Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, was a Conservative. He is remembered chiefly for his love of alcohol and his hatred of free trade. Brian Mulroney, the last elected Conservative prime minister, foreswore alcohol when he reckoned (correctly) that he could surmount the greasy pole (just like George W. Bush) and...
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....
Pat Buchanan has taken more punches than Chuck Wepner, hut unlike the Bayonne Bleeder, Buchanan has a good right hook (or is it now a left?) of his own. The year began with Buchanan defending his feisty anti-interventionist manifesto A Republic, Not an Empire: Not since the days of Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, the one...
In light of the vital importance of the Middle East to American interests, it is curious that our media have chosen not to report Arab reactions, which have been uniformly negative, to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s vice-presidential candidacy. From America’s friends in the Persian Gulf and Egypt to its foes in the Levant and North Africa,...
The anti-Christian and anti-European bias of the United States’ elite is nowhere more apparent than in its decades-long, love affair with Turkey. President Clinton argued in Ankara last November that Turkey will not only bridge “the gulf between the West and the Islamic World” but is also slated to become “fully a part of Europe,...
For sheer incoherence, incomprehensibility, and outrageousness, nothing beats the United States Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. The First Amendment is a fairly simple piece of constitutional law: It forbids the federal legislature from restricting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, or from establishing a national religious sect. Unfortunately, in the 20th...
Connoisseurs of the odd byways of law rarely find rich materials in the U.S. Supreme Court, where the deliberations usually proceed with dignity and common sense. For truly asinine judicial misbehavior, we normally have to look at state courts. Yet this past March, the Supreme Court had before it a case that delighted the late-night...
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
The parking lot of a shopping mall in Biloxi, Mississippi, was packed with young blacks in town for an event called Black Spring Break. Suddenly, a shout went up from several male voices: “There’s a white girl! There’s a white girl!” Seconds later, the girl was under attack. The mob pressed in, hands clawed at...
When C.S. Lewis wrote that there was more distance between us and Jane Austen than between Jane Austen and Plato, he was remarking on a cataclysm that colleges and universities had not escaped. The charters of colleges founded before the Age of Jackson reiterated the claim that the purpose of an educational institution was always,...
Homeschooling parents are all too aware of the hazards they face in signing up a beloved child for four years at Ivy U, Good Old State U, or even Used-to-be Christian College. Even if the institution in question does not hand out condoms like candy during orientation week and does not require courses that indoctrinate...
The smog of political correctness hangs heavily over most American colleges and universities. Since the politically correct are intolerant, support only their own style of research, and hire and tenure only their own kind, this condition may well he with us for two generations. This has led some to despair over the fate of higher...
Most American conservatives are aware of the close connection between Al Gore’s family and the late, unlamented Armand Hammer, one of the most appalling figures in the 20th-century American rogues’ gallery. But in order to read about that connection in a major daily newspaper, they have to look abroad—to England, where the Independent has published...
Many Americans would be horrified at the thought of discussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini as anything but moral and political antipodes: democrat versus dictator, peacemaker versus aggressive bully, good versus bad. Fifty-five years of bipartisan hagiography have placed FDR in the pantheon of American saints, roughly at number two between Abraham Lincoln and...
I live in Italy—in Venice, which I have on occasion described as Italy’s Italy—for the deceptively simple reason that it is the only place in the world where I do not feel the urge to play roulette after dinner. I have actually thought long and hard about this opening sentence of mine, trying to decide...
In the United States, liberation from foreign domination and liberation from the past (the republican and democratic features of government) were largely the result of the American Revolution, which was spontaneous in origin, successful, moderate in its outcome, and—above all—supported by a considerable part of the population. This fortunate historical experience may lead many Americans...
While we yield to no one when it comes to disdain for Fidel Castro and contempt for Bill Clinton, we also believe in the rule of law and in the right of parents to take care of their children. From the notion that parents’ rights depend on a child’s “best interest” as determined by a...
Foreign policy, the elites of both Beltway parties tell us, is not an issue in this election year. By that, they mean it is off the table, a matter already decided upon and settled by those who know what is best for America. So they, and their media auxiliaries, redirect our attention away from foreign...
November 9, 1989, marked the end of the old politics and the old alignments; on that day, as the Berlin Wall fell, so did the political categories and alliances of half a century. The end of the Cold War meant a lot more than the end of communism as a viable ideology. It meant more...
“At present, the United Nations closely resembles the American nation under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789). The inherent problems with that system demonstrated the need for ‘a more perfect Union,’ which was duly accomplished with the signing of the United States Constitution. And just as Confederation led to true American federalism, so the UN is...
Last year, President Clinton, who has rarely found a conflict that lie did not want to join, complained to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Congress was cutting foreign aid, “the very programs designed to keep our soldiers out of war in the first place.” He threatened to veto the foreign-assistance appropriation hills passed by...
A decade after the ostensible end of the Cold War, we are witnessing the emergence of anti-Americanism in places where it had never existed before—notably, among the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton’s misnamed “national security team” have succeeded where Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev failed. “If...
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
The nostalgic should derive some comfort from the knowledge that, in one respect at least, the 1930″s are back: Dr. Joseph Goebbels is alive and well, and living in Atlanta. According to the Dutch daily Trouw (February 21), CNN employed military specialists in “psychological operations” (psyops) disguised as journalists during the Kosovo war: “Psyops personnel,...
I like reading about hate crime: It is such a cheering feature of American life. And while I am always happy to see the excellent news about this kind of offense—ever-rising numbers, more and more crimes in ever-broader areas of the country—I wish we could get those statistics even higher. The reasons for mv satisfaction...
For a quick fix on how a particular organization sees itself and its purposes, inspect its official name, especially if the organization dates from a more forthright and transparent time, when assorted reformers wore their hearts on their letterheads. The purpose, the raison d’être, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded...
As an academic trained in the study and appreciation of literature, I have spent the better part of my life staunchly defending the ramparts of literary endeavor against the slings and arrows of outrageous pop-fiction lovers. I have steadily despaired of those who read Stephen King, Terry C. Johnston, Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, and...
A writer, asked during a literary party what her new novel was about, turned on the questioner with an expression combining irritation, indignation, and pity, and replied, “My novels aren’t about things!” Some time later, this same writer would denounce Stephen King in print for hogging the marketplace and for his alleged role in censoring...
The fruits of NATO’s splendid little war in Kosovo are becoming apparent. Russia has revised its defense doctrine to make it easier to press the nuclear button. The new national security strategy promulgated by Acting President Vladimir Putin calls for “expanded nuclear containment” while pledging to resist Western attempts to dominate the globe. This policy...
With Republicans increasing social spending and Democrats upping military outlays, Washington is devoid of serious debate over any important issue. Despite the President’s attacks on GOP “isolationism,” both parties largely favor foreign intervention. As a result, America finds itself entangled in almost every international conthet and potential conthet: Bosnia, the Caucasus, China, Colombia, East Timor,...
When two heterosexuals murder a homosexual, it is a “hate crime” to be splashed over the nation’s front pages for weeks on end. When two homosexuals brutally rape, torture, and murder a 13- year old boy—as they did last September in Arkansas—it is news unfit to print. A 13-year-old named Jesse Dirkhising was killed on...
Ideological assumptions that but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric, if not utterly insane or even demonic, now rule the “mainstream.” The trouble is that normal people do not take madmen seriously enough. This works to the advantage of politicians—an inherently insane breed—and their subjects’ attitude of “they can’t be serious” allows them...
Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called “place-ism,” and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a...
How could I possibly know as much as I do about popular entertainment? I mean, I almost never go to the movies anymore. The big multiplexes annoy me with the stink of their sprays, their even more vexing segmentation of the audience, and their usurious popcorn prices. At home, I have no time for television,...
A television ad: Single girl “Heather” has come to be videotaped for a dating service. Haltingly, she blurts out facts about herself—she’s got a Lab, a “great” job, an “out-of-control shoe fetish”—while sipping the diet soda which is supposedly the raison d’être of the ad. The interviewer comments, “Sounds like a pretty good life.” Taking...
DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...
“Spectacular fiasco for the organizers . . . a damning verdict on globalization that ignores its own consequences” was Le Monde‘s assessment (December 2) of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Dozens of dailies all over the world concurred. But the reporting of this event, its background, and the accompanying protests in the “mainstream”...
“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...
In our fact-free news, concocted and presented by the products of our fact-free educational system, the lies have reached the point where only foreigners dare speak their name. That’s certainly true of the most outrageous lie of the year, and perhaps of the decade: the “Kosovo genocide.” It did not happen, period. The cat may...
Religion is a very sturdy creature. For two centuries, various atheist regimes have tried to eliminate religious practice in their societies and, without exception, have ended up restoring the forms of the old worship, but with newer and far lamer excuses. The French revolutionaries who tried to free their subjects from the curse of Christianity...
During the Indonesian crisis in September, the American media faithfully toed the U.S. government line. “East Timor is not Kosovo!” declared Albright, Berger, and Cohen; “Amen!” responded the Fourth Estate. But commentary on America’s hypocritical diplomacy was abundant abroad. In the Toronto Sun (September 14), Lorrie Goldstein wrote: If East Timor was [sic] Kosovo, we...
What was the most important story unfit to print in 1998? No, it wasn’t Kosovo: Chronicles may have been among the first to expose the Clinton administration’s many lies, crimes, and misdemeanors in the Balkans, but that particular cat is now out of the bag. There is a story still largely unknown, however, and so...
Twenty years after being exiled from the Soviet Union, Alexander Zinovyev—one of the most prominent living European authors—has decided to leave his adopted homeland, France, and to return to Russia. His reasons are summarized in the title of a long interview in Le Figaro Magazine: “The West has become totalitarian” (July 24). While he was...
“To be merely queer is no achievement, but to be brilliantly individualistic is a fine art which Geneva brought to perfection,” wrote Warren Hunting Smith, who died last November at the age of 93. Mr. Smith lived something of a double life. He was an editor of the Yale Edition of the Horace Walpole correspondence,...
What is individualism? John Stuart Mill answered this question with a theory of rights. Mill looked for a “simple” theoretical principle that could distinguish the liberty of the individual from that of the state. Not only is there no such principle, but we miss the full character of individualism if we try to grasp it...
When I was growing up, the nuclear-war nightmare and other end-of-the-world scenarios weighed heavily on filmmakers’ minds. From radioactive giant lizards trashing Tokyo to the ironic Planet of the Apes, from On the Beach to Dr. Strangelove, the movies made it clear that our social order was on the edge of extinction. The Terminator series...
A few years ago, before my son was born, I spent a weekend in the Hamptons at the country house of a moderately hip American investment banker. There were about 20 of us to dinner that evening, with all the usual cosmopolitan strains amply represented. Boring and predictable as the whole business was, by about...
We open this, the final Signs of the Times to be devoted entirely to Clinton’s war in Kosovo, with an eloquent summary of the war by Canada’s answer to Pat Buchanan, David Orchard. In an op-ed in the National Post (June 23), the prominent Tory declared the idea that NATO attacked Yugoslavia to solve a...
In his article “A Just and Necessary War,” published in the New York Times on May 25, President William Jefferson Clinton summarized the case for his war against the Serbs. He elaborated on his “vision,” arguing that the bombing of Serbia was the response to “the greatest remaining threat to that vision; instability in the...
Regular readers of this column are acquainted with the exact terms of the Rambouillet “peace” accords, which Serbia refused to sign, and for which reason it got bombed. The details of this American-sponsored plan are still unfit to print in the “mainstream” media in the United States, but the cat is out of the bag...