Bill Sammon, the author of The Evangelical President: George Bush’s Struggle to Spread a Moral Democracy Throughout the World, cannot be labeled a critic of President Bush.  As both the senior White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a reporter for the Washington Times, he’s had greater access to the President than any other journalist.  And his book has been … [Read More]

President Bush’s nominee to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general is making waves because of who he is (the first Orthodox Jew to be nominated for the position) as well as for what is not (a known quantity on issues that matter to social conservatives, such as abortion and the relationship between Church and state).  A former federal judge, nominated by … [Read More]

Well, no, not really.  Babar Ahmad is a British Muslim who ran jihadist websites that raised money for radical Muslims fighting in Chechnya and Afghanistan.  He’s currently being held in England, awaiting extradition to the United States.  His case is of interest to me, because it was Ahmad to whom former U.S. Navy signalman Hassan Abujihaad passed classified information on the … [Read More]

Last week, I reported that a number of newspapers had decided not to run a two-part storyline appearing in Berkeley Breathed’s comic-strip Opus (the reincarnation of his once wildly popular Bloom County).  In the comic, the main female character, Lola Granola (a name redolent with meaning), had decided to convert to radical Islam and had begun to wear a burqa.  According … [Read More]

Justin confesses that he is “perplexed by this paleocon jihad against McDonald’s, Walmart, and other commercial venues.”  He shouldn’t be.  He admits that he prefers Johnny Rocket’s (a good choice) to McDonald’s.  And if the market is all about freedom of choice, shouldn’t we paleocons be free not only to choose not to patronize Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and Microsoft, but also to … [Read More]

My friend Justin Raimondo is the best of the paleolibertarians, but he occasionally suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome.  At least, I assume that’s what’s responsible for the knee-jerk reaction to my previous post. Justin writes: “Is Senor Richert proposing to nationalize the fast food business, in order to get the government to inject ‘meaning’ into McDonald’s hamburgers?”  Of course, I had … [Read More]

Left undistorted by government, our libertarian friends tell us, the market will always work out to the advantage of all.  Those of us who express doubts are routinely derided as “statists” or “protectionists” or “authoritarians.” And we may even be called something worse if we dare to proclaim, with the social teaching of the Church, that the market is made for … [Read More]

Reading Paul Weyrich’s article today on Hugo Chavez’s crackdown on the Venezuelan media, and our “free” media’s reaction to it, brought to mind an event from my first term at Michigan State.  Our campus parish, like most Catholic parishes around colleges and universities, was unabashedly leftist; still, I was going there for the Eucharist, not the politics, so I tried to … [Read More]

I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion. For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars. Thanks to the tragedy of September … [Read More]