by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 31, 2002

Not a year has elapsed since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that killed 3,000 Americans. Yet the national consensus behind the war on terror has begun to fray. And the fault lies with the president and his War Cabinet.

The war’s first phase – assembling the anti-Taliban alliance, deploying U.S. forces and striking with decisive impact – was done brilliantly. But beginning with the president’s “axis-of-evil” speech last winter, the focus has been lost.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 29, 2002

“For the first time in more than two decades, trade barriers are moving in the wrong direction. This isn’t the 1930s … but Pat Buchanan is one happy camper these days.”

So writes Steve Moore in a long and anguished column in the Washington Times titled, “A Comeback for Protectionism.” A free-trade purist at Cato Institute, Moore is right to be alarmed.

Americans, souring on what global free trade has done to them, are again turning to the philosophy that converted America from 13 rural colonies into the mightiest industrial power the world had ever seen – in a single century.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 25, 2002

Since President Bush took the oath, the Dow Jones has fallen over 30 percent, the Nasdaq 75 percent. In Sunday’s New York Times, Seth Feaster, using a much broader index, has even more jolting news.

The Wilshire 5000, writes Feaster, tracks “every publicly traded U.S. company. The Wilshire hit its ceiling on March 24, 2000. Since then, the market has lost more than $7 trillion in value and shed more than 1,000 companies.”

Forty-one percent of the value of all publicly traded stocks in the United States has disappeared in 28 months!

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 22, 2002

At long last, Congress may be about to do its duty.

According to the New York Times, before summer ends, the Senate and House will call up secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld to lay out the war aims and war plans of President Bush.

These hearings are overdue. The New York Times has already spread out on its front page an invasion plan calling for 250,000 U.S. troops to strike Iraq from three directions. From London come reports that 30,000 Brits will march alongside.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 17, 2002

“The American government sure is easily baffled. An extremist Egyptian Muslim chooses July Fourth to murder Americans and Israelis who are flying from an American airport on Israel’s national airline – and the official line is we can’t call this terror …”

Adds exasperated columnist Dennis Prager, “This country’s officials are in a state of denial and confusion that is almost as frightening as the terrorists they are supposed to be fighting.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 15, 2002

Any regular viewer of CNN, MSNBC or Fox News has seen the videotape: A handcuffed black 16-year-old being body-slammed on the hood of a police car and punched in the face by a white cop.

Endlessly, the TV talking heads express outrage, as the tape rolls on, and few there are who defend what that cop did. But why are the media addicted to this story? The teen-ager is not dead. He does even not seem seriously hurt. As for that body-slam, yes, it was rough, but that is what happens every Sunday to NFL quarterbacks who fail to “read the blitz.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 10, 2002

“We face an entirely new war,” said Gen. MacArthur, as he realized that the hordes of Chinese “volunteers” coming over the Yalu meant Beijing was now intervening massively in the Korean War.

That war would last three more years. And the recent horrors in Afghanistan suggest we may be headed for a wider war.

On Saturday, Vice President Abdul Qadir was assassinated in Kabul in broad daylight. His killers fled in a taxi. Qadir was the highest ranking Pashtun in the government, excepting only President Karzai himself.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 9, 2002

Call it the Independence Day capitulation or July Fourth surrender.

Forty-eight hours after handing the U.N. an ultimatum – either U.S. troops get immunity from the International Criminal Court, or we veto the U.N. mission in Bosnia – President Bush backed down. The globalists called our bluff, and America threw in its hand.

Hours before the capitulation, the president was a portrait in patriotic defiance. “As the United States works to bring peace around the world, our diplomats and our soldiers could be drug into court.” U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte echoed Bush: “We are and will remain a special target (of the ICC), and we cannot have our decisions second-guessed by a court whose jurisdiction we do not recognize.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 3, 2002

When the U.N. Security Council rejected America’s demand for immunity for U.S. soldiers in the Bosnian peace force from arrest and prosecution by the International Criminal Court, the United States vetoed an extension of the force. Either our troops get immunity, or our troops get out.

Good for President Bush.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – July 1, 2002

“I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

So Jefferson wrote to fellow Virginian James Madison in the year Madison authored his country’s Constitution.

It’s past time for “a little rebellion” against federal jurists who are perverting that Constitution to make themselves petty dictators.