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Uncuffed From Low Expectations . . . Trump Slips Past Listless Dems To Reach Out And Reach For Stars

March 5, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Uncuffed From Low Expectations . . . Trump Slips Past Listless Dems To Reach Out And Reach For Stars

By DEXTER DUGGAN Unlike the Oscar awards ceremony’s best-picture bumble two nights earlier, longtime entertainer and new President Donald Trump, scorned by Hollywood, pulled off a precision performance before Congress on Ash Wednesday Eve. When television news and entertainment programs have to fill tightly timed slots — the evening news show can’t last two minutes too long, commercials have to make their message right on schedule — Trump managed to speak almost exactly 60 minutes, on the dot, even though he repeatedly was interrupted by applause whose length he had no control over in the U.S. House chamber. No cue cards or notices flashing from a director’s booth to quiet down now. Indeed, Trump noted to the chamber how long…Continue Reading

Capitalism: The Anti-Poverty Miracle

March 4, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Capitalism: The Anti-Poverty Miracle

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK Have you ever wished that you could corner Pope Francis and his advisers and question them about their hostility toward capitalism? I have. The Pope comes across as a good man, decent, kind, open to a free-wheeling discussion of the issues of the day, yet he seems to have a blind spot that leads him to judge capitalism by its shortcomings and socialism by its promotional literature. Neither you nor I is likely to get a chance for a meeting like that, but Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, accomplished the next best thing. He placed an article in the Jesuits’ America magazine on February 20 entitled “Confessions of a Capitalist Convert” that…Continue Reading

Is Secession A Solution To Cultural War?

March 3, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Is Secession A Solution To Cultural War?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs. Yet, given the divisions among us, deeper and wider than ever, it is an open question as to how, and how long, we will endure as one people. After World War II, our judicial dictatorship began a purge of public manifestations of the “Christian nation” that Harry Truman said we were. In 2009, Barack Obama retorted, “We do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation.” Secularism had been enthroned as our established religion, with…Continue Reading

The Mortal Storm

March 2, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on The Mortal Storm

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK It has been many years since I last watched The Mortal Storm, the 1940 movie starring Robert Young and James Stewart as young Germans at the time the Nazis came to power. But I remember certain scenes clearly, especially the depictions of Nazi college students disrupting their classes and accusing their professors of being disloyal to Hitler. I can recall, even as a boy, remarking to myself how defenseless a classroom teacher becomes when young men such as those in this film refuse to abide by the norms of civility and scholarly discourse and resort to angry rhetoric to carry the day. The scenes were especially effective because, if I remember correctly, the Robert Young character…Continue Reading

The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

March 1, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

By JUDGE ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO The past week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that members of the intelligence community — part of the deep state, the unseen government within the government that does not change with elections — now have acquired so much data on everyone in America that they can selectively reveal it to reward their friends and harm their foes. Their principal foe today is the president of the United States. Liberty is rarely lost overnight. The wall of tyranny often begins with benign building blocks of safety — each one lying on top of a predecessor — eventually collectively constituting an impediment to the exercise of free choices by free people, often not even recognized until it…Continue Reading

Extremism Goes Mainstream

February 28, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Extremism Goes Mainstream

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK It is not as if we had no extremists in the country before Donald Trump became president. I can remember even as a teenager seeing newspapers spreading unfounded stories about politicians and celebrities and exposés about Catholics, Jews, and secret societies that controlled the world. But, for the most part, these were eccentric publications, far out of the mainstream, with an air of zealotry about them, usually found around college campuses or being handed out by wild-eyed people who were hard to take seriously. Black Muslims, the supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, and various Aryan supremacist groups come to mind. Times have changed. Every morning when I turn on my computer, it opens to Yahoo’s homepage, where…Continue Reading

Lent Is My New Favorite Season

February 27, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Lent Is My New Favorite Season

By REY FLORES Do you have a special favorite time of the year? I know that I do and that season is fall. I have always loved fall because it is a time of reflection, knowing that soon that another calendar year is coming to a close. The seasons I certainly am not fond of are winter and summer, in that order. My winters now in Virginia aren’t as harsh as they used to be back in Chicago, but summer is definitely worse down here because of the extreme humidity, which can be suffocating at times. This year I am trying to make the most of spring. I want it to be my new favorite season because as I get…Continue Reading

Selective Morality . . . California Bishop’s Call To Disrupt Trump’s America Betrays His Political Bias

February 26, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Selective Morality . . . California Bishop’s Call To Disrupt Trump’s America Betrays His Political Bias

By DEXTER DUGGAN A California bishop who mixed religious references with strong liberal political defiance of the Trump administration at a conference had rebuked one of his priests last fall for supposedly substituting conservative views for the Magisterium. That bishop, Robert McElroy of San Diego, calling for disruption of Trump’s America, even suggested during an Alinskyite-flavored conference in central California in mid-February that establishing a $15 minimum wage is part of “our work (as) co-creators with God.” Apparently rejecting the traditional principle of subsidiarity, McElroy dogmatically claimed that “the tradition of Catholic social teaching is unequivocally on the side of strong governmental and societal protections,” and also that free markets “must be structured by government to accomplish the common good.”…Continue Reading

Pope Francis Cheers On America’s Social Justice Warriors

February 25, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Pope Francis Cheers On America’s Social Justice Warriors

By CHRISTOPHER MANION The turmoil prevailing throughout the universal Church emerged in a roiling microcosm at the “World Meetings of Popular Movements” in Modesto, Calif., last week, as a letter of welcome sent by Pope Francis resonated his familiar call to upheaval and resistance. The Argentine Pope’s rallying cry did not happen in a vacuum. Some forty years ago, a group of Catholic prelates gathered to champion an orthodox response to “Liberation Theology,” especially to what Cardinal Lopez Trujillo of Colombia called its “criteria that imposed a Marxist analysis on the conflict of class struggle.” This ideology, advocated by the Marxist revolutionary left and, inside the Church, by Jesuits of Jorge Bergoglio’s generation, had driven countless millions of Catholics from…Continue Reading

Is A Trump-Putin Detente Dead?

February 24, 2017 Frontpage Comments Off on Is A Trump-Putin Detente Dead?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that he read the nation and the world better than his rivals. He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethnonationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit. While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them. While our corporatists burn incense at the shrine of the global economy, Trump went to visit the working-class casualties. And those forgotten Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin responded. And while Bush II and President Obama plunged us into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, Trump saw that his…Continue Reading