting cloture on the Kennedy-Kyl immigration bill he had embraced. Bush returned home,...

On a balmy spring day, a visitor to St. Mark’s in Venice, if he is adventurous enough to make his way to the top of the cathedral and look down, will see the subjacent piazza covered in a species of vermin. Excoriating the ...

PERSPECTIVE Ted's Timor Mortis by Thomas Fleming Stumbling past the half-truths. VIEWS Americans Don't Die! by Roger D. McGrath Casualties, from republic to empire. Portraits by George Garrett Some notes on the poetry of growing old. The Last Adieu by George McCartney A wake for the living. A Dirge for ...

What was anticipated in September, the retreat of the old bulls of the Republican Party from the Bush war policy, happened in June. The beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war is at hand.

“The only thing that keeps the ruling coalition together is the loathing of Berlusconi,” Sylvia Poggioli, NPR’s veteran Rome correspondent, told me over the morning coffee last week, “and the fear that after the next election they’d no longer be in power.” In other ...

The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Sanchez says, is “to stave...

On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical (Testem benevolentiae nostrae) to James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, intended “to suppress certain contentions” that had arisen in America “to the detriment of the peace of many souls.” In essence, Leo feared that some American Catholic intellectuals, including a number of bishops, were finding...

A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture,...

Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, chapters 4 & 5 I am going to keep my promise to keep my initial summary of these chapters very short in the hope that contributors to this discussion, more learned in evolutionary theory than I, will share much of the burden. The story Wade wishes to tell in...

Beijing announced in early March that it plans to boost China’s defense budget by 17.8 percent in the coming year. That fairly hefty increase continues a pattern of double-digit hikes over the past decade. Both the United States and China’s neighbors in East Asia are expressing growing uneasiness about the trend. Far more troubling, however,...

A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...

In July 1861, the Union Army marched out of the capital to meet the Confederates forming up at Manassas. Washingtonians packed picnic lunches and followed to enjoy the rebel rout. By nightfall, the Union Army was straggling back to the city. Stunned and panicked spectators had already returned to report the defeat of Gen. McDowell’s...

Economic discussion in the United States is trapped in ancient ruts. Both right and left are stuck in old habitual ways of thinking. Neither shows inclination or ability to think independently of ideology. For a country beset with economic problems, this is problematic. The ascendancy of free market economics during the past quarter century has...

By the 1950’s, professors at our universities were teaching American history, “warts and all.” By the late 60’s, it was mostly warts. Now, it is all warts, all the time. The Japanese have taken a different tack. They have sanitized their history, especially their actions during World War II, and only in response to pressure...

By 1988, Ronald Reagan, who had famously branded the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” was striding through Red Square arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians were pounding both men on the back. They had just signed the greatest arms reduction agreement in history—eliminating all Soviet SS-20s targeted on Europe, in return for removal of the Pershing...

Here’s what I can’t figure out: How in the world did Saint Patrick evangelize all of those Druid priests and clan chieftains without a mission statement? After all, history and tradition tell us that he walked around preaching and performed an occasional miracle. But how did he know what his mission was? And then, there...

In the current debate on the future of Kosovo, it is often overlooked that hundreds of thousands of Serbs and other non-Albanians had fled the province under Albanian pressure well before the KLA terror campaign of 1996-1998. Under Tito, the Albanians’ share of the population thus rose from 64 percent in 1953 to 77 percent...

The immigration bill does not address the problem. Like most bills, it is the product of influential moneyed interests. It serves these interests at the expense of the American people. I have nothing against immigration in principle and nothing against Mexicans. Illegals, or what are known in the construction trades as “first generation Mexicans,” are...

PERSPECTIVE Establishing Christian America by Thomas Fleming The Master's business. VIEWS Americanism, Then and Now by Christopher Check Our pet heresy. Protestantism, America, and Divine Law by Harold O.J. Brown A personal reflection. The Business of Souls by Aaron D. Wolf When Experts Attack, Part II. NEWS Border Math by George ...

The Washington, D.C., think-tank The American Enterprise Institute camouflages its purpose with its name. There is nothing American about AEI, and the organization’s enterprise is fomenting war in the Middle East against Israel’s enemies. Its real name should be The Likud Center for Middle East War. AEI has the largest collection of warmongers in America....

Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran? For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war. —Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq. —The U.N....

When President Bush announced, in a televised speech, that he was planning to deploy 21,500 additional troops to Iraq, he added an ominous aside: Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing...

“Political words of all others are the most indefinite, on account of the constant struggle of power to enlarge itself by tortured construction of terms.”—John Taylor of Caroline To have spent the better part of a working life as a historian studying Americans of earlier times has been a privilege. It is also a sorrowful...

Today, in Washington, D.C., Mary Cheney gave birth to Samuel David Cheney. The baby, the product, apparently, of artificial insemination has no known father, apart from Ms Cheney’s girlfriend Heather Poe. Up the road from Washington, in Hackensack, N.J., 60-year-old Frieda Birnbaum, described as a “mid-life counsellor,” gave birth to twins.  Ms Birnbaum does have...

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...

If Rush Limbaugh can pass for a conservative these days, it’s no marvel that George Will can, too. Unlike Limbaugh, he at least reads books, especially Victorian ones. (He even named his daughter Victoria.) But he shares with Limbaugh an easygoing approach to defining conservatism, to the extent that a tabloid tramp such as Rudy...

A prominent opposition figure was shot dead last Sunday in the capital of a former Soviet republic. Had it been a “pro-Western reformist” in Moscow, you’d be force-fed the victim’s name for days on end. A legion of editorialists and “analysts” would be telling you that Vladimir Putin is behind the crime and that we...

A review of Winter’s Bone: A Novel, by Daniel Woodrell. The Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full...