Category: View

According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence.  And it’s a good...

The trial was fixed.  The judge knew it.  The rancher had the town buffaloed.  The jury would deliver the verdict the rancher wanted. The judge was concerned that the rancher’s rowdies would use the verdict for a lynching.  The rancher didn’t want any more nesters around.  The nester’s wife was a good-looking woman, and the...

A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them.  Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task.  Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under ferocious attack for his alleged relationships with several women, including a teenage girl.  These stories are surfacing exactly when one aspect of his policy—the fight against illegal immigration, which was part of the government program endorsed by the majority of voters in the last general election—is starting...

“We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom.” —John XXIII Nestled in the foothills below Saddleback Mountain in “the O.C.” there is an abbey of priests and a small boarding school.  There is nothing there that would remind one of the lubricious television program that made the initials of Orange County, California, proverbial;...

“Rawhide” Andrews was a Texas Ranger.  He came to the force after it was reconstituted in 1874, the Rangers having been discredited in the years following the War of Yankee Aggression as an enforcement unit for carpetbaggers. Comanches were in decline from smallpox and cholera and from the near extinction of buffalo by hide hunters. ...

It seems that bipolarity is a significant element of human nature, mental as well as emotional.  Human beings tend toward extremes in both thought and feeling, never more than when the subject of either is the animal kingdom with which we share our world.  Most of mankind differentiates among animals as ferocious beasts, objects of...

The Russian government has established a presidential commission charged with countering “attempts to harm Russian interests by falsifying history.”  The history it refers to is that of the 20th century, in which domestic and international crimes committed by the former Soviet Union played a salient and notorious role.  The Kremlin insists that the sacrifices made...

“Another Crisis like this one and the West will be wiped out,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 1.  “Once we have overcome this Crisis, the question will be how can we return to a path of virtue as far as public debts are concerned.”  Of course, the first question is whether the West...

It’s Friday evening, and you have arrived at your local multiplex with your ten- and twelve-year-old boys and two of their very closest friends.  You’ve come to see the best movie $150 million can make.  You cannot remember just when, but it seems you idly mentioned to your wife earlier in the week that you...

In 1939, the year I was born, gasoline was ten cents per gallon.  A new car cost $700.  A new house cost $3,850, and the average rent was $28 per month.  Harvard tuition was $420 annually. A loaf of bread from the bakery was eight cents. Hamburger was 14¢ per pound, eggs were 19¢ per...

It was a sizzling June afternoon in 2003 when the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst, Lawrence Franklin, walked in off the hot pavement into the cool recesses of the Tivoli restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, and offered to commit espionage against the United States—and the FBI recorded every word. It wasn’t just serendipity that caught this traitor...

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a, wipeout.” —The Surfaris Maybe we just had it too great out here in California.  Perfect weather.  World-class universities.  High-paying middle-class jobs.  Reasonably priced housing.  Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  The Beach Boys.  California girls.  Hollywood.  Disneyland. Now the state is crumbling fast into the ocean.  Still can’t beat the weather—until unemployment forces you to move to...

The proverbial visitor from Mars—or perhaps I should say Neptune, since the only intelligent life known to exist on Mars today is robotic, crawling in and out of craters as it frenziedly snaps digital photographs like an ordinary terrestrial tourist—anyhow, the proverbial visitor from outer space would never guess from visiting Earth’s Western and Westernizing...

Since September 2008 an awful lot of Americans have lost 40 to 50 percent of their net worth.  According to Bloomberg News, the federal government, during the same period, has committed $11.3 trillion in loans, guarantees, and investments to bail out the financial system.  The Obama administration believes this effort will help the overall economy...

It was a cold, blustery day in Washington, D.C., when the spies met their mark.  The place: Union Station.  The mark: one Lawrence Franklin, then a 56-year-old Iran specialist who worked as a top official at the Pentagon.  Franklin was convinced that Israel was being shortchanged by the United States, and that Iran posed a...

When NATO marks its 60th birthday on April 4, there will be much celebration.  Proponents will hail not only the alliance’s longevity and past successes but its goals in the coming decades.  Their optimism is based, in part, on statements by the new government in NATO’s leading power, the United States.  While the administration of...

The U.S. automotive industry operates in a highly regulated environment, a fact largely overlooked in recent congressional hearings over federal loan guarantees to domestic firms.  These regulations affect more than three million American blue- and white-collar workers employed in the industry, along with shareholders and other investors, including retirees (and their spouses) vested in pension...

America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.”  This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction.  But sex education suddenly required its own graphic, stand-alone how-to course, then morphed into a “nonjudgmental” monstrosity designed to transmit knowledge of...

  “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon . . . terrible as an army with banners?” —Song of Songs 6:10 “Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.”  (“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried...

In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected.  Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration.  Lincolnism, the idea that the central state can and should use its...

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!” —Robert Burns A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor....

When the late Tony Snow stepped down from his position as President George W. Bush’s press secretary, he explained that he simply could not “make it on $168,000 a year.”  The comment didn’t play well in Peoria. The media downplays the enormous wealth enjoyed by disgraced chief executive officers of bankrupted companies, special-interest moguls, lobbying...

The baseball is cracking into Tom Hopps’ glove as he plays catch on the sidewalk.  Terri Reader is playing next door in her backyard, and Mr. Coyle, one of the millworkers in our neighborhood, is walking out front to inspect his freshly mowed lawn.  There is a continuity to these childhood memories that becomes more...

On November 4, 2008, voters decisively rejected the Republican Party, voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 52.8 percent to 45.9.  Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, including every state in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; every state on the Pacific Coast; Florida, the state that ensured George W....

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. —Daniel 6:10 With the election of Democrat Barack Obama as...

The poor United States of America: so far from God, so close to Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his First Inaugural Address, announced what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy.  “In the field of world policy,” Roosevelt said, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects...

The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington.  It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended.  Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...