Category: Web

  Timothy Broglio is Archbishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services.  Early this year, he attracted a great deal of media attention, mostly negative, for a letter he issued condemning the Obama’ administration for requiring Catholic institutions to include contraception in its insurance coverage.  An adroit diplomatist, Broglio reached a compromise with the Pentagon, and...

  Previously here I impertinently suggested a revision to Sam Francis’s brilliant and justly famous description of the Republicans as “the stupid party.”  Republicans always abandon their positions and surrender to the enemy.  This behavior is presumably stupid because it damages and weakens the party  by betraying its base.  This happens to some degree but...

  John Kerry has pinned his case for killing Syrian civilians on an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, written by “Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy,” a 20-something researcher who turns out to be a propagandist for the Syrian opposition without the sacred Ph.D from Georgetown that got her a job at a propaganda mill masquerading...

  Even before the recent victory of rightwing Catholic Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition in Australia, the previous Labor government was instituting measures to stem the flow of mass immigration. Outgoing leftist PM Kevin Rudd said of the new measures: “Asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia.”...

  Last week, hell came to the tiny Christian village of Maaloula where they still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. “Rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra,” the Al Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist group, writes the Washington Post. The AP picked up the story: One...

  Emperor, directed by Peter Webber, 2012, 98 minutes Hyde Park on Hudson, directed by Roger Mitchell, 2012, 94 minutes   Anything not older than a half century past is not history but current events, a fact often lost on Hollywood.  So perhaps we should be grateful for these two interesting though flawed dramatizations of the World...

  Ten years ago, Chronicles was one of the few American publications pointing out that the American invasion of Iraq would be a disaster for Iraqi Christians.  And so it proved to be.  Since our invasion of Iraq, half of Iraqi Christians have fled, and those who remained have been targets of murder, extortion, and kidnapping by Islamists, who...

To be charitable to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry et al, their case for starting war against Syria now is no worse than Bill Clinton’s and Madeleine Albright’s excuse for attacking Serbia in 1999 or George W. Bush’s and Colin Powell’s justification for attacking Iraq in 2003. It is slightly better than...

From 1920 to 1936, Syria’s Alawites enjoyed their own separate autonomous state in French-ruled Syria. First, it was known explicitly as the Alawite State and from 1930 to 1936, as Latakia Governorate. In response to pressure from the Sunni majority, France dissolved the Alawites’ state and forcibly incorporated it into the Sunni-dominated areas. Needless to...

This Labor Day, elite opinion is pushing a piece of legislation that poses a clear threat to the interests of working Americans, the immigration bill supported by President Obama and passed by the Senate. By massively increasing legal immigration and regularizing illegal immigration, this bill promises to further depress wages and to throw more Americans...

And a point. Everyone I know is asking me why we are going to bomb Syria. There is a rarely a simple answer to such questions, but if we look closely at the would-be bombers–the leaders of Turkey and France for example, perhaps we can gain some insight. The latest coalition of the willing might...

Author John Lott of “More Guns, Less Crime” fame had this to say about a personal encounter with the future POTUS during his time at the University of Chicago law school in his latest book (hat tip to Mark Brennan and David Gordon): “I first met him in 1996, shortly after my research on concealed...

  The New York Times is suddenly concerned about declining birthrates in continental Europe, and especially in Germany. Having beaten the drums for decades on the dangers of overpopulation (not to mention the threat of resurgent neo-Nazism ever lurking below the surface of polite German society), the Times might reasonably be expected to rejoice at the news that, “In...

Whenever there is a widely publicized atrocity in a country gripped by civil war, followed by an orgy of the pornography of compassion, it is sensible to ask cui bono and to examine all evidence in minute detail. When an incident is immediately used as grist for the interventionist mill, it is reasonable to assume...

Last night I came back from a marvelous six-day sojourn in the tropical paradise of Aruba, where I pondered the future of paleoconservatism over many a glass of (Beefeater) gin and tonic. The first thing that stood out in that tiny island of Caribbean Europe (Aruba only became an autonomous part of Holland in 1986)...

Last Friday, Commonweal published an essay by former First Things editor Jody Bottum entitled “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage.” The reaction of National Review’s Michael Potemra was to pronounce Bottum’s piece “fascinating and brave.” A less apt description is hard to imagine. Bottum’s essay is so meandering that it is...

  Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell. Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The latter said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.” As...

Chelsea, otherwise known as Bradley Manning, has petitioned the US Army to give him transgender procedures that will enable him to spend his 35 years pretending to be a woman in a woman’s prison. Apart from the surgeries and hormone therapy involved, it sounds like a great idea. I mean, imagine the film version starring...

Earlier this week, Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player, was brutally killed in Duncan, Oklahoma. Police have charged James Edwards and Chancey Luna with first degree murder for killing Lane. Lane was white; Edwards and Luna are black, though an accomplice, Michael Jones, charged with being an accessory after the fact, is white. Australian papers...

In Duncan Oklahoma, two black “teens,” driven by a white teen driver, murdered a complete stranger–an Australian student and baseball player. The only motive given so far is that they were bored. Since the victim was white and at least one of the three a devotee of the racist thug doggerel known as rap, there...

In the near term, bet on the men with the guns. The Egyptian Army, being slowly squeezed out of its central role in the nation’s life by Mohammed Morsi, waited for the moment to oust the elected president and crush his Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi was deposed and arrested, and the Brotherhood leaders rounded up and...

  The really important news from Egypt is not the “martyrdom” of some hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and underage human shields set up for sacrifice by their leaders. It is not the brutality of the security forces fighting the emergence of a Khalifate within the state. It is the targeting of dozens of Christian churches, institutions and...

Like a broken clock taking its twice-a-day victory lap, the New York Times weighed in this morning on Detroit’s bankruptcy. The reason? It’s finger-pointing time. And, when money is the issue, the Times’ ink-stained fingers reflexively point to banks, all of which are big, bad, and beyond the reach of regulators. And now it looks...

  At The Nation someone named Ari Berman is foaming at the mouth over North Carolina’s sensible decision to require official identification documents to register voters and permit them to vote.  This “voter suppression law,” he positively shrieks, is “the worst in the nation.” Nearly everyone who is not a leftwing faddist is aware, first, that North...

  The left-wing media painted the legislation restricting abortions in Texas with the broadest brush.  “Sweeping” was the most common adjective.  As in “’It is a very happy, celebratory day,’” Perry said before signing the sweeping antiabortion measure” (Salon); “Gov. Rick Perry signs sweeping abortion bill” (ABC News); or “Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed sweeping new...

  “There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking,” said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin. The reason: Putin’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at...

  Twenty-seven-year-old Stephanie Bannister was running for office in Australia’s state of Queensland as a candidate for the rightwing One Nation party that takes an admirably strong stance against mass immigration.  Several days into her political careers (48 hours  according to some reports), Bannister gave an interview in which she made several statements that showed...

  A burbling controversy of Olympic proportions has found its way to Moscow via Lausanne.  On one side the forces of evil are arrayed behind the stallion-riding Vladimir Putin and his “anti-gay” law (which sailed through the Duma in June).  On the other are the forces of absolute equality, led by the bribe-swilling International Olympic...

Our lamented friend Sam Francis scored big when he labeled the Democrats as “the evil party” and the Republicans as “the stupid party.” These telling characterizations have appealed to many later observers, as have other of Sam’s apt phrases, like “anarchotyranny.” Sam was always in earnest but his comments were often laced with humour. He...

  Apparently, the threat is both serious and specific. The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens. The threat comes from Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization. “After Benghazi,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “these Al Qaida...

  After a show trial that lasted for five years and would’ve made Josef Stalin and Andrei Vyshinsky proud, 354 opponents of Tayyip Recep Erdogan’s Islamist regime have been found guilty.  The main defendant, Gen. Ilker Basbug, who led Turkey’s armed forces in 2008-2010 was given a life sentence.  The head of the socialist-secular nationalist...

  August 6 marks the 68th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.  One goal, many claimed, was to “weaken the resolve” of the Japanese to fight by inspiring terror (what we now call “shock and awe”) in the hearts of our enemies, combatant and civilian.  Said Gen. George Marshall, “It’s no good to warn...

  The Obama administration, citing an ominous increase in online chatter in the terrorist community, has closed down 19 diplomatic posts in Muslim countries, and this morning (5 August) the State Department revealed that they will stay closed because of the continuing threat.   It is perfectly possible that there the CIA has detected a...

  “We’re extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. He added that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral...

  Russian authorities set up a detention camp for illegal immigrants, after 4,500 of them were arrested in Moscow during raids on garment factories and markets. The arrested illegals were Vietnamese, Syrians, Egyptians, and Moroccans, along with the usual citizens of former Soviet Central Asian republics. Raids are now taking place in St. Petersburg, where...

John McCain is back in the news.  The media is exulting that “The Straight Talk Express Is Back” because McCain has taken to denouncing members of his own party as “wacko birds” and to carrying water for Obama in the Senate.  As bad as Obama has been, America is probably fortunate that McCain never made it to the White...

  Making the rounds in the paste-a-link world is an editorial by a young religion blogger, Rachel Held Evans: “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church.”  The reason for its frequent pasting is that she mentions how unimpressed the Millennials (those born from roughly the 1980’s into the 2000’s) are with the trappings of today’s hip...

  On July 1 Croatia became the 28th country to join the European Union, and on current form there will be no further enlargement for many years to come. A look at the glaring dysfunctions in Croatia’s accession, compared to the double standards Brussels imposes on Serbia and Ukraine, is indicative of the peculiar mitteleuropäisch view of what...

  In my recent piece “Hell-Bent,” one of my overarching themes was that the rush to approve same-sex marriage was really about self-identified “heterosexuals” seeking approval for themselves.  Legally sanctioned “gay marriage” is a kind of public proclamation that the constraints of traditional morality do not apply. As if to prove my point, Time‘s new cover story is...

  I have filled enough pages on same-sex marriage to make a book, at least by the low standards of neoconservative publishing, and only one important question remains to be settled: What is to be done?  It is an important question, not only because marriage is a vital part of ordinary life, but also because...

  Four-and-a-half months into Pope Francis’s pontificate, it’s become more than a little tiresome to hear both his admirers and his detractors compare him with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. “Benedict would never have done . . . ” rolls as easily off the lips of aging Call to Action types as it does off the...

  The U.S. policy on Egypt is in disarray, and both camps distrust America—the Muslim Brotherhood by default, its opponents from experience. Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as Morsi’s key foreign aider and abettor during his attempt to grab complete power in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, and with good reason. She came...

  In his second term, Richard Nixon had Watergate, but also the rescue of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. In his second term, Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, but also a treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe, his “tear-down-this-wall” moment in Berlin and his lead role in ending the Cold War. In his...

  American college students never cease to unpleasantly surprise us (hat tip to Mark Brennan).  Dan Jordan of the Media Research Center circulated a petition on George Washington University’s campus, asking students to sign in support of fourth (yes, you read it right, fourth!) trimester abortions. Jordan explained to the students that “If you don’t know...

  The ongoing crisis in Egypt, prima facie, is a case of irresistible force (the army) meeting an immovable object (the Muslim Brotherhood, MB). The officers have declared that “the clock cannot be turned back” (i.e. Morsi will not be reinstated), while the deposed president’s supporters aver that they will settle for nothing less than the...

  Hardly a day goes by that someone does not email or telephone me with the news that some allegedly conservative writer has finally endorsed “Gay Marriage.”  I’d rather not name names, but the most amusing so far has been an online screed declaring Andrew Sullivan the “most important political writer of his generation.”  All...

  The “resignation” of Rand Paul’s aide Jack “Southern Avenger” Hunter was another broadside cannon shot fired in the war between us paleos and the liberals and neocons over Abraham Lincoln, a war that started with the attack on the late M.E. Bradford. The mainstream howled in outrage over Hunter’s 2004 column “John Wilkes Booth Was Right”. Now,...

  Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas passed away last week at the age ninety-two. The most noticeable aspect of her media persona was her life-long support for Islamic terrorists. She openly supported the Shiite terror group Hezbollah, even proclaiming to a CNN cameraman: “Thank God for Hezbollah” and said that Israeli Jews “should go...

It’s as if The Nation admitted Alger Hiss’s guilt, The New Republic discovered the virtues of evangelical Christianity, or National Review concluded that Barack Obama has been an outstanding president.  Yesterday, Consumer Reports gave the top ranking of any sedan to the 2014 Chevrolet Impala, the first American sedan the magazine has rated best in 20 years.  The disdain of Consumer Reports for American cars is...

  “The First Black President … Spoke First as a Black American,” ran the banner headline of Sunday’s Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up? “A week of protests outside the White House, pressure building on him...