Here’s what we can look for as the federal government implements new rules meant to thwart the likes of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, the would-be pants bomber: —Sharp drop-offs in beverage sales as passengers find themselves barred from restrooms during the last 60 minutes of international flights. —Airport check-in times longer than airplane flight times. —An...

Of Christmas, War and Peace by Patrick J. Buchanan • December 28, 2009 • Printer-friendly “And this shall be a sign unto you: You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger. “And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying: Glory...

“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes.  “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.”  The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter.Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of salt....

A Tender Unitarian Christmas II: Yankees and Jews Slapping NorwegiansThis [insert preference] Season, the message from the Chicago Tribune to Garrison Keillor is clear: Feel free to slap around Unitarians all you want, but leave the Jews alone.I like Garrison Keillor.  There, I said it.  (We fellow-ex-fundamentalists-turned-Lutherans must stick together.)  Not everyone on the Chronicles...

For Democrats like Harry Reid, who called them “evil-mongers,” and Nancy Pelosi, who called them “un-American,” the NBC News poll must have hit like a sucker punch at a Georgetown wine-and-cheese. The Tea Party movement, those folks rallying against spending last spring and Obamacare in the summer town halls, are viewed more favorably than the...

Americans sick over Congress’ “health care” outrage should be glad to sniff the generally unpolluted air of Christmas Eve in order, at last, to hear the angels sing. Because if anyone ever took a political vote-counter for one of the heavenly host, it had to be a long time ago: not in the eight or...

It was a cold and dreary New York that Ebenezer Scrooge V looked at from the window of his Upper East Side office.    The sun was setting, but his long day was not over yet. His secretary, Mrs. Cratchit buzzed to ask if he was ready for his appointment with the representatives of  UNESCO’s International...

As someone who has written on the War Against Christmas for both Chronicles and VDARE.COM since 2001, it should come as no surprise that my perspective is different from Thomas Fleming’s.  I welcome anyone, Christian or non-Christian, who is willing to defend this matchless holiday, and look with suspicion on all those who are hostile...

“Settlers attack West Bank mosque and burn holy Muslim books” was a London Times headline on Dec. 11, 2009. These attacks, together with the demolition of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of Palestinians’ olive groves, the innumerable checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from accessing schools, work and medical care, the Israeli wall that denies Palestinians access to...

Possibly the best reason for not understanding what’s in the Senate health care bill is that no senator knows for sure, not even Harry Reid, without whose subservience to the Obama White House we might have some idea what’s up; but let that go . . . Few legislative spectacles of our time, and there...

“It’s time to stop worrying about the deficit—and start panicking about the debt,” the Washington Post editorial began. “The fiscal situation was serious before the recession. It is now dire.” The editorial continued: “In the space of a single fiscal year, 2009, the debt soared from 41 percent of the gross domestic product to 53...

The decades-long campaign of Ron Paul to have the Government Accountability Office do a full audit of the Federal Reserve now has 313 sponsors in the House. Sometimes perseverance does pay off. If not derailed by the establishment, the audit may happen. Yet, many columnists and commentators are aghast. An auditors' probe, they ...

As if policy “experts” were not growing almost daily in disrepute, along came the Environmental Protection Agency Monday to fortify, in a backward way, the case for just plain old, you know, common sense in public policy. No 2,000-page congressional bills; no international conferences; just homely intuition, leading to the conclusion that, Pa, this whole...

At last week’s Job Summit, there was talk of a second stimulus package, of tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers, of an Infrastructure Bank to select national priority pubic works projects like the Hoover Dam and TVA of yesteryear. But no one, it seems, advanced the one obvious idea that would have...

Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.” One can understand why the banksters are worried. The company, now known as Gold Sachs, has a large responsibility for...

If actions speak louder than words, President Obama is cutting America free of George Bush’s wars and coming home. For his bottom line Tuesday night was that all U.S. forces will be out of Iraq by mid-2011 and the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan will, on that date, begin to get smaller and smaller. Yet the...

Ritual trumphalism about America’s righteous mission in the closing sentences of his speech did not dispel the distinct impression during President Obama’s 33-minute address to cadets at West Point Tuesday night that we were listening to a man defeated by the challenge of justifying the dispatch of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Obama didn’t make...

In the great 1947 Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street, Judge Harper (played by Gene Lockhart) is all set to rule that there is no Santa Claus, until his shrewd political adviser Charlie Halloran (played by William Frawley) convinces him that such a ruling would be political suicide.  Obama could have used a Charlie Halloran...

Led by a conflicted president of a divided party and nation, America is deepening her involvement in a war in its ninth year with no end in sight. Only one parallel to Barack Obama’s troop decision comes to mind: the 2007 decision by George W. Bush to ignore the Baker Commission and put Gen. David...

If government would just stop trying to do everything in the world . . . Well, wait. Let’s review what the U.S. government is currently up to: 1. Overhauling health care, or, if not actually overhauling it, talking endlessly about how government should do it. 2. Reconfiguring the way Americans use energy. 3. Rejiggering financial...

Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11, and four alleged co-conspirators. The Republican and right wing ranting that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have...

Our Pushover President by Patrick J. Buchanan • November 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “This state visit is . . . a terrible mistake,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy...

As George W. Bush famously asked, “Is our children learning?” Apparently not in the twin capitals of liberalism, D.C. and New York. In a ranking of 50 states and D.C. by how much each spent per pupil in public schools in 2005, New York ranked first; D.C. third. The state spent $14,100, and New York...

No one can accuse Mandolyna Theodoracopulos of not being provocative, and I read her recent post “Jon and Kate Plus Hate” with interest.  I entirely agree with her criticisms of in vitro fertilization, and indeed would go well beyond them: Just because science allows us to do something does not mean that we should, and...

Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries The title of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity.  However, ever since Sam Francis' apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book ...

PERSPECTIVE Going Through the Motionsby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Recovering the Dignity of Truthby William MurchisonEpiscopalians and/or Anglicans. Fighting for Orthodoxy Among the Methodistsby Mark TooleySome good news. A Tale of Two Subversivesby Srdja TrifkovicBattling Christophobia in California and Serbia. NEWS Government-Managed Businessby Stephen B. PresserAs Silent Cal spins . . . REVIEWS Waiting for Charles...

PERSPECTIVE Something to Remember by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Race and Racism by Tom Landess A brief history. Saving French in Quebec by Luc Gagnon Why language isn’t enough. NEWS Social Security’s Coming Crash by Doug Bandow The certain end of entitlement. REVIEWS It’s the Culture, Stupid! by Tom Piatak Paul M. Weyrich: The Next Conservatism plus William J. Quirk on Theresa Amato’s Grand Illusion: ...

A year after Obama's triumphant election, hauling substantial majorities in the House and Senate on his coattails, the progressive sector sits trying to warm its hands before the bonfire of all its hopes. An awful

It did not take the Israel lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements” position. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the U.S. government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In May, President Obama read the Israelis the riot act,...

Like, for example, Charles Martel and his son Charlemagne, Otto the Great and Barbarossa, Henry II of England and his son Richard Coeur de Leon, or, going to the East, Belisarius and Heraclius, Leo the Great and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, or the Christian Medieval rulers of Serbia—Stephan Dusan and Prince ...

Is Atlas shrugging in Brazil? This just in: A massive power failure blacked out Brazil's two largest cities and other parts of Latin America's biggest nation for more than two hours late Tuesday, leaving millions of people in the dark after a huge hydroelectric dam suddenly went offline. ...

For the Blue Dogs, Tuesday was a fire bell in the night. Virginia Republicans led by Robert McDonnell crushed the most conservative Democrat nominee in decades, rolling up a victory that rivaled Ronald Reagan’s rout of Walter Mondale. New Jersey GOP nominee Chris Christie, whose campaign had been the despair of its backers, won a...

There is little to say about the shootings at Ft. Hood that has not already been said a thousand times in half-sentence bursts—expletives undeleted—on every newspaper site in the United States, but there are one or two questions to ask or ask again. Here in Ft. Worth, when I read ...

It makes no sense to see Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as represented in at least one family account, as the victim of

My two earlier commentaries on resistance films—movies that portray the heroism of outnumbered people under brutal invasion by great powers—brought forth a good deal of attention and discussion.  It might be worth continuing the theme a little longer.  For me it is a high priority of  faith that every genuine nation, no matter how small...

When America is about to throw an ally to the wolves, we follow an established ritual. We discover that the man we supported was never really morally fit to be a friend or partner of the United States. When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s...

Why did Rome fall?  To be more precise,  why did the Western Empire collapse in the course of the fifth century?  Gibbon and some later historians blamed Christianity, which, they allege, not only weakened the manly spirit that had sustained the Empire but also diverted manpower and resources away from ...

I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war ...

A review of The Informant! (produced and distributed by Warner Brothers; directed by Steven Soderbergh; screenplay by Scott Z. Burns based on Kirt Eichenwald’s book) “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas,” Chaucer’s pardoner warned his guilt-ridden audiences: The root of all evil is greed.  Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! serves as a latter-day illustration of this admonition....

Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race.  Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt.  Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks.  The superiority...

Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire.  In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...

Sibel Edmonds is a former translator for the FBI—and she’s a tease.  And I don’t just mean the seductive allure of her dark good looks.  For years, she’s been hinting at the vastness of the story she’s been sitting ...

According to The New Yorker (September 27), “America did not plunge into an economic abyss” because of the government’s “bold stroke” guaranteeing money-market funds and flipping Goldman Sachs into a bank holding company.  “The reprieve bought enough ...

If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation? Would we invade Iraq? While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won? Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or...

The Holy Father—Pope Benedict XVI—offers to let Episcopalians and other Anglicans of Catholic disposition join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining characteristics of their Anglican identity. And who in the booming pagan market cares a flying broomstick what the pope does about anything? Not the Wiccans, an estimated 340,000 strong. ...

“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK. For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava. On Oct. 1, Scozzafava was leading. Today, she trails Democrat Bill Owens and is only a few points ahead of...

If humility is the skandalon of Neopagans, they typically base their more pragamatic case against Christianity on its suppose opposition to what pagan cultures regarded as the legitimate use of violence: personal self-defense, defensive war, and the execution of murderers, rapists, traitors, and other serious malefactors. They are entirely wrong, ...