The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

History You Probably Never Knew

Very early in my childhood, history became a favorite subject, most likely because of my father’s service in World War II. Knowing that he had been wounded while fighting the Germans in France — he had a deep scar on the back of his neck from the shrapnel that nearly killed him — I was […]

Pharaoh Amenhotep II and the Exodus: Vindicating the Bible as Israel’s History

Since the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, there has been a chorus of anti-Israel rhetoric portraying the Jews as “colonizers.” This rhetoric seeks to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s historic claim to the land which, as the Bible says, God promised to the descendants of Abraham as a covenant (Genesis 12:1-3). As every child […]

Thanksgiving and the Meaning of America

What are you thankful for, this holiday? Personally, I’m thankful for gluten. Our oldest daughter has been on a gluten-free diet for some time, and because she’s visiting us for Thanksgiving — with her husband and two sons, Franco and Luca — my wife bought some gluten-free bread. Not realizing it was gluten-free, I accidentally […]

The High Price of Forgetting

“The dullards and malcontents among us are always anxious to acquire by coercion and bullying what they cannot gain by merit. Because of this, their simple-minded doctrine is attractive for a certain type of disaffected bureaucrat.” — Stanley K. Ridgley When I was young (says the Baby Boomer, because you callow punks don’t know this […]

Remembering St. Crispin’s Day: ‘We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers …’

Today I was waiting for my pizza to come out of the oven and scrolling through Facebook on my phone when I saw my post from last year (“St. Crispin’s Day: ‘If We Are Mark’d to Die, We Are Enough to Do Our Country Loss’”), and said to myself, “Is today October 25?” Never shall […]

Self-Inflicted ‘Oppression’

When I first joined the staff of The Washington Times in 1998, our chief foreign correspondent was Marty Seiff. A native of Belfast, Marty had traveled the world, filing bylines from nearly 50 different countries, and had been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. Whenever the subject of the Middle East came up — […]

How Am I Related to Pocahontas?

Having traced the ancestry of my paternal grandmother Perlonia McCain (née Bolt) all the way back to Rollo the Viking — seriously, that’s what the Internet says — my son Jefferson also took a look at the ancestry of my maternal grandfather, Hermit Eiland Kirby, whose father was William Thomas Kirby. His father, William Terry Kirby, […]

Music Cue: ‘Immigrant Song’

Genealogy is fun, although I’m not entirely sure that online sources are reliable. At any rate, my son Jefferson texted me today about some of the research I’d done. It seems his girlfriend’s family can trace their ancestry to William the Conqueror, and here I’d gotten no further back than the Revolutionary War. But I […]

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