Columnist.
The Untold Story of How Nancy Reagan Would Have Taken a Bullet for Her Husband
"George Bush made a mistake," said Donald Trump in the South Carolina debate last week. "We should have never been in Iraq." Trump added that "we destabilized" the larger Middle East. Those are legitimate points of contention — though Trump should not exclude President Obama's decision to premature pull troops from Iraq. That move by Obama in 2011 was disastrous, as so many (including Bush himself) warned it would be. It unquestionably helped enable the surge of ISIS and its establishment of a self-proclaimed "Islamic State" caliphate. But then Donald Trump went way overboard.
In what is being embraced by Hillary Clinton as the highest praise, Planned Parenthood, America's longtime leading provider of abortion, is enthusiastically endorsing Clinton as president. Clinton can boast the first-ever endorsement of a candidate in a presidential primary in the century-long existence of Planned Parenthood.
Another "Holiday Season" is behind us. And every such season, the purge of religion in our public schools just gets worse. In fact, the season now serves to remind us of one thing for certain: the God-purgers are on an unyielding secular crusade that gets more self-righteous ever year. This past season seemed to reach new levels of absurdity. What we're seeing now is remarkable not only for its vigorous assault against everything religious, but for the apparent willingness by secularists to embrace ignorance and sophistry in the process. They are willing to make their students — whom they're supposed to educate — dumb about historical reality and to look downright silly in the process. I'll illustrate with two examples, starting with this past Thanksgiving, the kick-off of the long "Holiday Season."
A few days before Christmas, I checked the schedule for Turner Classic Movies, one of the few TV channels I watch. I was looking for Christmas movies, maybe the 1938 Reginald Owen version of "A Christmas Carol" or something like that — something for the family. I was pleased to find three favorites back-to-back that I've seen with my wife and daughters, all nice Christmas romances — and all with a similar happy ending.
"Islam is poised to triumph in Europe in the long-run."
In 1789, America's first president proclaimed a "day of public thanksgiving and prayer." George Washington implored the heavens to "pardon our national and other transgressions" and urged the citizenry to practice "true religion and virtue." In 1863, Abraham Lincoln urged his countrymen to set aside the last Thursday of November "as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."
Some time ago a former student emailed me a video clip that I now show my Major European Governments course. It's a five-minute news piece by Dale Hurd of CBN News, a conservative Christian outlet — the rare kind of place where you see reports like this. The piece was on radical Islam in Europe, specifically in Belgium, and it was based on Hurd's interview with a Muslim leader in Brussels, the very heart of modern Europe, of secular Europe, of the European Union, and of everything Islamic fundamentalists despise about Europe.
A long-touted motion picture on prominent Hollywood screenwriter and communist Dalton Trumbo debuts in theaters this weekend. I will see the film, but first I'd like to share some background on Trumbo. I do so not as a film critic but as a historian of the Cold War and communism, including the Hollywood front for which Trumbo was extremely active. For starters, it's crucial to keep in mind that communism was responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the last century, double the combined tolls of World War I and II. It's also vital to know that most American communists (small "c") did not actually join the Party.
Remembering Frank Kravetz
October 17, 2015, is the centenary of the birth of Arthur Miller, one of the literary left's shining lights and righteous crusaders against some of liberals' worst demons: Joe McCarthy, "HUAC," and, more generally, anti-communism. Yes, anti-communism. As often noted by Harvard's Richard Pipes and the Hoover Institution's Robert Conquest, few things have animated liberal animus quite like anti-communism. It's not that liberals have been pro-communist so much as they are *anti-anti*-communist. They dislike anti-communists more than they dislike communists. Their preferred demon isn't Joe Stalin but Joe McCarthy. As James Burnham, the great ex-communist, put it, "for the left, the preferred enemy is always to the right."
Pope Francis has returned to Rome after a historic trip to the United States. It was a fascinating endeavor. There have been many papal visits to America in my lifetime — in fact, nearly all have been in my lifetime, the first occurring in 1965, the year before I was born. None of these, however, were so heavily marked by political-ideological battle lines among liberals and conservatives. Really, those lines have been drawn boldly on the left, with liberals eagerly claiming this pope as one of them, and many conservatives granting that concession.
While papal visits to the United States are increasingly common, what is uncommon is to see political-ideological battle lines drawn around a pope. The tendency this time is especially acute among liberals, who eagerly frame Francis as one of them — a categorization Francis has resisted. "I'm sure that I haven't said anything more than what's written in the social doctrine of the Church," he said as his plane approached U.S. soil. To some degree, liberals are certainly justified in linking Pope Francis to many of their concerns — climate change, wealth redistribution, poverty. And even many conservatives seem to concede this pope to the political left. In truth, however, both sides lack a full picture. To illustrate the point, I'll focus on the subject area that brings Pope Francis here to America to begin with: a major international Catholic Church synod on family and marriage.
When I write about Margaret Sanger's May 1926 speech to the women's chapter of the KKK in Silverlake, New Jersey — [as I did again recently](http://patriotpost.us/opinion/37242) — liberals get upset. They accuse me of distortion and even making up the whole thing. Many of them cannot find it within themselves to condemn this sordid moment. One writer in the Huffington Post, who was highly unimpressed with, went so far as to assert that the KKK "was almost a mainstream group then, if still clandestine."
William P. Clark died two years ago last month. When he passed, I wrote a tribute at The American Spectator, aptly titled "Bill Clark's Divine Plan." For those unfamiliar with Judge Clark, he was, simply put, Ronald Reagan's architect for the takedown of the Soviet empire during a crucial stint (1982-83) as national security adviser. He had been Reagan's trusted aide dating back to the Sacramento years, where he was Governor Reagan's chief of staff. It is hard to overstate Clark's kinship with Reagan and his role, though no one sought to understate the role more than Clark himself.
Margaret Sanger is a saint in the feminist church. She is a charter member of the progressive hall of fame. Liberals revere this woman who preached "race improvement" and denounced what she called "human weeds," "morons," "idiots," "imbeciles," and the "dead weight of human waste." Hillary Clinton glows that she is "in awe of" Sanger. She said so in 2009 upon receiving Planned Parenthood's "highest honor" that year: its coveted Margaret Sanger Award. Likewise effusive was Nancy Pelosi when she proudly accepted the award in 2014.
