Chronicles is very sad to report that our friend and longtime contributor Tom Landess has passed away of a sudden illness.  A true man of letters, Dr. Landess wrote (and ghostwrote) hundreds of books and articles, as well as poetry.  He was a student and friend of many of the Twelve Southerners and a brilliant...

  The New York Times‘ Bill Keller wants Hillary Clinton to replace Joe Biden on the Obama re-election ticket, but a better, likelier choice by far is available—one Newton Leroy Gingrich, reputedly a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination but in fact, an Obama surrogate working for Democratic victory in November. I have proof. That’s to...

  In what The Washington Post called “a bold act of political defiance,” President Obama Wednesday announced the recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray’s nomination had been blocked by a Senate filibuster. There was no way he was going to win approval in 2012. Enraged Republicans denounced the appointment as...

  Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama had signed into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from...

  Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.” The tale is about a dog who...

  This Christmas let us spare a thought and say a prayer for countless Christian victims of Muslim brutality, over the centuries and in our own time. An explosion ripped through a Catholic church during Christmas Mass near Nigeria’s capital Abuja on Sunday morning, killing at least 25 people. A radical Muslim group, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility...

  Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as  Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...

  Day Six December 23, 2011.  Thousands of Sunni Muslims in Samarra, Ramadi, Baiji, and Qaim have taken to the streets.  Many of them carry signs and banners protesting the Shi’ah-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki and expressing support for threatened Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi. Day Five December 22, 2011.   Dozens of people were killed as bombs...

  For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq. On May 1, 2003, on the carrier Abraham Lincoln, the huge banner behind President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished!” That was eight...

After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning.  Let us turn to the Apology.  You probably all know that the Greek apologia means something like justification or defense argument rather than apology.  It is Plato's reconstruction (or imaginative ...

  It’s been some years since Tom Fleming and I have indulged in seven-day mad dashes across the Balkans, speaking, lecturing and giving interviews, meeting interesting people over good food and drink. Last week’s tour, which took us to Belgrade and Banja Luka, had the tempo and feel of the old times, but it was...

Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to veto Germany's demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence. With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU:

  On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day,...

  Srdja Trifkovic’s paper on Russia and the European Media, delivered at the conference “Russia and Europe: Issues of Contemporary Journalism,” Paris, November 24, 2011 Most West European media professionals tend to subscribe, consciously or not, to a neoliberal world outlook in general and to the tenets of multiculturalism in particular. In other words, they...

  Addressing the annual congress of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Leipzig on November 14, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for further political integration within the European Union as a means to ending the sovereign-debt crisis. “The task of our generation now is to complete the economicand currency union in Europe and, step by step, create a...

It has been a while since I posted a Booklog entry.  It is not for lack of reading, on my part, but most of my reading has been either rather technical--Sicilian history, Pre-Socratic philosophy, the history of marriage--or too light to merit discussion.  In preparing for our own Sicilian Expedition, ...

  Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war? Is a vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich a vote for yet another unfunded war of choice, this time with a nation, Iran, three times as large and populous as Iraq? Mitt says that if elected he will move carriers...

  Silvio Berlusconi has been around for so long that it is hard to imagine Italian politics without him occupying the center stage. The end of his era is nigh, however, to the relief of his opponents as well as many of his erstwhile supporters. Berlusconi announced on Tuesday night that he would resign as...

  I went to vote this morning, at a new polling place.  I was directed to the polling place by a sign that was in both Spanish and English.  When I was handed the ballot, I saw that it, too, was in both Spanish and English, with both languages appearing together in a confusing jumble....

  Yes, yes, curse the defensive genius and pedophile* Jerry Sandusky (author of Touched) and Coach Joe Pa (who continued to employ him).  But what about the grad assistant who happened to lock eyes with ol’ Sandusky when the latter was sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the Happy Valley showers of Penn State? According to the grand jury report,...

Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring,

By the time Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the shift in policy, it was hardly a surprise.  In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer ...

  Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s decision to call off the referendum on the EU-brokered rescue plan may look like a sign of weakness. Not so. The wily Socialist has forced the opposition to get off the fence and declare its support for his policies. He has seriously scared, rather than merely “infuriated,” his European...

Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote ...

European politicians and commentators are predictably screaming blue murder over Prime Minister George Papandreou’s announcement that the Greek government will put the EU rescue package to a referendum, but I smell a rat. This looks like a cunning ploy, jointly engineered by Athens and Berlin, to get a more radical ...

  When Herman Cain made his irrelevant 9-9-9 tax plan a focal point of the current political debate, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were quick to shout out their ‘Me too!’ Perry’s 20% flat tax, pulled out of the magic hat by a deft right hand, would produce a very serious revenue short fall, but...

  For two decades now, Pat Buchanan has been warning us of the dangers our country faces.  When he first started sounding the alarm, at the end of the Cold War, those dangers were hard to perceive.  Now, they are hard to ignore.     Pointless wars in the Mideast have resulted in thousands of...

  There will be no Greek default—not for months to come at least, as we predicted here two weeks ago. The private banks that had splashed out on ostensibly lucrative Greek bonds will have to accept a “haircut” of fifty percent of their nominal value, according to an agreement reached early Thursday morning after days of...

  I know it is none of my business.  If the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth wish to change the rules of succession to the crown, I have no right to an opinion, not only because as an American  I have about as much interest in royal antics as I do in soap operas…. Read...

  Eight years ago when George Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq, the only moral or legal justification they could dream up was Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction.”  At the time, I derided this claim, in print and on radio and television….   Read more and comment on The Daily...

  In Federalist 2, John Jay looks out at a nation of a common blood, faith, language, history, customs and culture. “Providence,” he writes, “has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion … very similar in...

My latest on the Daily Mail takes up the rise and what I hope will be the fall of Herman Cain. I also have an even newer piece on Obama's First 1000 Days. Please do not respond here, since what is really needed is a show of interest at the ...

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  My stopover in Brussels on the way to the Balkans last week proved less than illuminating on the issue of the eurozone crisis and Greek debt. The real decisions are made further east, in Frankfurt and Berlin, but the EU apparat appears confident that there will be no Greek default in the short term and that Athens...

  Pose a threat to the stability of Saudi Arabia, as the Shiite upsurges are now doing in Qatif and al-Awamiyah in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province, and you’re brandishing a scalpel over the very heart of the long-term U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fall of America’s ally, the Shah of Iran, in...

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—Observing the correlation of forces in this city and the intensity of conviction in the base of each party, the outcome of the ongoing fiscal fight between Barack Obama and the Tea Party Republicans seems preordained. Deadlock. There will be no big jobs-for-taxes deal. The can will be kicked down the road into...

The lifeblood of Chronicles is Tom Fleming, who took the reins of an interesting magazine in 1985 and turned it into an indispensable publication for anyone concerned about the future of this country.  But the magazine that you hold in your hands today also owes its current form—and perhaps even ...

  Talking to CKCU 93.1FM in Ottawa, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic considers the extraordinary readiness of the government in Belgrade to compromise Serbia’s national and state interests in order to demonstrate its subservience to the “international community.” A recent batch of Wikileaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade drastically illustrates the extent of institutionalized political...

  Wednesday, at a meeting with Hispanic activists, President Obama vowed to keep pushing for what he calls “comprehensive immigration reform.” The “reform” Obama wants is one that will enable illegal immigrants to become legal residents, and that will place no meaningful obstacle in the way of others who want to join them. Obama’s comments...

When I first saw the memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism center in Newark, declaring that I’m “a threat to National Security,” not to mention an “agent of a foreign power,” I was incredulous.  These can’t be real FBI documents, I thought to myself.  Someone is pulling my leg. Sadly, no. 

I have posted two more columns on

  Last Saturday, at United Russia’s congress, the ruling duumvirate of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin finally ended the uncertainty of some months’ standing. Putin first asked Medvedev to head United Russia’s list at next December’s Duma election. Accepting the offer, Medvedev proposed that United Russia nominate Putin as its presidential candidate...

  Siracusa: Sunday, 25 September 2011 We’ve been in Siracusa since Friday evening.  My wife, Christopher Check, and I, accompanied by our young friend and board member Mark Atkins, are checking out the site of our next Winter School, and there is so much to do: so many ancient ruins to check out, so many medieval...

In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory.  Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building.  A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal.  Two calm men enter the room and...

The commentary editor of the online edition of The Daily Mail has invited me to contribute a blog several times a week.  Once he wakes up and realizes his terrible mistake, the blog may be gone with the wind a lot sooner and more permanently than the Confederacy.  So, if ...

  Monday, September 19 The big noise is, again, President Obama’s job’s plan that will require a tax on the rich, the so-called “Buffet Plan.”  Now, I’d be ticked pink if all the Warren Buffets of America could be taxed out of their dirty business.  What has Mr. Buffet ever manufactured, what has he ever...

Kudos to the Morning Edition staff!  I have been an NPR listener almost from the beginning, and while I am constantly impressed by the errors and distortions that pepper your reporting on literature and history, I must confess that even I was bowled over by Robert Krulwich’s conversation with Stephen Greenblatt on the subject of...

The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework of...

Srdja Trifkovic, still in Germany at a major conference, will be interviewed by Paul Youngblood on WNTA/1330 at 4 PM today, Thursday 14 September.  On this same website there is a button to take you to the station's live webcast.

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