Archive for Tom Piatak
Tom Piatak is a contributing editor to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He writes from Cleveland, Ohio.
I Love What You Do For Me, Toyota!
It’s always nice to have one’s beliefs confirmed. I was traveling this week, and wasn’t able to follow current events closely, but as the bad news around Toyota continued to mount, I figured that someone at NRO would be flacking for the Japanese and suggesting that it was all part of a government plot to help GM. Sure enough, when I came home, I discovered that John Miller was suggesting that the federal government, with its ownership stake in GM, wants Toyota to “drop dead,” citing as evidence Secretary of Transportation LaHood’s comment that “if anybody owns any of those vehicles, stop driving it, and take it to a Toyota dealer.”
Wall Street and Code Words
In the January 2010 issue of Chronicles, University of South Carolina law professor William Quirk noted that the federal government is “propping up Wall Street with $23 trillion in cash and commitments.” The reason for this unprecedented and extraordinary commitment is the financial crisis that Professor Quirk has argued was caused, at least in part, by deregulation of the financial sector, particularly the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that had separated commercial banking and investment banking. Now, the Obama Administration appears to be moving toward separating commercial banking from investment banking again. One need not agree with everything the Obama Administration is proposing to recognize that this is a serious problem deserving serious debate and analysis.
A War Worth Winning
As someone who has written on the War Against Christmas for both Chronicles and VDARE.COM since 2001, it should come as no surprise that my perspective is different from Thomas Fleming’s. I welcome anyone, Christian or non-Christian, who is willing to defend this matchless holiday, and look with suspicion on all those who are hostile to Christmas, whether they are multiculturalists, secularists, or Christian purists whose arguments resemble those of the Puritans who did succeed in suppressing Christmas for a time in both England and parts of America.
Obama Bumps Charlie Brown
In the great 1947 Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street, Judge Harper (played by Gene Lockhart) is all set to rule that there is no Santa Claus, until his shrewd political adviser Charlie Halloran (played by William Frawley) convinces him that such a ruling would be political suicide. Obama could have used a Charlie Halloran before scheduling last night’s speech on Afghanistan. I am referring not to the substance of Obama’s speech, which I will leave to the analysis of keener minds than my own, but to its timing. Obama’s speech completely preempted ABC’s broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas, much to the dismay of the many families all set to watch this other Christmas classic.
The Hate That Never Dies
Jonah Goldberg has a piece in yesterday’s USA Today defending television loudmouth Glenn Beck from his critics. In the course of his piece, Goldberg takes a swipe at Pat Buchanan for not being a Republican and for writing a revisionist history of the start of World War II, making the same sort of arguments that used to be made in books published by such conservative publishers as Regnery and Devin-Adair.
Our National Pastime?
Recently at NRO, Mark Krikorian drew critical attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal which described how minor league baseball teams are now importing foreign players. According to the Journal, “For decades, minor-league rosters seemed the essence of the American heartland. But thanks to growing numbers of foreign players . . . the minors are fast turning into a veritable United Nations.” The reason for the change is a law signed by George W. Bush in 2007, which allowed minor-league teams to import as many foreign players as they want. The law has a name only George Orwell could love, the Creating Opportunities for Minor League Professionals, Entertainers and Teams Act, since it creates no opportunities for “Minor League Professionals” who have the misfortune of being Americans. In fact, it helps drive down the salaries of American players.
Of Mary and Crystals
Heather Mac Donald is a very good journalist, and conservatives are in her debt for her work dealing with immigration, crime, and the realities of urban life. But Mac Donald, an atheist, is puzzled by religion. Last Sunday, this puzzlement took the form of a short piece at the Secular Right website, where Mac Donald expressed her shock at seeing a flyer for “one of those creepy painted sculptures of Mary with oversized, tear-encrusted eyes and an undersized mouth” in her apartment building in Manhattan. The flyer was for a visit of a statue of Our Lady of Fatima at a nearby church, a church that is apparently a bit too close for Mac Donald’s comfort. “I ask in all sincerity: are Secular Right’s fellow highly-educated conservatives ready to prostrate themselves before, and put a toy crown on, a wooden effigy?” Mac Donald also wrote that “I honestly don’t know how to distinguish the worship of a wooden icon from the belief in the healing powers of crystals or in the predictive power of entrails. I know I must be missing some essential distinctions here, but for the moment they elude me and I remain at a loss to understand.”
One Small Step for Person, One Giant Leap for Personkind
The day before Thomas Fleming offered his reflections on the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, I offered mine at Takimag. My focus was different from Dr. Fleming’s. I used the anniversary to reflect on how and why America had declined since Neil Armstrong took that famous step onto the moon, and wished that “we could recover some of what we had in 1969, when American achievement seemed so natural.”
How Not To Read A Papal Encyclical
The overarching flaw of the neocons is arrogance. It was arrogance that led them to believe that we could remake the Mideast when we invaded Iraq. It was arrogance that led Catholic neocons to lecture John Paul II on Catholic just-war teaching as they lobbied the Vatican to endorse our disastrous invasion of Iraq. And George Weigel displayed a comparable arrogance when he penned a reaction to Benedict XVI’s social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, the same day it was released, claiming that the passages he agreed with were “obviously” written by Benedict, while those he disagreed with were just as clearly written by unnamed Vatican bureaucrats. Although Weigel is a papal biographer, he seems to think he is a pope, possessed of his own personal Magisterium. It is one thing for a Catholic, after serious reflection, to respectfully disagree with a noninfallible papal teaching; it is another to flippantly dismiss an encyclical as a “duck-billed platypus” and “the warbling of an untuned piccolo” less than 24 hours after reading it.
Not Your Father’s National Review
What held National Review together during its heyday was anticommunism. The kiddies who post at NRO either don’t know this, or are embarrassed by it. Yesterday, Mario Loyola, commenting on the prospect of the Obama administration potentially prosecuting members of the Bush administration for encouraging torture, ruefully notes that there is historical precdent for this.
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