Category: Web

  That afternoon, as Paul and I were gassing on about the evil neocons, one of us said something like, “”If they are neoonservatives, what are we then, paleolithic conservatives or palaeocons?”  In my recollection, I was the first to utter the word, though I believe Paul also claims credit.  I won’t dispute the point....

  Chapter One: Some Basic Concepts, Part One I have never been very good with dates, but it was some time in the mid 1980’s.  Paul Gottfried, who was teaching at Rockford College, had come to my office, and we were discussing, as was our wont, the sad state of conservatism.  (I do not recall...

  Today brings news of the death of Andy Williams at the age of 84.  I suspect most of those saddened by this news are near Williams’ own age, but I liked Williams’ singing and more generally have always enjoyed the American popular music that preceded and for a while coexisted with what became rock music. ...

  Chronicles‘ distinguished foreign affairs editor has a way of exciting controversy. Often the cause is his view of Islam.  Despite the fact that he has declared, over and over, that he opposes the aggressive policies and measures taken by the US against Iraq and Afghanistan, his historical critique has been sufficiently on-target to create...

  For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives. From the fall of Berlin in 1945...

  Getting some play today is a news story from Cranston, Rhode Island, about a ridiculous decision by the Cranston school board banning father-daughter dances.  It’s the old pattern.  A girl felt left out because she had no one to take her to the father-daughter dance.  Mom called the ACLU.  The ACLU, which couldn’t care...

If you’ve got a Facebook or Twitter feed (or a friend who mass-emails) you’ve probably heard that, according to the New York Times and Harvard, Jesus Christ had a wife.  Proof came recently in the form of a tiny scrap of papyrus, written in Coptic and dated to the Fourth Century of the Common Era.  (I’m still not...

  For Southerners, the hatred of so many of their “fellow Americans” comes so steadily and predictably that it is usually best simply to ignore it and let the heathen rage. We are an easy-going, non-ideological, and Christian people, so most of us don’t even notice. However, the Washington Times has usefully exposed a particularly egregious example, an...

  Anti-American protests have continued to spread across the globe, though the fires of passion are predictably burning out.  People do have jobs to go to, children to feed, lives to lead. Even violence-prone jihadists can’t always be breaching embassies or murdering diplomats. Note: This is a slightly improved version of my latest Daily Mail column....

Breaking news from CBS.  A study of 2000 American teens revealed the astonishing news that kids who sext are more likely to be having real sex than kids who don’t send obscene photos of themselves to their friends.  What’s next?  A study revealing that people who eat three meals at McDonalds are more likely to...

  Click here to see the Facebook page for Chronicles Unbound, the weekly live radio show and podcast of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Today, Srdja Trifkovic joins us live from Belgrade to talk about the surge of anti-Americanism in the Middle East and the killing of an American diplomat.

  It is the nature of men to create monsters, says virtual counter-hero Harlan Wade of F.E.A.R., and it is the nature of monsters to destroy their makers. Mary Shelley and the Golem come to mind, but what happened in Benghazi on Tuesday is more reminiscent of Bram Stoker. U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens did not create it, but he was...

Yesterday brought the shocking news of the murder of the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, by a Moslem mob in Benghazi, Libya.  The site of the murder is significant:  Benghazi was the stronghold of the rebellion against Moammar Khadafy, a rebellion that succeeded only because of help from the United States.  Stevens’ murder brought...

  Yesterday the AP had a very interesting story on newly declassified documents that support the view that FDR and Churchill knew that the Soviets were responsible for the massacre of over 20,000 Polish prisoners of war at the same time they were publicly following Stalin’s lead and blaming the massacre on the Nazis.  Later on, of...

  Christian conservatives in Florida are all het up over remarks made by Mark Alan Siegel, the Palm Beach County chairman of the Democratic Party.  Siegel, it appears, was not happy with his party’s decision to reinsert the word “God” into the platform.  Evangelical Republicans had spent a good 24 hours damning the godless Democrats...

  This Friday, September 7, 2012, we’ll begin the show with some economic and business questions.  Both parties say they are courting the “middle class,” but what does that mean?  I know rich doctors making $1 million a year who say they are middle class, as does everyone who has dug a ditch for the...

  Both the 20th and 21st centuries have seen failed presidencies. William Howard Taft lost in 1912, though he might have retained office had not his old friend and former leader Theodore Roosevelt run as a third party Bull Moose candidate and won more votes than Taft. Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his...

Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of...

  Poor Clint Eastwood.  Like most film actors, the man is a fool, and like most entertainment celebrities, he has no idea how foolish he is.  I suppose few of us could resist the temptation to believe the praise that is lavished on our every grunt or belch, and it is no reflection, personally, on...

  I’d be the last one to suggest that the Republican National Convention should be a bastion of Christian orthodoxy, and I’m sure no one goes there for the liturgy.  But still.  The schedule ought to tell us something about the “values” of the GOP, don’t you think?  I mean priorities, what sort of face you want to...

  The latest scandal among the British royals will doubtless reenergize the long-running argument over the usefulness of monarchy in these times. Surprisingly often, here and in other fora, one encounters Americans so affronted by the manifest defects of “democracy,” that they declare themselves to be “monarchists.”  This has always seemed a little strange to...

  Marine General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, says one possible explanation for a spike in killings of American troops by their Afghan partners is the strain of fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended on August 18. He said that while the reasons for the killings are not fully understood,...

  After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.”...

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has an interesting post arguing that globalization is the single most important factor in the decline of the American middle class.  Among other facts, Thompson notes that 97% of the jobs being created in America are in sectors of the economy not subject to foreign competition.    It’s good that at least some in the...

  Sometimes I don’t know why I bother.  What, after all, is the point to entering into any public discussion of controversial matters?  Each side of the question has made up its mind before the facts are in, and the respective champions of the issue or debate are, depending on who has washed your brain,...

  Venues in which a person’s fidelity to Catholic teaching is generally viewed as a negative are suddenly voicing concern about Paul Ryan’s adherence to Catholic social teaching.  It’s not, of course, that Daily Kos or the Daily Beast have suddenly embraced Catholicism.  It’s that they’re worried that Ryan might help Romney win Catholic votes and the election, thus depriving Barack Obama of the...

  Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer has an article analyzing a revealing ad the Obama campaign is running here in Ohio.  In it, two women talk about Mitt Romney’s opposition to the HHS contraception/abortifacient mandate.  One of the women tells the other, “It’s about a woman being able to make decisions.”  The ad then informs the viewer that Romney...

  Ah, Italian politics . . . This scene reminds me of my native Serbia: corruption, sleaze, scandals, cushy jobs for the boys, and dramatis personæ that changes but little from one decade to another. There’s also the same resentment at various dictates coming from the German-dominated European Union—of which Italy (unlike Serbia) is a member, but...

  This morning, Mitt Romney chose the backdrop of the USS Wisconsin, one of four members of the mighty Iowa class and a magnificent symbol of American power, to introduce Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate.  If Ryan becomes vice president, he will be the first member of the House of Representatives elected vice president...

  Almost a year has passed since we last took note of Turkey’s increasing clout in three key areas of neo-Ottoman expansion: the Balkans, the Arab world, and the predominantly Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union. Each has played a significant part in reshaping the geopolitics of the Greater Middle East over the past decade. This...

  The shooting of  Sikhs at a temple in Milwaukee is generating the usual blather about senseless violence, the paranoid racialist right, and the patriotism of Sikh immigrants.  I finally heard, this morning, the inevitable, “Today, we are  all Sikhs.” Excuse me, but no, I am not now and shall never be a Sikh. Sikhs,...

  The long wait is over, and President Obama can start packing his bags.  Clint Eastwood has endorsed Governor Romney, and that, as they say, is that.   Since the 2012 Superbowl, there had been speculation that the actor famous for playing Dirty Harry and The Man With No Name might actually come out for...

  “Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. … One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.” So wrote H.G. Wells in What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War in the year...

  The Syrian scenario, as concocted in Washington with some help from London and Paris, is proceeding with almost comical predictability. Amnesty International has just issued a report accusing government forces of “crimes against humanity” and calling on the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. The report, “All-Out Repression: Purging Dissent in...

  The Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy is irrational and detrimental to American interests in the region. The decision to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt is the strategic equivalent of Emperor Nicholas I Romanov’s support for the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849. The cost of that geopolitical blunder was...

  Years ago, during the First Gulf War, I asked one of our editors whether he objected to the protestors who burned American flags.  He replied, “It’s not my flag, it’s not my country.”   I respected his opinion, though I wondered at the time if it was not a bit extreme.  But every day...

  Among the least remembered poets of World War I was Edmund Blunden, who lived to a miraculously ripe old age, spending some of it in Japan teaching English literature.  His verse is quiet, patient, descriptive, often taking a side look at what might have been the cause of terror and grief.  Here’s a poem...

  “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble during the Super Bowl. And understandably so. For this was no gaffe, said Romney, this is what Obama believes. This is straight out of...

  The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things—bread and circuses. —Juvenal, Satires Except that instead of circuses we call them football games—a term linked indissolubly with the mess at Penn State: NCAA fines and penalties, disappearing statues of head coaches...

  Having traveled all over Bosnia and Herzegovina recently, including Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Tuzla, Doboj, Zvornik and Visegrad, I can testify that—almost 17 years after the end of the war—this former Yugoslav republic is not a “country” but a deeply divided international protectorate. As the Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik said on July 20, it...

Today we are planning to talk about the Aurora shootings.  If you don’t have time read my offensive screed on the Daily Mail, you can listen to the show.  We may also–and this is not at all an unrelated topic–discuss the significance of the campaign rhetoric being used by both sides.  Meanwhile, the DOD has made...

  The first criterion in choosing a vice president, it is said, is that he or she must be qualified to be president.   Yet there is another yardstick by which candidates measure running mates. Do they bring something to the table? Can they help with a critical voting bloc? Can they bring a crucial...

This month the Census Bureau reported that the inflation adjusted median income for male workers was $32,127 in 2010, less than the $32,844 such workers earned in 1968.  There are, of course, many reasons for this prolonged wage stagnation, but chief among them are mass immigration, which began with the Immigration Act of 1965, and free trade, which...

  Anyone claiming that international bankers, multinational company executives, members of the Bilderberg Group, elite academics, senior judges, United Nations officials and European Union strategists are working together to undermine the remnants of sovereignty and identity of old Christian nations through mass Third World immigration would be dismissed by our bien pensants as a conspiracy theorist. A...

  Yesterday brought the news of Andy Griffith’s death at 86.  Unfortunately, the type of television exemplified by The Andy Griffiith Show died long before its star did.  Long gone are the days when the networks aired prime time series that parents could safely allow their children to watch, much less a prime time in which such...

  For John Roberts, it is Palm Sunday. Out of relief and gratitude for his having saved Obamacare, he is being compared to John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Liberal commentators are burbling that his act of statesmanship has shown us the way to the sunny uplands of a new consensus. If only Republicans will...

  Over the past two decades the decisionmakers in Washington have acquired and internalized a bias in Balkan affairs that falls outside the parameters of rational debate. As Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute has noted, such policy is not as inconsistent as it seems: “Time after time the U.S. policy makers would ask what...

  I certainly understand Mr. Oliver’s point, but I’m afraid he has misunderstood mine. Do I think that John Roberts has a burning desire to impose a “radical social agenda” on the country? No. But his unprecedented expansion of Congress’s power “to lay and collect Taxes” has given Congress a new tool to do just that....