William “Hootie” Johnson, age 71, poor man, has fallen afoul of public opinion and sensibilities, for which the consequences thus far were entirely predictable: the scorn of the best newspapers; hospitalization for a coronary-artery bypass, an aortic aneurism repair, and an aortic valve replacement; now, news of restlessness on the part of the natives. Might...

The Republic of Georgia’s desirability as an oil and natural-gas transit point has made her a pawn in a game that involves Washington, Moscow, Caspian Sea oil, and the fate of Iraq.  And this game is, in turn, part of the great game going on in Central Asia. Since September 11, 2001, American policymakers have...

Air conditioning you might be surprised to learn, marks its 100th anniversary this year.  At a Brooklyn printing plant in 1902, Willis H. Carrier designed a system to control humidity, temperature, and air quality and, in the process, changed the world forever. Before the widespread availability of air conditioning, families cooled off on porches, talking...

Gerhard Schroeder has won another four-year term as German chancellor following his Red-Green coalition’s victory in September—the narrowest ever seen in a German election.  Until just weeks before the election, he was expected to lose, and, considering his record, deservedly so.  Under Chancellor Schroeder, Germany has enjoyed a double-digit unemployment rate—over four million Germans are...

Michael McConnell, to use the overworked metaphor, is the “poster boy” for the Senate Democrats’ attempts to frustrate President Bush’s promise to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.  Scalia and Thomas are the two current justices who have most closely embraced a jurisprudence faithful to the understanding of the Framers,...

William Bennett’s latest fundraising project is an organization he calls “Americans for Victory Over Terrorism,” a special project of his previous experiment in do-nothing think-tankery, Empower America.  Collecting a veritable rogue’s gallery of lobbyists and special-interest reps, the former Czar of Drugs, Education, and Culture says that he is modeling AVOT explicitly on such neoconservative...

Spencer Abraham’s August trip to Moscow may have solved one of the chief puzzles of Russian politics as well as underscored Washington’s intent to cultivate Moscow as a possible alternative to OPEC as an energy supplier.  Energy Secretary Abraham promised his Russian counterpart, Igor Yusufov, that the United States would help fund Russian geological research...

Steven Hatfill, if indeed he is responsible for the anthrax campaign in the United States last year, is a villainous criminal of the deepest dye, who deserves the harshest punishment the courts can impose.  Yet even if his guilt should be established by some future trial, the way in which the case has been investigated—and...

Jean Chrétien, the prime minister of Canada, is perhaps the best embodiment of Coolidge’s statement that, when it comes to success, persistence is better than talent, intelligence, connections, or money. Chrétien was literally the man who wouldn’t leave.  Since beginning his political career in 1964 as a Liberal MP from Quebec, he has been around...

Brazil is about to receive another IMF bailout, funded chiefly by American taxpayers.  While the main beneficiaries will be a few private banks whose loans are at risk, there is practically no public debate about the deal. This is the second Brazilian bailout in only four years.  In the summer of 1998, the IMF put...

Vladimir Putin’s strained performance at a June 25 Kremlin press conference—timed to precede his departure for a G-8 summit in Canada—has led many Russian observers to reassess the popular image of the Russian president as a “strong hand” who had whipped the oligarchs into line and restored order in the long-suffering “Land of the Firebird.”...

The Federal Government is the only industry in which employees get more money—and raises and bonuses—for doing absolutely terrible jobs. The American people have spent several hundreds of billions of dollars on our intelligence agencies over the last ten years, yet none of them ever hinted at, much less warned us, about the attacks of...

“Hate crimes” legislation and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were the topics of the June 12 edition of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, which featured a debate between Kenneth Connor of the Family Research Council and Elizabeth Birch of the Human Rights Campaign, “America’s largest gay and lesbian organization.” Connor criticized the federal intrusiveness that...

To arm pilots or not to arm—that is, apparently, an even more important question than the debate over whether or not we should allow unions, seniority rules, and affirmative action to hamstring every new effort to preserve national security.  George Bush wants a free hand with the unions, but his administration doesn’t want airline pilots...

Archbishops of Canterbury, for all their essential powerlessness in worldly terms, are never as inconsequential as might be supposed.  How about those great English accents, for instance?  How elegantly the archbishop of the hour undertakes to speak for and to an Anglican Communion increasingly disunited in theological outlook, joined by habit and custom as much...

The Pledge of Allegiance’s ban by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will probably have been reversed and the public furor will have faded away by the time this issue of your favorite journal reaches you.  In the end, all that will have happened is that the politicians will...

Arkansas’ Teachers Retirement System was the only government retirement system in the United States to lose money by investing in the offshore limited partnerships at the center of the Enron bankruptcy.  The Cayman Islands-based partnerships “engaged in derivative transactions with Enron,” according to a November 2001 SEC filing, allegedly “to permit Enron to hedge market...

Jesse Ventura’s election to the governorship of Minnesota marked the apex of the full-fledged merger of politics and entertainment.  When it came to celebrity, “Jesse Ventura” (his stage name, which, tellingly he used at his inauguration) was a jack-of-all trades: actor, professional wrestler, announcer, talk-radio host, football broadcaster.  All of these professions, held in some...

U.S. Intelligence claims to have foiled an Al Qaeda plot to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an American city.  Abdullah al-Muhajir, a 31-year-old American-born U.S. citizen of Latin American origin, made the mistake of traveling to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport from Pakistan after concluding his terrorist training.  Had he taken the trouble to travel...

The Pledge of Allegiance, as this issue goes to press, is illegal for children in the public schools of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington state to recite, because it contains the words “under God.”  Two out of three judges on a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...

The Supreme Court, in its landmark 6-3 decision in Atkins v. Virginia, has taken the penultimate step toward total elimination of the death penalty in the United States.  The facts of the case are clear: Daryl Atkins and an accomplice plotted to rob a customer in a convenience store; abducting their victim, they took him...

Russian security is threatened in the east as well as in the south and west (through NATO expansion).  In an interview in Moscow’s elite-oriented Nezavisimaya Gazeta on April 25, Prof. Vilya Gelbras of Moscow State University’s Asia and Africa Institute called Russia’s East Siberia and Far East regions the “weakest link” in the “system” of...

Child molestation has been much in the news in the past few months, and as always in such debates, the issue of homosexuality is never far from the surface.  For decades, conservative activists have argued that homosexual behavior is closely related to molestation and pedophilia, so that tolerating homosexuals ultimately endangers children.  According to the...

Judge Danny Boggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is, for believers in the rule of law, a hero.  Judge Boggs, in an extraordinary dissenting opinion published in May, revealed profound problems with the majority of his court’s approach to law in an affirmative-action case and pointed out that his chief...

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...

Palestinian . . . Lutherans?  To many American Christians following the conflict in the Holy Land, this moniker sounds as oxymoronic as the more general “Palestinian Christians.”  American evangelical end-times buffs—and their number is legion—simply cannot admit, as they attempt to match daily news items with chapter and verse from Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, the...

“We Americans” (a euphemism for the ruling class) probably learned something from Vietnam.  Since that disastrous war, imperial military expeditions have been conducted somewhat differently: Bomb the barbarians into submission from the air rather than try to win their hearts and minds for democracy on the ground.  It may be that we haven’t heard the...

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s success in the first round of France’s presidential election—he came in second and faced President Jacques Chirac in the final round-fell far short of a “revolution,” despite the right’s wishful thinking.  The number of votes in his favor has risen only slightly since 1995, and the rout of the Socialists was primarily...

Andrea Yates, the Houston mother recently sentenced to life in prison for drowning her five children in the bathtub, has become the latest horror story in an alarming string of domestic atrocities occurring in the wake of mental-health drug treatment.  From the killer kids of Columbine, to the sickies of Springfield, Oregon, and Santee, California,...

Vladimir Putin, at the end of February, was expected by pundits East and West to react sharply to the news of Washington’s plan to send military advisors to Georgia, aiding Tbilisi in its battle with Taliban-connected Chechen insurgents.  The insurgents have long used Georgia’s Pankisi gorge as a rest camp and base for continuing their...

Manufacturing jobs continue to disappear in the United States, and the process has accelerated during the recession that started in March 2001.  Manufacturing employment declined from 18,116,000 to 17,037,000 between March and December 2001, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  The popular media have reported that this recession is the mildest since...

Ernest once told me that, for most of his political life, he had been a neoconservative without knowing it.  He did not mean that he necessarily admired or agreed with the godfathers of neoconservatism, but that he was a child of the Enlightenment, an enemy of credulity and superstition, whether those commodities came packaged in...

Texas A & M, founded in 1876, is one of those educational entities a certain kind of Texan recoils from praising too lavishly—the kind of Texan who went to the rival University of Texas and grew up deriding the Aggies as abrasive bumpkins. Traditions, masticated like a chaw of first-rate ’baccy, are hard to put...

Dartmouth Medical School has published the results of research concerning parental influence upon children’s behavior in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Lo and behold: Parents’ “preaching” works!  Their lectures have a “positive impact” on teenage behaviors such as smoking and drug use—even when parents themselves engage in such activities. Similar findings are...

After September 11, several important stories continue to be ignored.  Here, to a lay observer, is the shape of the past fall’s most overlooked developments. The two biggest sponsors of terrorism in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.  The intelligence community has known this for years.  The recent kidnapping and slaying of a...

Superbowl XXXVI, proclaimed by the National Football League to be a tribute to September 11 (themed “Heroes, Hope, and Homeland”) underscored the fact that there is something inauthentic about a spectacle that allows sports-bar patrons to experience masculinity vicariously by watching well-padded millionaires smash into one another for control of a leather ball. The Fox...

“America has changed” has been the media’s new mantra since September 11.  But what has America changed into?  Reporters have fanned out across the country seeking those changes, and they have filled the airwaves and pages with their findings.  Some who have been interviewed talked in the abstract about how they do not take as...

Vladimir Putin’s minister of “emergency situations,” Sergei Shoygu, has been particularly busy this winter, since the usual unpleasantness associated with Russia’s harsh climate has been made worse by the country’s crumbling infrastructure.  In October and November, entire villages in Yakutia were swept away as huge ice flows jammed the rivers, causing massive flooding, while January...

Enron, a derivatives trading firm, filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on December 2, 2001.  The media has framed the scandal as a simple morality play pitting good against evil, with the Texas firm’s top management and the Bush administration competing for the latter role.  Naturally, neoconservatives blame the Clinton administration for the entire...

The Taliban’s defeat may give the American people a false sense of security.  They may convince themselves that we can vanquish those who launch terror attacks on us with the use of our push-button arsenal and massive airpower, precision missiles, and a modest use of ground forces—Special Forces, light infantry, and Marines, or even local...

Before Christmas, Peter Brimelow used my article “Happy Holidays? Bah! Humbug!” (Vital Signs, December 2001) to kick off VDare.com’s annual War Against Christmas competition.  Since then, I have received a steady stream of correspondence—some of it sharply critical, but most of it extremely favorable. Of course, not everyone liked the essay.  I learned that my...

Terrorism, in our time, has found one of its most consistent sponsors in Pakistan.  This fact is so simple it could be taught in fourth-grade geography; only the names are difficult. In December 1999, in Kashmir, India, an Indian Airlines aircraft was hijacked by several Pakistan-based groups—Harkat-ul-Mujahedin (HUM), Lashkar-e-Toib, and Hizbul Mujahideen—demanding the release of...

The Federal government’s freestyle interpretive gymnastics did not end when the man who was uncertain regarding the meaning of “is” left office.  On January 13, 2000, President Clinton appointed Victoria Wilson to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a roving band of allegedly independent and bipartisan officials tasked with the job of...

Hispanic voters remain the chief target of GOP strategists, at least in Texas.  In the wake of Republican Orlando Sanchez’s December 1 runoff loss to Houston’s incumbent black mayor, Lee Brown—Sanchez garnered 48 percent of the vote to Brown’s 52 percent—news media and Republican apparatchiki were busy gushing about the growing electoral weight of “Hispanic”...

Russian relations, in mid-November, were potentially on the verge of a sea-change, at the conclusion of two days of smiles, handshakes, bear hugs, and the usual feel-goodisms we have come to expect of “summit meetings,” especially from American presidents.  (President George W. Bush, for instance, insisted that “the more I get to see” Russian President...

After September 11, no foreigner can fully understand what it is like to live in America.  Every day, we have to listen to our leaders telling us why the Constitution doesn’t work any more.  It is enough to make an honest conservative want to join the ACLU—almost.  The ACLU will go all the way to...

Since September 11, our friend Scott McConnell, like most Americans,  has been confused.  Writing in his Antiwar.com column, Ground Zero, he describes his puzzled disappointment with the talks and conversation at the recent John Randolph Club.  He came to Rockford, apparently expecting Chronicles’ editors to deliver a neatly packaged response to the U.S. government’s policy...

Big government—is it back?  Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way.  But September 11 has demonstrably changed, and may continue to change, some attitudes regarding the exercise of government power.  Bombing the hell out of Afghanistan may be one of those enterprises for which Americans value the services of the national government.  (There may...

After September 11, voices from many quarters have urged Americans to reflect on the reasons for the widespread hatred that the United States endures abroad. This is doubtless good advice: Such historical reflection is always worthwhile, and the pressing need for it is amplified in times of trouble. But whether these voices genuinely seek historical...

Vladimir Putin adopted his usual serious demeanor during an October 8 meeting with his “power ministers,” the men who head Russian defense and security agencies. The ex-KGB operative grimly noted that the U.S. losses in the September 11 terrorist attacks were “colossal,” more than twice that of (official) Russian casualties in the Chechen war. Putin...