By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
In describing 2011, few cliches seem more appropriate. For in this past year, we Americans seemed to lose control of our destiny, as events seemed to be in the saddle.
While President Barack Obama maneuvered skillfully to retain a fighting chance to be re-elected, the economy showed no signs of returning to the robustness of the Reagan or Clinton years. And Obama is all out of options.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
For the 30 years since “The McLaughlin Group” began to run on network television, the Christmas and New Year’s shows have been devoted to the conferring of annual awards.
The first award on the Christmas show is “Biggest Winner.”
This year, clearly, one of the world’s big winner was — Islam.
For this was the year when what Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc predicted in 1938 would be the “second period of Islamic power” became manifest to all mankind.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq.
On May 1, 2003, on the carrier Abraham Lincoln, the huge banner behind President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished!”
That was eight years ago. And so, was the mission accomplished?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
In June 1967, with ex-Vice President Richard Nixon, this writer toured an Israeli military hospital full of wounded Egyptian soldiers.
An Israeli officer told us that in the hospital was an Egyptian officer he had captured in the 1956 Sinai campaign, and that he had asked the Egyptian: “We have fought three times now, and three times you have been defeated. Why do you keep fighting us?”
By Patrick J. Buchanan
In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition.
Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted:
“Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan replied.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Republican Party is a stool that stands on three legs: social conservatives, economic conservatives and foreign policy conservatives.
Yet since Ronald Reagan departed and George W. Bush arrived, that coalition has been under a growing strain that may yet pull it apart and redefine what conservatism means in 21st century America.
Is a free-trade globalism that saw America lose 57,000 factories and 6 million manufacturing jobs in the last decade conservatism?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt.
Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama’s “grand bargain,” the “big deal” of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in “revenue enhancement.”
These crazed ideologues, the Tea Partiers, we are told by the talking heads, just do not understand that governing is about compromise.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year’s end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves.
He has, however, well served his political interests.
A larger drawdown would have risked the gains made in Kandahar and Helmand and invited a revolt of the generals, some of whom might resign and denounce Obama for denying them the forces to prevail.
1 
27 
6274 47 5712 20 5773 25 4952 26 4164 19 4050 60 3460 14 3163 41 2420 22 2531 33 1931 22 1950 4 2112 34 1621 24 169
Order from Amazon...
