When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
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Tribunals for Terror
When President Bush signed an executive order on November 13 that authorized the trial of non-U.S. citizens on charges of terrorism before special military tribunals, the response from the political right was almost—though not quite—unanimously supportive. Not only did the attorney general himself enthusiastically defend the tribunals, so did such luminaries as the conservative movement’s...
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On School Vouchers
Lew Rockwell (“Flies in the Ointment,” September) and I have the same ultimate objective: “an educational market in which parents are responsible for paying for their own children’s education.” We agree also on the “twin evils of public education: involuntary funding and compulsory attendance.” In our ideal (libertarian) world, government would play no role in...
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The Body’s Vest
Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide. —Andrew Marvell (1621-78), “The Garden” Browsing through the poetry section at Borders, I came upon a sole copy of a new book of poems by Fred Chappell, Shadow Box. I have been an admirer of Chappell’s fiction for years, especially his novel I...
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A Hero for Our Times?
Lord Louis Mountbatten died in 1979, a victim of IRA assassins. Since then, no fewer than three biographies on the man have appeared (if one includes The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, the book on Mountbatten’s self-orchestrated television documentary, shown in this country as Mountbatten: A Man for the Century). The latest, by Philip...
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The Secret History of the Feminist Movement
The feminist movement, it has just been learned, was actually concocted by men. Specifically, a small group of planners meeting in 1962 set in motion the developments of the next 30 years concerning men and women. These men acted in a selfish spirit of personal aggrandizement. The heretofore secret minutes of their planning group are...
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I Just Did Say That!
You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws by David E. Bernstein Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute; 197 pp., $20.00 A Miller Brewing Company executive is fired for retelling a racy segment of a Seinfeld episode at the watercooler. An unwed teacher successfully sues the parochial school that fired her for becoming pregnant...
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The Cult of Dr. King
The third annual observance of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. passed happily enough in the nation’s capital, with the local merchants unloading their assorted junk into the hands of an eager public. It is hardly surprising that “King Day,” observed as a federal legal public holiday since 1986, has already become part of...
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La Virgen de Guadalupe: Sent Back to Mexico?
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has spilled the beans: She intends to “liberate” Christians, which means Latinos, from their self-imposed delusion—which, surely, is Christianity and belief in God. Mrs. Clinton’s strategy not only calls for undermining Christian-inspired organizations and businesses but aims to “privatize” religion entirely. The best way to achieve these objectives, as revealed in...
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The Unfashionable Adams Legacy
The Education of John Adams; by R. B. Bernstein; Oxford University Press; 368 pp., $24.95 It is not fashionable these days to admire the Founding Fathers, and yet the flood of books, articles, and even Broadway musicals devoted to them has not ceased. Attention is usually focused on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jeff erson,...
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A Just and Honest Man
In its almost 60 years, much has been written about National Review, especially about those present at its creation. Most attention, of course, has been given to founder William F. Buckley, Jr., but others there at the beginning, such as James Burnham and Frank Meyer, have not been neglected. Yet no one, until now, has...
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The GOP’s Clinton
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 ...
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A Free-Minded
Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkans were full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.) The group was...
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The Supremes and the NRA
I agree entirely with Aaron Wolf both on the constitutional argument but also on the deeper political question of the centralization of power. The problem is that we are all tempted to use the court when it suits our purpose, and in this case if I lived in Chicago I'd ...
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The Cataclysm That Was Roe
The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes). It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state. It lost, with 61 percent...
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In Praise of Toughness
“A system-grinder hates the truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson During the 25 years of its existence, contemporary feminism has received a measure of gentle chiding for its excesses. Not even the most indulgent eye can completely overtook feminist comparisons of marriage to prostitution, childbirth to defecation, or the use of the pronoun “he” to Jim Crow....
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Rending the Seamless Garment
People often ask me, “What is wrong with our priests?” or “Why don’t our bishops say more about abortion? They seem to have no trouble whatsoever speaking out quite freely when it comes to war or capital punishment.” On the surface, this is disturbing. I find it even more disturbing, however, that I, a layman,...
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Will War Cancel Trump’s Triumphs?
Asked what he did during the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes replied, “I survived.” Donald Trump can make the same boast. No other political figure has so dominated our discourse. And none, not Joe McCarthy in his heyday in the early ’50s, nor Richard Nixon in Watergate, received such intensive and intemperate coverage and commentary as...
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“The One”
Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate. And then there are the books. The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope...
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A Living Library of the Law Revived
“It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.” —Aristotle Here Lies Edward Coke, Knight of Gold, of Imperishable Fame, Spirit, Interpreter, and Inerrant Oracle of the Law, Discloser of its Secrets—Concealer of its Mysteries, Thanks Almost Alone to Whose Good...
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Free No More
In his latest book, Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan argues that hubris, ideology, and greed are among America’s deadliest enemies. Hubris led to overreach. Hegemonic neoconservative ideology turned most of the world against the United States. And free trade has become a no-think cult that permits a greedy few to destroy America’s economic position for...
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Well-Regulated Militia
Last June, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, loosed a posse of some 700 well-armed and irate citizens to win back control of the streets and parking lots of Phoenix from the local goons. The sheriff’s pronouncement, “We’re going to get the bad guys,” alarmed the local ACLU, which likened the militia to “a...
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The Sacraments of Anti-Christ
“A Republican marriage,” said a French actress of the 18th century, “is the sacrament of adultery.” This bon mot is recorded by Sir Walter Scott in the description of the French Revolution with which he begins his Life of Napoleon. In passing the first no-fault divorce law in Christendom, he concludes, the Jacobins had reduced...
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Lilliput vs. Leviathan
There are lots of freckles, red hair, and Celtic names in Catron County, New Mexico. Though almost everyone in the county has some Indian or Mexican blood, this is home to the families and culture which David Hackett Fischer describes in Albion’s Seed as Scotch-Irish, double distilled, first by the Highland clearances and then by...
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Ezra Pound’s ‘Language of Eternity’
What (to ask one bizarrely unfashionable question) is civilization? Set aside geography, climate, genetics, and luck. The high classical civilizations are marked by certain indispensible accomplishments: a serious respect for facts; related to this, a steady application of work toward stable wealth; a conception of justice moving in two directions, toward society as a whole...
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In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity
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,...
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Facts Are Stubborn Things
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
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The Revolution in Civil Rights Law
It has been nearly 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations the law was meant to minimize the role of race in the daily lives of Americans. Its result has been the opposite. The doctrine of “disparate impact” has had the astonishing...
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As American as a Stolen Election
U.S. presidential elections are routinely contested for a reason: Cheating has been a recurring part of the American electoral process.
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Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos
“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...
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The Battle Over Terri
Michael Schiavo has decided that his wife’s life is without merit. Since her collapse in 1990, he has worked to free himself from the burden of caring for the one he vowed to love in sickness and in health. After she awakened from a brief coma, Terri Schiavo’s condition improved slightly, and, though unable to...
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The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
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Through the Woods to Grandmother’s Charter We Go
The sacred American heritage of consent requires exercise if we want it to be meaningful and to preserve our ability to govern ourselves.
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This Dog Won’t Hunt
Judge Roy Moore of Etowah County, Alabama, was sued by the ACLU and something called the Alabama Freethought Association (Unitarian-Universalists, I believe they are) back in 1995 for displaying the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall and for beginning each session with a prayer by a Christian clergyman. Over the past year, the affair has...
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The Boerne Case
Boerne, Texas, is an unlikely location for a contest over religious freedom, but in 1996 the local Catholic Archbishop decided to sue the city for refusing to allow him to expand a church situated in a zoned historic district. The Archbishop based his case on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids religious persecution and...
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A Democratic Politician
“An historian is a prophet in retrospect.” —A.W. von Schlegel Wir sind mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig (“We are nowhere near done with Hitler”): the warning by two contemporary German historians provides an apt opening line to John Lukacs’s delightful book. His “history of the evolution of our knowledge of...
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The Name or the Thing?
“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...
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Voting for the Antichrist
This morning, the morning before Election Day 2016, I read a social-media post from an old friend who, over the past year, has felt the Bern and is now calling Donald Trump the Antichrist. It reminded me of another political post, which declared that a certain presidential candidate is the sort who writes aghast the...
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A Topic of Concern
Public-school finance, as a topic of concern, reminds us that the egalitarian impulse lives on imperishably. Mankind must be hard-wired to scratch the ears of the perceived—generally self-defined—underdog, before siccing him on the perceived top dog. Public schools, financed with public monies, were probably overdue their share of the action; but, boy, are they catching...
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The News
A.D. Sertillanges’ advice to anyone who wishes to accomplish intellectual work includes the following admonition: As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable. You must know what the papers contain, but they contain so little; and it would be easy to learn...
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Twin Threats to the Land of Fire
My first stroll through Fountain Square in the walking district of Baku, Azerbaijan, revealed the warp and woof of the city. If I didn’t know otherwise, had someone told me that I was on the Zeil promenade in Frankfurt, Germany, rather than in a country just north of Iran, I would have believed him. The...
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The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that...
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Defending the West . . . Against Itself
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...
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Europe’s Kulturstadt for 1999
Four years ago, when I made a trip to Naumburg to attend a philological symposium devoted to Nietzsche, I was told by one of the participants that, until recently, West Germans traveling from Frankfurt on the main west-east railway line had been forced to dismount when the train reached the “frontier town” where the Federal...
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Mere Children
There is a profound difference between the ancient and medieval view of children and the modern cult of the child. The Rousseauean idolatry of nature and worship of savages, popularized through a certain brand of sentimental poetry, helped to establish a picturesque ideal of the innocent, angelic child. St. Augustine was not inclined to hold...
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Guilty of … What, Exactly?
It has been amazing to see the number of very smart people who stumble over explaining exactly what Trump was convicted of doing.
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Defining Racism
“Racism” and its derivative, “racist,” are oft-used words, and so we ought to know what they mean. But often we don’t, and we just fling them at each other, hoping they will wound, if not kill, the offensive person. One of my dictionaries (Standard College Dictionary, 1963) defines racism this way: ” 1. An excessive...
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What Happened to Russian Spycraft?
I am losing confidence in Vladimir Putin. Time was when I had naive respect for the operations of the KGB or whatever the descendants of the Cheka and Ogpu call themselves these days. Whatever one thought of their moral pond life, these people were serious. Had they not turned any number of British and Americans?...
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The War on Homeschoolers
Homeschooling is one of the many fronts in the state’s war against the citizen. Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Rutherford Institute, and Eagle Forum, as well as longstanding laws that protect family autonomy, homeschooling parents are still viewed as neglectful if not downright abusive. With methods...
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Roll Up Your Sleeves, Deplorables
Trump has triumphed. Now what? A theme is reverberating on this, the Day After, and it goes like this: The media are buffoons who so obviously got everything wrong. How could anyone trust them ever again? All of the Network Gurus (save FOX’s) staved off the Trumpocalypse for as long as they could on Tuesday...