Mike Pence

Trump Embraces the Culture War

To attend the Indianapolis Colts game where the number of the legendary Peyton Manning was to be retired, Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, flew back from Las Vegas. With him in the stadium was wife Karen. In honor of Manning, she wore a No. 18 jersey as “The Star ...

Who Truly Imperils Our Free Society?

“The Barbarian cannot make ... he can befog and destroy but ... he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.” Hilaire Belloc’s depiction of the barbarian is recalled to mind as the statues honoring the history ...

Tribalism Marches On!

Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play. Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991. “Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?” was my title, and the column ...

Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress

Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump ...

What Harvey Wrought

Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together. In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster ...

What Still Unites Us?

Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement. Neocons claimed America was an “ideological nation” a “creedal nation,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Expropriating the biblical mandate, ...

America’s Second Civil War

“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee—and what a leader! ... No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.” So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial “The Oxford History ...

Is the American Empire Worth the Price?

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson observed, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” And the prospect of a future where Kim Jong Un can put a nuclear weapon on a U.S. city is going to cause this nation to reassess the risks and rewards of ...

Teheran, Iran

Is Iran in Our Gun Sights Now?

“Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender.” Thus does our Churchill, Newt Gingrich, dismiss, in dealing with Iran, the policy of containment crafted by George Kennan and pursued by nine U.S. presidents to bloodless ...

Flag of Poland

Alone Perhaps, but Is Trump Right?

At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are ...