by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 30, 1998

A week ago, an assassin fired through the kitchen window of Barnett Slepian, an obstetrician who did abortions in Amherst, N.Y. And like the murder of Matthew Shepard, the slaying of Slepian was seized upon and exploited to initiate a new moral pogrom against the American right.

In Shepard’s case, social conservatives who condemn homosexual conduct as immoral were charged with giving aid and comfort to his murderers. And those who decry abortion as “the killing of the unborn” are now accused of giving moral sanction to the killing of Slepian.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 27, 1998

Between 1992 and 1994, a historic swap took place in U.S. politics. Republicans, who had had a quarter-century lock on the White House, gave it up to the Democratic Party, while Democrats, who had had a 40-year lock on the Congress, gave it to the GOP.

The GOP traded a horse for a rabbit. Congress has become about as relevant to the most fateful foreign-policy decisions as the student council at Ridgemont High. Consider the last 10 days:

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 23, 1998

Fourteen years ago, foreign steel producers began dumping heavily into the U.S. market, choking America’s industry near to death. Big Steel went to the president. Ronald Reagan listened and acted.

On Sept. 22, 1984, he took to the airwaves to denounce “predatory practices” that had made America a “steel dump for the rest of the world.” “(T)hat simply isn’t acceptable,” said Reagan, as he pledged “swift, effective action.” He was true to his word.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 20, 1998

Matt Shepard is dead. His death was vicious and violent.

According to prosecutors, Shepard was in the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Wyo., when he “confided to Mr. McKinney and Mr. Henderson (his alleged killers) that he was gay. The subjects deceived Mr. Shepard into leaving with them … to a remote area.”

While walking into a field, Henderson “struck Mr. Shepard in the head with a pistol.” The two then “tied Mr. Shepard up with rope, robbed him and tortured him, while beating him with the butt of a pistol. During the incident, the victim was begging for his life.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 16, 1998

Watching America march, step by step, ever deeper into the Balkans brings to mind Hegel’s observation that the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.

“My mind-set is Munich,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has exclaimed. Yet she and the Clintonites seem to have misread the deeper lesson of that ill-fated conference between Adolf Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 13, 1998

As Congress adjourns in an orgy of capitulations to President Clinton to avoid a government shutdown, for which the GOP would be blamed, the two great questions of the coming 106th Congress are clear:

Will Congress impeach the president, and will Congress be forced to choose between protecting U.S. industry and saving Big Money?

Two articles suggest the second issue is now at hand.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 6, 1998

Can it be that a Republican Congress will wind up killing a near $18 billion tax cut this year for American families, only to hand $18 billion over to the IMF to make the world safe for hedge funds?

So it would seem. The GOP’s modest tax cut of $80 billion over five years is hanging by a thread in the Senate. But a House-Senate conference is colluding to tack $18 billion in fresh IMF money onto a foreign aid bill and then whip it through the House.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – October 2, 1998

“What we are really talking about is a humanitarian disaster precipitated by the cold political calculus of an autocratic leader who has pursued a political strategy against his own citizens,” said U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander in Europe.

Gen. Clark’s target was Slobodan Milosevic. Yet his words might have been used by another American general named Robert E. Lee, about another “autocratic leader” named Abraham Lincoln.

The day Clark made his statement bolstering the case for air strikes in Kosovo, the fall issue of Independent Review arrived. In a piece on Lincoln, “micromanager of the war effort,” scholar Thomas DiLorenzo describes Union tactics in the rebels’ Shenandoah Valley: