History

A personal note on the Ides of March

Featured image I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars, »

Don’t RIP, Karl

Featured image Via InstaPundit, I learn that Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. I concur with Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion that March 14 should therefore be a holiday: Marx performed the difficult feat of being wrong about everything. Most people are right about some things and wrong about others; the law of averages sets in. But if you are an ideologue, like Marx, and if your ideology is stupid, you can »

2024 plus 1972 Equals?

Featured image As Steve notes, Joe Biden can’t even handle his cue cards and calls to dump the Delaware Democrat are surging by the day. That recalls events from the summer of 1972, another crucial election year. The incumbent president was Richard Nixon, hated by the left for his role in exposing Stalinist spy Alger Hiss (see Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case). In 1972, the Soviet Union still controlled Eastern Europe under the »

Happy Death Day, You Miserable Son of a Bitch

Featured image Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. In his sleep; so, like Lenin, Mao and Castro, and unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Ceausescu, he never paid a price for his crimes. The Victims of Communism remember: Stalin died on this day in 1953. He left behind a legacy of terror, famine, and mass murder. Remember the victims. pic.twitter.com/HUBBYUZMwh — Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) March 5, 2024 Stalin ranks second only »

When Ronnie Met Jeane

Featured image Lifelong Democrat Jeane J. Kirkpatrick came to the attention of former Democrat Ronald Reagan though her 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” As America’s future UN ambassador contended: The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects. The pattern is familiar enough: an established autocracy with a record of friendship with the U.S. is attacked by insurgents, some of whose leaders have »

Remembering the indispensable man

Featured image Today we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Of all the great men of the revolutionary era to whom we owe our freedom, Washington’s greatness was the rarest and the most needed. At this remove in time, it is also the hardest to comprehend. Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that »

Ambassadors, Presidents and Double Standards

Featured image Steve marks the contrast between Biden’s confused UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who called out anti-Semitism “clearly and forcefully” at the United Nations. Consider also the contrast between Thomas-Greenfield and Ronald Reagan’s UN Ambassador, lifelong Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick “studied totalitarianism all her life and was aware of its tensile strengths and subtle ruses for maintaining power,” wrote Peter Collier in Political Woman: The Big »

The Evolution of Electoral Fraud

Featured image In 1962, there was a Senate race in South Dakota between Republican Joseph Bottum and Democrat George McGovern. The seat was open due to the death of Republican Francis Case. I was just a kid, but I remember that election well. Bottum was the favorite, but in the closing days of the race the Democrats spread a rumor that he was an alcoholic. That ploy may have been crude, but »

The Sniper Departs

Featured image Charles “Chuck” Mawhinney, by many accounts the deadliest sniper in U.S. Marine Corps history, has died at 75. In Vietnam, Mawhinney recorded 103 confirmed kills and 216 probable kills. He typically fired from 300-1000 yards with a Remington M40 sniper rifle. One night the sniper took his M14 rifle, equipped with a Starlight scope, and positioned himself where an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) column crossed a river. “As soon as »

Politics of Identity In the Fifth Century [Updated]

Featured image I am currently reading The New Roman Empire by Anthony Kaldellis. A history of the Eastern Empire, it runs to 1,000 pages, which isn’t long enough, given the length of time and the density of incident recorded. Among the many subjects covered are the theological and political controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. The major theological debate in the fourth century was over the relationship between Jesus Christ and »

Political pilgrimage revisited

Featured image On his current visit to Moscow Tucker Carlson is repeating the old phenomenon of political pilgrimage. Paul Hollander devoted an entire book to it 40 years ago — Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (1981). (The original subtitle of the book was Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.) Hollander’s book was a powerful antidote to the phenomenon, but it did not »

A note on “Shane”

Featured image I recorded Shane off TCM and watched it for about the tenth time last night. The film was directed by George Stevens with a script by A.B. Guthrie, Jr. Alan Ladd plays Shane, the gunfighter with a mysterious past who is looking for a new life in Wyoming circa 1889. A variety of currents and undercurrents run through the film. Some of them conflict. Indians have been cleared from the »

Thinkin’ about “Lincoln”

Featured image I wrote the post below when the film Lincoln was released in 2012. I thought some readers might find it of interest today. My purpose here was to take up the movie in the context of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay on Lincoln — an essay which is all that bright high-school students may ever learn about him. I have inserted links to the publisher’s pages of the books cited. We »

A genius for friendship

Featured image Abraham Lincoln stands not only as America’s greatest president but also as its greatest lawyer. At the time of his election to the presidency in 1860 he was the most prominent practicing lawyer in the state of Illinois. As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom »

Salmon Chase: Whodat?

Featured image In the last of the five stories that make up his third volume of stories about fictional alter ego Henry Bech, John Updike recounts the incredulous response to Bech’s receipt of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. In Updike’s telling, the New York Daily News runs a story with the headline “BECH? WHODAT???” That doesn’t quite apply to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase, but we should know him »

When Patty Met Jimmy and Billy

Featured image Yesterday marked 50 years since the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. Hearst came to embrace the SLA’s revolutionary cause, adapted the nom de guerre Tania, and helped the SLA rob banks. On September 18, 1975, the FBI finally tracked down Tania. Hearst drew 35 years but in 1979 President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. In 2001. On January 20, 2001, President Bill »

Uncancel Woodrow Wilson? How About Hell No

Featured image “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson” is the case David Frum attempts in the new issue of The Atlantic. Frum thinks well of Wilsonian internationalism, and thinks Wilson’s progressive reformism was . . . pretty good too. Where to begin? Frum is a skilled polemicist and writer, but his case for Wilson is unconvincing. Frum affects a both-sidesism, trying to scold lefties who hate Wilson for his open and vicious racism, and trying »