“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period.”

The return of the Churchill bronze confirmed the suspicion that Obama was anti-Occident. The habit of giving inappropriate, thoughtless presents? as he and his family are deluged with wild effusions of love and lavish gifts? this shows Obama to be, well, a bit of a pig.

George Will once wrote that “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

The ability to mind one’s manners in dealing with others is a reflection of the mettle of a man. Or a woman.

While NATO provides Europe with a security blanket, it provides America with what she cannot live without: a mission, a cause, a meaning to life.

Were the United States, in exasperation, to tell Europe, “We are pulling out of NATO, shutting down our bases and bringing our troops home because we are weary of doing all the heavy lifting, all the fighting and dying for freedom,” what would we do after we  had departed and come home?

What would our foreign policy be?

What would be the need for our vaunted military-industrial complex, all those carriers, subs, tanks, and thousands of fighter planes and scores of bombers? What would happen to all the transatlantic conferences on NATO, all the think tanks here and in Europe devoted  to allied security issues?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO’s  mission was accomplished. As Sen. Richard Lugar said, NATO must “go out of area or out of business.”

NATO desperately did not want to go out of business. So, NATO went out of area, into Afghanistan. Now, with victory nowhere in sight, NATO is heading home. Will it go out of business?

Not likely. Too many rice bowls depend on keeping NATO alive.

In future years, when they regain political power, conservatives will likely face the difficult task of reforming entitlements while minimizing the social fallout of the citizens who have come to view them as acquired rights. All the more reason to take Western Europe’s lessons on public spending growth seriously: at the moment, it seems that even with plentiful European evidence of the dangers of too much public spending, American policy makers are unwilling to change course, willing to repeat the mistakes of Western European countries while the leaders of these very countries argue in favor of a different course.

When they refer to themselves as “progressives,” radicals express their own basic truth: Their method of operation is always to move steadily forward, seeking a progressive series of victories, each new gain exploited to lay the groundwork for the next advance, as the opposition progressively yields terrain. Such is the remorseless aggression of radicalism that conservatives forever find themselves contemplating the latest “progressive” demand and asking, “Is this a hill worth dying on?”

The “forgotten depression” of 1920-21 was caused by a huge increase in the money supply for President Wilson’s war. When the Fed started to tighten at war’s end, production fell 20 percent from mid-1920 to mid-1921, far more than today.

Why did we not read about that depression?

Because the much-maligned Warren Harding refused to intervene. He let businesses and banks fail and prices fall. Hence, the fever quickly broke, and we were off into “the Roaring Twenties.”

But, the Fed reverted, expanding the money supply by 55 percent, an average of 7.3 percent a year, not through an expansion of the currency, but through loans to businesses.

Thus, when the Fed tightened in the overheated economy, the Crash came, as the stock market bubble the Fed had created burst.

Herbert Hoover, contrary to the myth that he was a small-government conservative, renounced laissez-faire, raised taxes, launched public works projects, extended emergency loans to failing businesses and lent money to the states for relief programs.

Hoover did what Obama is doing.

It is a simple unquestionable truth that no public official or other public person in the U.S. today could meet the minimal ethical standards of the founding generation of Americans. If the founding generation is the measure of wisdom, integrity, and patriotism, then present-day leaders don’t even make the farm team.