Your home for traditional conservatism.

Aaron-d-wolf rss


Aaron D. Wolf is Chronicles' associate editor.
Email this author

Articles and Posts by Aaron-d-wolf:

  • Tune In: Live This Afternoon!(0)

    Despite the slow news week, Chronicles Unbound, the best show on radio, will still air live today, 3-5 PM CDT.  Tune in online by clicking here, or download the podcast on Monday at this page.  If you are in Northern Illinois or Southern Wisconsin, tune in on your terrestrial radio device at 100.5 FM.

    Chronicles editors @Thomas Fleming and @Scott P. Richert will join @Paul Youngblood in Downtown Studio One.  Who knows what they’ll talk about, but if you’d like to ask a question on the air (and you’re a reader of this site), you can take advantage of our exclusive toll-free number: (855) 430-5300.

  • From the Vault: Roberts Is Unpredictable(0)

    When the mainstream ConPress was fawning all over Nominee Roberts—wait, they still are!—Chronicles was advising caution.  Read Tom Piatak’s piece here, and the late Harold O.J. Brown’s piece here.

  • Sheriff Arpaio’s Bind(0)

    FOX News’s Neil Cavuto asks Sheriff Arpaio the right questions, revealing the utter feebleness of the Supreme Court’s upholding of the “key part” of Arizona’s immigration legislation.  The sheriff can pull over the suspected illegals, ask for papers, and . . . nothing.

    Watch the interview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SdyQcyVCSs

  • Paesano, Go Home(0)

    The intro to Justice Scalia’s partial dissent in Arizona v. United States is a perfect demonstration of today’s self-contradictory “conservatism.”  It takes with one hand, then pretends to give back with the other (emphasis mine):

    “The United States is an indivisible ‘Union of sovereign States.’ Hinderlider v. La Plata River & Cherry Creek Ditch Co., 304 U. S. 92, 104 (1938). Today’s opinion, ap­proving virtually all of the Ninth Circuit’s injunction against enforcement of the four challenged provisions of Arizona’s law, deprives States of what most would consider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there.”

    Proof of this “conservative” schizophrenia can be found in Mark Krikorian’s instant reaction to the ruling, which was to call it a victory for immigration restrictionists and blame the liberal media for “spinning” the story to suggest otherwise (emphasis mine):

    “The other three provisions that were challenged were preempted by federal law, according to the Court, but could you even name what those parts are?  Making it a state misdemeanor for an illegal alien to apply for employment would be nice, for instance, but it’s not even a federal crime yet.”

  • SCOTUS hateus(0)

    There are some real stunners in today’s convoluted ruling from the Supremes regarding Arizona v. United States.  Here are some of my favorites:

    “As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States.”

    “Federal governance is extensive and complex.”

    “Removal is a civil matter, . . .

    ” . . . and one of its principal features is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials, who must decide whether to pursue removal at all.”

    “States are precluded from regulating conduct in a field that Congress has determined must be regulated by its exclusive governance.”

    “Because Congress has occupied the field, even complementary state regulation is impermissible.”* **

    *I made that one up.

    **Not really: It’s real.

     

  • Arab Spring in Red-Hot Rockford Summer(0)

    You’da thought Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was Barack Obama, the way Rockford’s local news media fawned over him on Sunday.  Yes, Captain Hijab made a super-secret stop in Chronicles‘ hometown early Sunday morning, on his way to the G20 Summit in Cabo.  Said Rockford Airport Director Mike Dunn, “The entire delegation were just very very friendly and warm people.”

    This is what we’ve been reduced to, here in the land of dead factories and record unemployment: We rejoice that the re-Islamicizer of Turkey deigns to step foot in our airport.  The granddaddy of the Arab Spring, who serves as a model for incremental Islamic revolution, is way-cool, just because he was nice to us while his jet was refueled.  What’s more, ”‘They’ve asked us to extend an invitation to our mayor to perhaps visit Turkey with a trade delgation from here,’ says Dunn.”

    I don’t reckon the good folks of Turkey are interested in buying Cheap Trick CDs, sock monkeys, public-school discrimination memorabilia, or Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, so I doubt the deal will get done.  Truth is, if we really did make what we used to make, which made Rockford the manufacturing capitol of the Midwest, I doubt we’d be so enamored of flying Islamicists.

  • Freedom or the Church?(0)

    Check out Chris Check’s review of For Greater Glory, at the Crisis website.  Was the Cristeros War about religious liberty, or preserving the Catholic Faith?  Find out from someone who knows a thing or two about the conflict.

  • The King James Bible at 400: Love’s Labor’s Lost(0)

    I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl.  Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year.  We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO).  Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were not dirty liberal Southern Baptists.

    That year, our subject was the Gospel of Mark.  Our team divided the book up, so that among us we had all 16 chapters memorized, right down to the snake-handling part in the end, which the New International Version (used by the dirty liberal evangelicals) set in italics, to indicate that it wasn’t the Word of God.  Questions were fired at us over an ancient p.a. system, and we leapt to our feet to answer, causing a lamp to light and a buzzer to sound.

    But our team wasn’t sounding many buzzers, falling into dead-last place by halftime.  We broke for lunch, dejected.  Mr. Kobernat, our faculty advisor, started cracking jokes, as was his custom, to lighten the mood.  One wag among us looked up at him and said, plaintively, “Master, carest thou not that we perish?”  Everybody laughed.

    We weren’t Quakers, and that wasn’t our everyday talk.  But Elizabethan English was a part of our everyday lives.  Our preachers, relatively uneducated when compared with Mainline clergy or even with the Southern Baptists and evangelicals, could speak fluent Elizabethan.  Every Wednesday night, at prayer service, they prayed in it.  Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast deigned to bless us . . .  They could read it at lightning speed, losing momentum only when approaching certain Hebrew names in the Old Testament.  One Arkansas evangelist, who preached regularly at our summer camp, read the “old-feyshun King James Bah-bul” at such a pace that we wondered how he could breathe.  His face was red, and he sweat, as it were, great drops of blood.

    As we speak, that old-fashioned King James Bible is enjoying the 400th anniversary of its publication.  And though it will be properly fêted by scholars and panelists in divers academic settings, there is no denying that, apart from its place of honor among my KJVO friends, it has finally started to yield up the ghost.  And that is a shame, because the King James Version is, hardly arguably, the single-most influential book in the modern English-speaking world.  So much so that, while its liturgical use is all but lost, it still sways the imaginations of those who once heard it.

    As most of us well know, the liberal powers that be took the King James Bible out of America’s public schools in the 1960’s.  For conservatives, that and the removal of teacher-led prayer were signs of the times.  Yet how many today, liberal or conservative, would recognize the fact that those two phrases—the powers that be, signs of the times—come to English directly out of the King James Bible (Romans 13:1, Matthew 16:3)?  The phrases feel familiar.

    Matthew Norman, a columnist for the London Telegraph, writes not on religion but on “television, poker, and New Labour.”  That is reflected in the title of his March 18 column, “Please Let the Blairs’ Coitus Be Interruptus.”  (To drink freely from that well, see Derek Turner’s review in this issue.)  But Norman followed that up on the 25th with “The Police Have Become a Law Unto Themselves.”

    In “Caribbean Junkets, Zeppelin Heads, Goldman Sachs and Mr. Magoo,” Bill Singer of Forbes.com wrote (April 19), “Which of those interrogating Senators didn’t accept campaign contributions or lobbying funding from Wall Street?  Which of those paragons of virtue returned all the filthy lucre from these now contemptible lowlifes?”

    Featured on March 30 on the ABC News website, former Liberal Party (Australia) press secretary David Barnett opined of New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell, “His transformation from the bland all-things-to-all-men cloak-of-many-colours he has worn for the past four years to the determined, [...]

  • Re: Fraud Upon Fraud, Jobs We Won’t Do(3)

    Allen Wilson writes in a comment that “We should give them a week’s worth of food and transportation to the orchards and farms of those states where there are complaints that new immigration laws are scaring off Mexican workers.”

    This really cuts to the heart of things.  The very existence of food-stamp programs and minimum-wage laws gives the lie to our fork-tongued politicians who wish to perpetuate the exploitation of the “undocumented” and their cheap labor, while claiming that picking fruit and mowing grass are jobs Americans won’t do.

    We should think of our federally sponsored welfare programs as a jobs program, wherein the underclass is paid to be indolent, the way the FedAg pays farmers to keep land fallow.  The entry-level position could be called Urban Labor Engineer.

    But if you add up the value of food stamps and other welfare payments per week and divide by 40, does the quotient equal minimum wage?  How does it compare with the under-the-table cash payments for the jobs Americans won’t do?  Or are our federal overlords so racist that they think the (largely African-American) welfare recipients are too ignorant or too lazy to mow grass or pick vegetables?

  • Re: iDocile(0)

    Chris is right, of course—docility is connected by the Angelic Dr. to prudence (ST II-II, 49:3).  It properly “consists in a man being well disposed to acquire a right opinion from another man.”  What I’m driving at with iDocile is a shotgun wedding between a willingness to learn and mind-numbed passivity, an Hegelian synthesis of docility and indolence.  Which wouldn’t be prudent, nor a quest for a truly “right opinion.”

    Or, to put it another way, the students I saw on the corners seemed diabolically conditioned to be “willing to be taught” (or indoctrinated) by the Rockford Public Schools.

    I fear that eSlavery—the term, not the concept!—is now dated, since Apple has effectively killed off all of the eCompetition and became the iVictor.