A lame duck president? To suggest that this is Bill Clinton’s condition is to be unkind to handicapped fowl. Clinton and his colleagues seem to be on the brink of madness. The administration’s domestic policy moves are haunted by the ghosts of the impeachment process, while its foreign policy team stumbles like drunkards from pillar to...

The acquittal of William Jefferson Clinton by the United States Senate is a good thing, although amidst the gloom that justifiably surrounds this fin de siècle, one is tempted to overlook the good side of the bad news. The acquittal should help dispel three dangerous illusions that still prevail among many Americans who cling to...

Hypocrisy, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld told us, is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. Tributes of this kind have been flowing lately from the members of the United States Senate and the mainstream press who clamored for some sort of censure of President William Jefferson Clinton, or who scrambled, for a while, to...

Abortion has been a part of the American national religion for several decades, and in February a federal court in Oregon decided that it was blasphemy to criticize the ritual sacrifice of unborn children. At issue was a pro-life website (“The Nuremberg Files”) featuring Western-style wanted posters for “physicians” who made their living by practicing...

A Holocaust memorial statue has been proposed by a local Jewish interior decorator here in St. Petersburg. The 80-foot statue would be situated in one of the parks that line Tampa Bay, in downtown St. Pete. The decorator has already selected a London sculptor, who, in turn, has designed the statue. Everything is set. All...

President Clinton lied under oath as well as on television: About that, few have disagreed. So why wasn’t lying under oath simply regarded as perjury? Because weighty conservatives, famous feminists, and legal scholars, among others, have tended to excuse the President, claiming that he was just lying to conceal an affair. Said Arthur M. Schlesinger,...

A new political party is an idea whose time has passed. While I certainly sympathize with those who want to “do something” about the federal Leviathan, taxes, abortion, illiteracy—pick a cause—they’re simply mistaken in believing that becoming active in politics will change things. It hasn’t, and it won’t. The Incumbent Party (with its two wings....

Canadian magazines would be protected against the tidal wave of split-run issues of U.S. publications that has swept across the border, under legislation sponsored by Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. The cabinet in Ottawa supported her proposed Bill C-55, which will prevent American magazine publishers from selling advertising to Canadian companies if those ads are meant...

President Clinton’s $1.77 trillion budget proposal is an insult, and not just to the GOP-dominated Congress that will not pass it; It is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Predictably, Sen. Pete Domenici, Republican point-man on budget, and new Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert both condemned the plan to raise taxes...

Cultural symbols are sources of contention everywhere. In Russia, a squabble over a monument rings a bell with this proud Southerner. The powerful Communist (CPRF) faction in the Duma recently raised the question of returning “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, the Soviet Unions first secret policeman, to his pedestal facing the Lubyanka, the one-time home of the...

“Eight is Enough” was a popular television show, but can eight be too many when they come at one time, as they did recently to a Nigerian couple in Texas? Professional pro-lifers have praised the courage of mothers who, faced with real threats to their health or the health of their unborn children, have rebuffed...

The culture war rages on at Barnard College, where two sharp-eyed harpies, Sandra Chefitz and Shannon T. Herbert, have humbled the last vestiges of traditionalism within its ivy-covered halls. Upon discovering that a Barnard brochure boasted that graduates of women’s colleges were more likely to marry and bear children than were alumni of coed institutions,...

President Clinton’s impeachment was a foregone conclusion, or so the syndicated columnists and the “political analysts” on the television news shows would have us think. According to them. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives enforced strict party discipline and engaged in arm twisting to ensure the desired outcome. But was the result predetermined, or...

The impeachment proceedings were the subject of an extraordinary suggestion made by Pat Caddell, a former pollster for the Democratic Party, at the “Dark Ages” retreat for members of the “conservative movement” over New Years’ weekend. Caddell told the gathering that the problem with the Republican Party was that they couldn’t seem to pick the...

The impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton poses a serious threat to the prosperity of our economy, the stability of our government, and the peace of the entire world. That, more or less, is the line being taken by the Democratic leadership. Whatever Messrs. Gephardt, Daschle, and Moynihan may think privately of the President’s fitness to...

The education cartel in Texas, and the Texas Education Agency (TEA) in particular, have raised the bureaucratic art to new heights by congratulating themselves for failing to attain their mediocre objectives. Consider a report, released by the Tax Research Association of Houston and Harris County and the Acres Home Chamber of Commerce, on the credibility...

Jack Kevorkian may have decided to assist in one last suicide: his own. In November, Kevorkian provided 60 Minutes with a videotape of the death of Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old man with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Kevorkian bluntly admitted that he had turned the tape over in order to force prosecutors in Oakland County, Michigan, to...

The Iraqi crisis last fall seriously eroded American influence in Europe. On November 16, European foreign and defense ministers gathered in Vienna to examine the potential evolution of the Western European Union (WEU) into the full-fledged military arm of the European Union (E.U.), a possibility which would effectively replace NATO in Europe and exclude the...

NAFTA was approved by Congress in November 1993. That year, the United States had a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico, down from $5.7 billion the year before. The proponents of the new agreement argued that the “opening” of Mexico would reverse this trend. Home to 90 million people, Mexico was portrayed as a “big...

John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis: November 1998 mingled recollections of two vastly different men who died the same day of the same year. Pomp and poignance, on the day of the Kennedy funeral, left indelible memories of muffled drums, a young boy’s salute to his father’s casket, a riderless horse clopping through the streets. Funeral...

Election Day 1998 dawned as a November morning out of William Cullen Bryant, with “piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.” We walked to the firehall polling place, passing the pioneer cemetery, burial ground of veterans of the Revolution, all those Ebenezers and Ethans who cleared the land and endured Valley Forge so that...

Kosovo has become a latter-day Munich. Over the past decade, it has been stylish for advocates of American intervention in the Balkans to justify their trigger- happy meddling by invoking “Munich.” The argument runs roughly like this: Unless the “international community” (i.e., the United States under the guise of the U.N. or NATO) acts resolutely...

“John Glenn returns to space!” the headlines screamed, and I found myself screaming back, “I don’t care!” I guess it’s a generational thing: I wouldn’t understand. Why did so many people—especially children of the Baby Boom—care that this man, who has spent his entire life feeding out of the public trough (with a little dessert...

Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...

Pope Paul VI, whose encyclical Humanae Vitae turned 30 this year, predicted that the proliferation of artificial contraception would bring “conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.” It’s hard to argue with him: The Pill may not be the only reason that Americans tolerate a 22-year-old tramp providing fellatio (but not sex!) to our...

I remember the first time I saw him. It was on a golden autumn day in 1962, and he was running for governor. The streets of my little town in northwest Alabama were cordoned off, and the honky-tonk band was playing a rousing version of “Dixie” as hundreds of state and Confederate flags waved in...

Hillary Clinton wisely chose to spend her 23rd wedding anniversary at a women’s conference in Bulgaria rather than in Washington with her husband. The White House claimed that Mrs. Clinton had decided to attend the October conference months earlier, but the timing—less than a week after the House of Representatives voted to open an impeachment...

Kosovo Albanians have been well supplied with arms and money. Some of the support has come from Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, and some from the extensive heroin trade controlled by Albanians. More recently, as Germany’s Social Democrats and their Green coalition partners prepared to take over the reins of government in Bonn, evidence...

William Jefferson Clinton and his supporters have stepped up their efforts to restore republican government to the United States. Responding to the Starr report—and the accompanying boxes of documentation sent to Congress—the President’s liberal champions took up the chant that “It’s all about sex” and argued that the real debate in the House Judiciary Committee...

Quebec Secession was the subject of an historic judgment handed down by the supreme court of Canada on August 20, 1998. This question reached the court by a “reference” or “renvoi” initiated by the governor general, in effect a request by the Prime Minister and his cabinet for an advisory opinion. The judgment is not...

The ICC, the International Criminal Court—the proposed judicial arm of the New World Order—is one step closer to becoming a reality. For five weeks this summer, the United Nations engaged in a protracted, angry, and dangerous debate on the establishment of the ICC. In the mainstream Western media, the ICC was portrayed as a permanent...

Zbigniew Herbert died on July 28. I first became familiar with Herbert’s work in 1984, when Leopold Tyrmand invited me to become managing editor of Chronicles. In discussing future candidates for The Ingersoll Prizes, Tyrmand repeatedly brought up Mr. Herbert as a future winner. Although I could not read Polish, Herbert’s verse made a deep...

Bill Clinton may be the most dishonored President in American history, but who is to blame for his ascension to the White House? George Bush, who waged an incompetent campaign for reelection? Bob Dole, tongue-tied and incomprehensible, unburdened by principle? Yes—but the fullest answer is more simple. At the heart of it, Bill Clinton was...

The Feds now control my backyard—in direct defiance of the Ninth and Tenth amendments. I have heard and read many stories over the years about imperial intrusions into private affairs, but I recently learned about these firsthand when I tried to refinance my mortgage to take advantage of lower interest rates. I immediately ran up...

The parents of Amy Biehl, the 26-year-old Fulbright Scholar who was hacked to death by black militants in South Africa in 1993, are perfect examples of liberals as defined by Thomas Fleming: people who would refuse to take their own side in an argument. Ms. Biehl, a Stanford graduate researching women’s rights and helping to...

The Tobacco Bill went up in smoke in June, and as I write there’s no telling whether it will resolidify, like Aladdin’s genie, if Congress rubs the lamp. But before we consign the fight to the ancient history file, it’s worth noting a few details. With the McCain bill died an attempt to kill the...

“La Preference Nationale“ has reentered the French political vocabulary. In June, former Prime Minister Edouard Bahadur shocked the French establishment by calling for an open national debate on the tabooed questions of immigration and the French identity. The dialogue would inevitably include Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front (FN), which continues to grow in...

Hate crimes were back in the news this summer. Of course, every crime is a hate crime when considered as a sin against charity and against the divinely ordained institution of human government. To this extent all crimes are equal, yet the United States government, while upholding as always the principle of equality, is attempting...

The box office failure of Primary Colors and Bulworth, directed by Mike Nichols and Warren Beatty respectively, has prompted Hollywood executives to view the future of the genre as “dicey,” or so says entertainment writer Bernard Weinraub in the June 18 New York Times. Mr. Weinraub seemed slightly shocked at this turn of events, since...

Richard Holbrooke is President Clinton’s nominee to replace Bill Richardson as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. This nomination stems from Holbrooke’s role in imposing the Dayton Accords on Bosnia and Clinton’s desire to exploit such interventions to convert the United States into the world’s policeman. Recently, Holbrooke applied his heavy-handed tactics to Kosovo. Holbrooke...

The GM strike that occupied the headlines this summer may be a portent of things to come, as a new wave of corporate consolidations and trade agreements destabilize the last of America’s great industries. Both UAW leaders and outside observers compared the strike to the historic 1937 “Sit-Down Strike” that established a symbiotic relationship between...

The Line Item Veto Act has been struck down by the Supreme Court. As I predicted in the February issue of Chronicles (“Reining in the Feds“), the Court (in Clinton v. City of New York) declared that the act violated the Constitution’s Presentment Clause, which commands that a bill passing both the House and the...

Octavio Paz, who died m April, was one of the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century. On the left for most of his life, Paz held convictions that were often more compatible with conservative thought. Paz was not a “progressive.” In fact, he complained that the ethos of progress had no...

“Choose life” does not “foster choice,” or so said Florida Governor Lawton Chiles when he vetoed the manufacturing of license plates with this pro-life message. Was it the smiling faces on the license plate he didn’t like? The bright colors? More likely, he just didn’t want to offend anyone. Apparently, the ol’ he-coon was disappointed...

Criminal aliens are not as welcome in the United States as they once were. In an effort to salvage its credibility, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) deported over 50,000 illegals with criminal records in fiscal 1997. But in some parts of the country, the new and harder line is softening, for reasons that have...

Joe Camel today, the Pillsbury Doughboy tomorrow. Who didn’t know that they wouldn’t stop with tobacco? And who didn’t know that Yale would be in the vanguard of the next wave of shaking-down politically incorrect companies with deep pockets? Researchers at Yale are now advocating that junk foods be slapped with a “fat tax.” Our...

Jean-Marie Le Pen is in trouble again. Imagine if Pat Buchanan had just scored a major political success, which had put him within reach of real political power—and then, just as he was reaching out to taste the fruits of years of hard work, political opponents threw a minor legal charge at him. Conviction on...

Bob Santamaria was not a name familiar to most Americans. But when he died in Melbourne, Australia, on February 25, 1998, he was mourned within his country and beyond as one of the greatest Australians of the century and as one of the world’s leading champions of freedom. Born in 1915, the son of Italian...

The Rockford schools controversy, approaching its tenth anniversary, is taking on the mythic stature of the Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City cases. While still in its infancy (as desegregation cases go) and relatively inexpensive (only $166 million through the end of the 1997-98 school year, compared to $2 billion in Kansas City), the Rockford...

Sanctions are a favorite instrument of U.S. foreign policy, but the Clinton administration seems to be having second thoughts. Recently, at a White House meeting with evangelical leaders, the President told the group that well intentioned sanctions were getting in the way of U.S. interests. His statement echoes a report issued last July by the...