Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy.  One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26.  A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment...

“Real men go to Tehran!” brayed the neoconservatives, after the success of their propaganda campaign to have America march on Baghdad and into an unnecessary war that has forfeited all the fruits of our Cold War victory. Now they are back, in pursuit of what has always been their great goal: an American war on...

A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored.  Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.  —John Adams Honest history is one of the many casualties of the ethnic spoils competition that now dominates American society.  —Clyde Wilson Blood will tell.  —proverbial wisdom There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. ...

As I understand gun control, the idea is to disarm criminals unless they work for the government. Police used to see their duty as to protect people.  Since the feds took over training them, more and more of them think their job is to swagger, push people around, and make military-style assaults. An Obama spokesperson...

Lecturing a conscript conclave of Justice Department bureaucrats, Attorney General Eric Holder last week called America a “nation of cowards” for not spending more time talking about race. Reading his speech, however, one recalls the sage counsel of Pat Moynihan to President Nixon in 1970: This whole subject might benefit from a long period of...

“The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating,” said President Obama, as he announced deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops. “I’m absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region, solely through military means.” “(T)here is no military solution in Afghanistan,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates....

Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79. Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his ...

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policy of Great Society spending and the Vietnam War is credited with the rising American inflation that persisted until checked by President Reagan’s supply-side policy. In Johnson’s time, the American economy and the U.S. dollar were strong, and there was no current account deficit. Yet, LBJ’s policy of guns and butter...

A few of us now decrepit pre-Reagan “conservatives” can remember the brief flicker of hope of saving the republic that we had around 1980.  Around about that time we were heartened by the founding of the Washington Times, which, it was thought, might become an effective foe of the mainstream ...

Metrics of National Decline by Patrick J. Buchanan • February 16, 2009 • Printer-friendly “Bush Boom Continues” trilled the headline over the Lawrence Kudlow column, as George W. Bush closed out his seventh year in office. “You can call it Goldilocks 2.0,” purred Kudlow. Yes, you could. But what a difference 12 months can make....

A Muslim businessman who with his wife created the Bridges TV Network to offer a kindler gentler image of Islam has been arrested for cutting off the head of his estranged wife, who had sough and received an order of protection.   Muzzammil “Mo” Hassan, who has been has been lauded by Jay Leno and NPR,...

“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton is supposed to have said, when he learned of President Lincoln’s death.  In a trivial sense at least, Stanton was obviously correct.  We have Lincoln’s face on the five-dollar bill—a bill that used to be worth more than a Happy Meal, before ...

“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces.  These opinions…are ...

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!” —Robert Burns A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort ...

“Buy American”—or Bye-Bye America by Patrick J. Buchanan • February 11, 2009 • Printer-friendly “British jobs for British workers!” thundered Gordon Brown, as he emerged from the shadow of Tony Blair to become prime minister. His populist sloganeering has now come back to bite him. Across Britain, thousands laid down tools in wildcat strikes in...

Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the ...

The American educational system at every level is an immensely expensive obstacle to culture and learning. America is not a Christian county.  It is a post-Christian country. Ex-President Bush is guilty of great crimes and has done his country irreparable damage.  (Although only an insignificant handful of people have noticed.) By launching ...

Before the first shots were fired in the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had begun to style himself as an instrument of the Lord.  But as William H. Herndon, a law partner and Lincoln biographer, wrote, “[t]he very idea that he was in the hands of an invisible, irresistible, ...

It’s beat-up-on-the-rich time in America: a cheap alternative to paying a veterinarian’s bill for the dog you just kicked violently upon checking your 401(k) statement. This, too, will pass, along with the recession, that’s to say. The sun will break through the clouds, and we’ll return to being a nation of strivers, with a built-in...

The purpose of Political Correctness is to suppress true ideas.  Its proponents have no interest in suppressing falsehood. You cannot have a First World economy and military with a Third World population. The Republican Party is not and never has been a conservative party.  (For most of American history, until less than ...

In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected.  Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration.  Lincolnism, the idea that the central state ...

I just got a copy of a thoughtful new book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter.  The book mentions me a couple of times, in polite disagreement.  Krannawitter, now of Hillsdale College, is a disciple of Claremont McKenna College’s Harry V. Jaffa, as ...

Thursday, February 12, 2009, marks the Bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.  To mark the occasion, ChroniclesMagazine.org will post at least one article each day of the week beginning February 9, and concluding with Friday the 13th.  Up first on Monday is Daniel Larison's View from the February issue, ...

Vast numbers of people in the United States and abroad are hoping that President Obama will end America’s illegal wars, halt America’s support for Israel’s massacre of Lebanese and Palestinians, and punish, instead of reward, the shyster banksters whose fraudulent financial instruments have destroyed economics and imposed massive sufferings on people all over the world....

PERSPECTIVE Rendering Unto Lincoln by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue by Clyde Wilson Abe’s indulgence. Obama as Lincoln by Justin Raimondo Mask and mirror. Lincolnism Today by Daniel Larison The long marriage of centralized power and concentrated wealth. NEWS The Financial Crisis by William J. Quirk How it happened, and why it is still happening. REVIEWS Strippers to the Rescue by Stephen B. Presser William ...

Over at NRO, Victor Davis Hanson is denouncing

To know truly is to know by causes.  —Francis Bacon Success begets excess, and excess begets death.  —Anonymous Something is going on and will not stop.  You are outside the going on, and you are, at the same time, inside the going on.  In fact, the going on is what you are.  —Robert Penn Warren...

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” sayeth Rahm. Opportunistic and cynical, yes. But also savvy political counsel that transformational presidents have always followed. FDR exploited the Depression to launch his New Deal, bring an end to a Republican hegemony of seven decades and make Democrats the majority party, until Richard Nixon...

The term limit issue has been sweeping the country.  Since 1990, voters in 15 states have used the petition and referendum process to impose term limits on their state legislators. Earlier this year [1994] in Illinois, term limit supporters filed 437,088 petition signatures from almost every county calling for a statewide referendum on term limits. ...

No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith: The old is better.  —Luke 5:39 Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples.  —Paul Craig Roberts Consistency is the touchstone of truth.  —Ilana Mercer If you have ten thousands of regulations,...

“Where there is no solution, there is no problem,” geostrategist James Burnham once wryly observed. Ex-Sen. George Mitchell, the latest U.S. negotiator to take up the Palestine portfolio, may discover what it was that Burnham meant. For Israel’s three-week war on Gaza, where Palestinians died at a rate of 100 to one to Israelis, appears...

Such is the Wickedness of some men, and the stupid Servility of others, that one would almost be inclined to conclude that Communities cannot be free.  —Sam Adams Much American public discourse—the larger part—is made up of false impressions and invalid assumptions, what sensible people used to call cant, that are designed to disguise and...

Does the public stock market actually serve a purpose?  To some free-market zealots, the answer is obvious: The public markets increase liquidity, and this enables fledgling businesses to get off the ground by allowing them access to capital.  Moreover, we can all reap the benefits of capitalism’s “creative destruction” and become a nation of investors...

“Forward, gentlemen, and show them the bayonet.”  —Stonewall Jackson, born January 21, 1824 It may be that automobile workers are not very good workers, as some assert.  But they are a whole lot better at being workers than the automobile industry executives are at being executives. Parts of the Posse Comitatus Act have been repealed,...

As President Barack Obama delivers his inaugural address to a nation filled with anticipation and hope, the vital signs of the loyal opposition appear worse than worrisome. The new majority of 49 states and 60 percent of the nation Nixon cobbled together in 1972, that became the Reagan coalition of 49 states and 60 percent...

What nobody is going to listen to during inauguration week is cynicism, or anything that savors thereof: the sound of pins pricking happy balloons, the minimizing tone of voice that says, “Ummm, HMMM, just you wait … ” When it comes to Barack Obama, we’re not into that. We’re into—no cynicism intended—a Lincoln moment. Really,...

As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale. He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi herself...

One good rule of thumb: if the state itself is claiming the banner of freedom . . . it is almost surely lying and should be watched more closely than ever.  —Anthony Gregory Civilizations that get too far from the land are bound to decay.   —J.I. Rodale I cannot accept your canon that we are...

With his public approval where Harry Truman’s stood when he left office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday. And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a Trumanesque defiance of his critics—and a Trumanesque failure to understand what ruined his presidency. He denounced protectionism, as he has with dismissive contempt...

An American president can wreck his country and blow up the world, but he cannot recreate either of them. —Chilton Williamson A recent book on the George W. Bush presidency is called A Tragic Legacy. But tragedy suggests the fall of something high and noble. There never ...

At the polls last November, conservatives and libertarians who vote according to conscience had two options: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party).  Combined, these two garnered only 719,655 votes—a paltry amount compared with John McCain’s 59,082,002.  For those who believe in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty, the 2008 election was...

The fact is that New England has been so busy writing history that it hasn’t had time to make it,  while the South has been so busy making history that it hasn’t had time to write it.  —Henry Tucker Graham Never attribute to malice what is more obviously due to stupidity or sloth.  —Oscar Handlin...

Barack Obama, it is said, will inherit the worst times since the Great Depression. Not to minimize the crisis we are in, but we need a little perspective here. The Great Depression began with the Great Crash of 1929. By 1931, unemployment had reached 16 percent. By 1933, 89 percent of stock value had been...

What a story!  It has everything!  Aliens, legal and otherwise, teen pregnancy, polygamy, miscegenation, crooked Chicago political bosses, a “true confessions” autobiography, a crazy preacher, a Cinderella rise to fame and glory, a Hamlet-like hero, a dual-loyalty Svengali, a spectacular  affirmative-action success story.  Race, sex, dysfunctional family, extreme limousine leftism, crime and mystery!  You couldn’t...

“Nothing doth more hurt a state than that cunning men pass for wise.”  —Francis Bacon I finally figured out why so many people admire Obama and his family.  They remind TV watchers of the Heathcliffe Huxtables. I have been practicing “Kumbaya” lately.  I want to be ready for Real Change. Of course, Obama owes a...