Bruce Walker

The 75th Anniversary of the Moscow Show Trials

This year is the diamond anniversary of much wickedness: the Spanish Civil War, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Berlin Olympic games, the annexation of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy, and the rise of the radically militarist Hirota government in Japan all happened within a few months of 1936. Another greater evil began on August 19, 1936: the Moscow Trials. Until then, totalitarianism had covered itself with a fig leaf of plausibility.

The Way to Win the Debt Ceiling and Budget Battle

Ernest Istook at the Heritage Foundation has written an excellent article describing how secret meetings with Obama help him mislead the American people about how the two parties differ in approaches the debt ceiling and budget deficit issues. The left thrives in darkness. It communicates in images and emotions, never in solid proposals in fixed language. The object, to leftists, in negotiating is to make their enemies unpopular. If Obama is winning this game now, why are we still playing?

Why RINOs but not DINOs?

During every presidential election cycle the left inserts its favorite candidate into the Republican nomination fight. Sometimes, like in 2008, Democrats nominate their preferred Republican. Other times, the left prevents a genuine conservative from getting the nomination. What the left does at the presidential level it does in other political races at all, putting "moderate" Republicans in Congress and statehouses. We, in stark contrast, do not even try to place our sort of Democrat within their party. Why?

The Ghosts of the Unborn

In our civil war over abortion, those who champion life know that the abortion supporters lie. Bernard Nathanson, the abortion doctor who co-founded of NARAL, later in his life repented and told the truth about NARAL abortion statistics. He said that the NARAL claim that 60% of Americans favored permissive abortion was simply invented, that NARAL statistics claiming that one million illegal abortions were performed each year in America was false, and that the real number 100,000.

The Left and Choke Points of Society

The grand strategy of the left is to seize and then to occupy alone the choke points of society. The left is pleased to move slowly, disarming opponents through pious professions of unbiased interest. Consider education and its companion groups. Many decades ago, as early as the 1920s, the left began to deliberately occupy positions of control within the field of education. In academia, that meant grabbing sinecures in History, Political Science, Sociology and the like. It meant also the creation and control of professional associations of academicians. Tenure, once the left had a majority of the faculty, was used to deny opportunity for advancement to those who disagreed with the left and to promote untalented haters like Ward Churchill or Anita Hill into places of power. Now we live in a world in which leftism is ubiquitous in colleges.

The Golden Anniversary of the Worst Amendment

The Constitution, despite what leftists think, has always been able to “grow” without the arrogation of ultimate power by the Supreme Court. Article V provides two ways to amend to the Constitution, and both ways very strong political consensus. Amending the Constitution requires a very strong political consensus and as a consequence the Constitution has only been amended twenty-seven times. Some of those amendments, like the Bill of Rights and the post-Civil War amendments, have been reaffirmations of the underpinning political values of America since before the Revolution: freedom of expression, religious toleration, due process of law, equality before the law, voting rights for all citizens, and limited federal power.

Be Bold!

The political courage shown by Governor Walker and Republican legislators in Wisconsin should be an object lesson to all conservatives: Be bold! Those who oppose us, those who have infested the institutions of American life and the organs of American government, and those who live at the expense of our sweat and our pride will show us no quarter. While our war for the soul of America is peaceful in the sense that it involves no physical violence, it is still total war.

In Every State

I have written often about the salient but overlooked fact in public opinion polls: conservatives represent a huge group of America while “liberals” are a much smaller percentage of our nation. The Battleground Poll, for example, is a bipartisan poll put together by a Democrat polling organization and a Republican polling organization. It asked in every poll the same demographic data about those polled. The results, year after year, are almost identical: about sixty percent of Americans call themselves “conservative” and about thirty-five percent of Americans call themselves “liberal.” The “moderate” or “don’t know” respondents fill up the tiny remainder.

Alfred E President

Barack Obama resembles, more and more, the hapless, clueless, sappily cheerful mascot of MAD Magazine, Alfred E. Newman. Given the intellectual vacuity of his life so far, attending schools and working in "jobs" that did not require a single original thought or even more exercise in critical thinking, it is increasingly hard to determine whether our illustrious leader actually grasps the profound seriousness of civilized life today.

The Bright Line

After the election of Obama, many conservatives saw little reason to support the Republican Party. McCain was only the most recent and perhaps the most obnoxious Republican nominee to treat conservatives like pariah. Since the Great Depression, Republicans had only nominated two conservatives to be president, Goldwater and Reagan. Before Phyllis Schally wrote her stirring book, A Choice Not an Echo, in 1964, Republicans had nominated RINOs at seven straight conventions. How bad was it been? Since 1920, two Republican presidents, Eisenhower and Hoover, had actually been courted by Democrats to be their party's presidential nominee. 1940 Republican Party nominee Wendell Willkie had supported FDR as a delegate to the Democrat party's 1932 convention. The pox of RINOs is not new.

The Doomed Presidency

Pundits muse how Obama can save his presidency. He cannot: Obama, politically, is doomed. Republicans do not have a Reagan waiting in the wings, but that will not matter in 2012. All Republicans are attempting to don the mantle of Reagan, who has thoroughly captured in death what he could not in life, the heart of the Republican Party. This grand and overriding figure, like FDR and Lincoln, will dominate the rhetoric and policies of the Republican Party. Republicans will not commit hari-kari in 2012.

How Should We Interpret the Constitution?

The Constitution is plainly written. It was intended to be easy to understand. The Constitution is also short. Why do we need a process for interpreting the Constitution means? If we have such a process for divining the meaning of the Constitution, why should that process be secret deliberations of nine judges who are effectively unaccountable to the people? The issue, after Obamacare, has become more than academic. Idaho has passed a resolution of nullification, which removes from the federal bench ultimate power to reject congressional actions as unconstitutional. The Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden advises that nullification is unconstitutional, but he has no power to prevent the Idaho Legislature from passing its resolution.

What Reagan Meant

On February 6, 1911, one century ago, Ronald Reagan was born. Seven years ago, when Reagan died, millions of Americans waited for hours to share a brief moment with this greatest of Americans. Mourning dead presidents is not unusual: JFK, FDR, and Lincoln all had lavish funerals. Mourning dead presidents who left office fifteen years earlier and who had been out of public life for nearly that long was simply unprecedented, not only in our national life but in the life of any modern nation. Reagan was great in a way that transcends our notions of greatness. Why?

The Ugly Middle

In the wake of murder in Tucson, predictable voices have urged moderation and suggested that Americans agree on a middle path, a resolution to “get things done,” and so on. Few myths are more resilient than the idea that the path of moderation is benign. When Barry Goldwater, 47 years ago, said “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” the cognoscenti in the enclaves of Leftist power judged him a doomed candidate. But…why? What Goldwater said was precisely true. Our nation was founded upon the radical idea that all men are created equal and that the primary purpose of government is to preserve liberty.

What if Obama is Just a Hack?

Many conservatives have noted Barack Obama’s Marxist roots. They fear that our president may be a radical ideologue, a loather of American values, a false Christian more likely to follow the Koran than the Bible, a slavish disciple of the odious Alinsky. They may be right. But there is another possibility: Barack Obama may be nothing more than a purely political animal, committed to nothing at all except his own fame, his own pleasure, and his own power.

Martyrs, Victims and Congresswoman Giffords

Few tricks of the Left have worked as well as guilt to keep us cowed and quiet. Fifty years ago, John Kennedy became president after his anti-Semitic political boss father, almost surely, stole the election for him. His running mate was a corrupt bigot. Kennedy was a sick man who hid his sickness, which profoundly affected his ability to govern, from America. He was an adulterer who slept with mobsters' molls. Kennedy despicably betrayed Cuban freedom fighters at the Bay of Pigs. He brought the world to the brink of destruction in October 1962. Kennedy committed our soldiers to a war in Vietnam without a plan of victory while his own "heroic" naval career actually masked dereliction of duty. JKF used the IRS as a political weapon. He was a poor president and a worse human being.

The More Things Change…

I recommend to anyone interested in peeling off the meaningless layers of drivel which pass as news and current events the eye-opening information in old magazines and books. We live in an artificial world in which celebrity and attention mean everything and in which a real understanding of where we have been is not really welcome. Read old books and you will find that the same issues which plagued us seventy years ago plague us today. Consider the July 1943 issue of Reader’s Digest.

The Census and Conservatism

The Census showed that states which tend to vote Republican also tended to gain House seats and that the states which tend to vote Democrat also tended to lose House seats. Some people have viewed climate as the principal factor in migration within America. "Climate" is a good term to use when describing the movement of people within our nation, but it is less the weather "climate" than other varieties of climate which seem to govern the flow of population.

Allen West for Senate

Florida seems to be a treasure trove of political hope for Republican conservatism. Marco Rubio, nearly every pundit agrees, is going to be on the Republican ticket at some point. Sooner, I hope, than later. Washington "experience" is rarely the sort that makes an elected official closer to the people or more principled in his policies; it is rather than the amount of "experience" that a husband hopes his wife has had before marriage or the dreary and familiar process of bright talents going to Hollywood and ending up mired in the moral muck of chic Leftism. Allen West, as most conservatives who follow the news know, is a retired and decorated war veteran who is about as direct about his conservative principles as we could expect of any politician. Like Congressman-elect Tim Scott of South Carolina, West is also black.

The Dreck Girl

The Democrat Party, whose roots are in the Ku Klux Klan, big city machine politics, giant and corrupt unions, and fatuous Leftism provide few bright lights in American history. Robert Byrd, chosen by Democrats to lead them in the Senate, was not an aberration. Democrats appointed men who joined or planned to join three Klansman to the Supreme Court, one to be Attorney General, and even one President, Harry Truman, although when he found out the Klan hated Catholics, withdrew his application.