As America debates whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in the ninth year of a war for ends we cannot discern, a riveting new history recalls times when Americans fought for vital national interests. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent is Robert Merry’s brilliant biography and history of that time. Merry goes far toward righting the injustice done by historians who have denied this great man his place in the pantheon of presidents, because they believe “Jimmy Polk’s War” to have been a war of … 
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Alright, you win. Reading all these blogs, I can’t avoid the subject of fist-pumping Heavy Metal any longer. A metaller since the tender age of 13 (coincidence?), I’ve been worshipping the gods of rock’n’roll even longer. But, don’t worry, that doesn’t stop me from being a proud Orthodox Christian. I’ll use my seasoned veteran status in an attempt to explain why this seemingly unorthodox subject keeps returning to Takimag. In fact, I’ll use it shamelessly, because I don’t believe that these recent pieces did a particularly good job justifying the importance of Heavy Metal to an uninformed audience. Love it or … 
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Can I milk another column out of Mad Men? Why not? Matthew Weiner’s show about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s is so meticulously detailed that it’s worth using it as a spur to consider what has and hasn’t changed in the Zeitgeist over the last half century. • The overall impression Mad Men gives of 1960 is that of a less crowded, less expensive world before we swarming hordes of Baby Boomers escaped our playpens and ruined everything. • In a fecund era, when most families had heirs and spares to spare (the Total Fertility Rate peaked in 1957 at … 
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I read with interest R. J. Stove’s recent blog about new a book by Gerd Bayer, Heavy Metal Music in Britain, and I would like to add my own remarks to Mr. Devin Reid Saucier’s apposite reply. As I pointed in my previous article on Black Metal, and as Devin iterated a few days ago, much has changed in the world of Metal since its inception in the 1970s. Not only did Heavy Metal beget a variety of more extreme music genres during the 1980s, including Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal, and Doom Metal; but those genres, in turn, … 
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As one might surmise, one doesn’t get rich by serving the HL Mencken Club. Unlike other organizations, which have claimed the “conservative” label, belonging to our club is not a ladder to social acceptability or a means of increasing one’s income or deferred annuity allowance. Investing time and energy in an organization like ours is not a wise career move but something reminiscent of the fate that Mustafa Kemal thought would await Turkish troops as they prepared for the British attack at Gallipoli in 1915: “I am not asking you to stand and fight here; I am asking you to die … 
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Nidal Malik Hasan was two men. One was the proud Army major who wore battle fatigues to mosque; the other, the proud Arab who wore Muslim garb in civilian life. What brought Hasan’s identities into fatal conflict was his belief that Iraq and Afghanistan were unjust wars, and his shock that he, a Muslim, was to be sent to serve in one of those wars, against fellow Muslims—a sin against Allah meriting damnation. Hasan was conflicted by a dual loyalty—to the country he had sworn to protect, and to his perceived duty as a Muslim. When Hasan told his neighbor that … 
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The U.S. government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that “our” government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire. Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by … 
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Blanket charges of racism have become the stock-in-trade of the liberal media in reporting on Town-Hall protesters. For converging to petition their representatives about the administration’s profligate policies, independent-minded, patriotic constitutionalists have been savaged by rabid reporters who see signs of the divine in Obama and the devil in his detractors. One apropos sign at a tea party captured this state of affairs: “It doesn’t matter what my sign says, the press will call it racist.” In fairness, members of the media are more inclusive in their reprimands about racial exclusion. The general, (alleged) racial backwardness of the American people is … 
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Patriotic immigration reformers didn’t have a dog in the NY-23 Congressional special election fight—Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman toed the Club For Growth line, so the issue didn’t surface—but you have to be amazed at the gloating over-interpretation of his very narrow loss (46%-49%). Particularly when you know from bitter experience that a Hoffman win would immediately have been spun down the memory hole, like the great patriotic immigration reform victories of California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s Proposition 200. The numbers make it perfectly obvious that Hoffman or any other conservative candidate would have won this race if GOP insiders hadn’t … 
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During last year’s Republican National Convention, South Carolina GOP leaders were regularly calling in to WTMA talk radio in Charleston to provide event coverage. On the day they were supposed to talk to me, I was informed that Republican Party officials did not wish to speak to Jack Hunter. In denouncing big government and all its works, I never saw any reason to make special exceptions for Republicans and for my anti-GOP sins I had become persona non grata. Today, everyone is denouncing big government. Since Obama’s election, tea party protests have sprung up across the country and conservatives are now … 
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