On Friday, July 20, President Bush issued an executive order that seems designed mainly to protect members of his administration from prosecution once he leaves office.  At least, that’s the most charitable interpretation I can put on it.  The order interprets Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in such a way that torture by the CIA during interrogation of suspected … [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]

Three headlines from the month of July: ”45 Muslim doctors planned US terror raids” (from the Telegraph of London) ”Italy ‘terror school’ imam had bomb chemicals-police” (from Reuters) ”Former U.S sailor in terror case discussed attacking military personnel, prosecutor says” (from the International Herald Tribune) Why, I’m often asked (even in comments on this website), do I bother discussing the threat … [Read More]

Citing Rod Dreher’s list of abandoned certainties in the face of the Iraq disaster, Andrew Sullivan titillates us with a promise to work up a list of his own. Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath in Sullivan’s case: after having done more than his bit in whipping up war hysteria against Iraq, and witch-hunting opponents of the war as bi-coastal “fifth … [Read More]

What is the life of a 17-year-old worth? Two stories caught my eye today—one from the Rockford Register Star, the newspaper of my adopted hometown of Rockford, Illinois, and one from the Grand Haven Tribune, which I grew up reading in Spring Lake, Michigan.  Each is the story of a young man who “volunteered to serve his country.”  One, Christopher D. … [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]