October 10, 2016

What Would Serious Anti-Trump Republicans Do?

Watching Establishment Republicans swoon like Victorian ladies of quality at Donald Trump’s man cave musings (the old term “locker room talk” being no longer appropriate thanks to recent cultural progress), one is tempted to wonder ...

May 10, 2016

Is Trumpismo proving Bismarck right again?

Proponents of Trumpismo define it as an insurgency, a rebellion against years of betrayal, as populist rage against a failed Establishment, or as voters lashing out at what they perceive as “disenfranchisement.” (They usually really mean ...

September 15, 2015

2016: When the Fun Stops

It is hard to recall any presidential primary season that kicked off with as much unadulterated fun as this one.  There's watching Donald Trump upend received political wisdom with Marxist abandon (the brothers, not Karl); there's the sc...

July 22, 2015

What Trump can do

Issue by issue, with outrageous bluster here and disdainful put-down there, Donald Trump threatens, singlehandedly, to drag the Republican primary campaign into relevance, and what has passed for political debate since the 2012 election into rea...

August 18, 2013

What Has Mark Levin Wrought?

In The Liberty Amendments Mark Levin has delivered more than advertised. He promises a credible agenda for reinvigorating constitutional government based on an approach to the amendment process which avoids the liabilities of better known options. Wh...

July 25, 2013

The Windsors and the Weiners

Early prime-time viewers still suffering from Downton Withdrawal Syndrome were this week treated to two unfolding dynastic reality specials. First was the long-awaited birth of an heir of the House of Windsor, His Royal Highness Prince George of Camb...

April 11, 2013

'If We Can Save Just One Child...'

Adam Lanza, who slaughtered and maimed children and staff of his former elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, provided this year's convenient justification for new legislation controlling firearms in the U.S.  This week, President Obama bri...

August 9, 2012

The Ignorant, the Pets, and the Dead: That's the Plan

Obama is, at least, not treating all voters as fools; he is treating only some voters as fools. "This is a dead-even race for the presidency ... Pretty much people have made up their minds," Candy Crowley of CNN observed on July 22nd's State of the U...

July 19, 2012

The Misgovernment Campaign

In Roanoke, Virginia recently, the President explained to an enthusiastic crowd that his Republican opponents' "basic theory is, if wealthy investors are doing well then everybody does well.  So if we spend trillions of dollars on more tax cuts ...

July 5, 2012

Conservatives: Beware Krohn's Syndrome

I feel compelled to say a word in defense of the now seventeen year-old Jonathan Krohn, erstwhile conservative wunderkind, who apparently at 13 wrote a book, Defining Conservatism, that people actually bought. (One can only conclude that the purchase...

May 30, 2012

That Professor Obama Dog Won't Hunt Anymore

"Professor" Obama, like so many of the other Obamas, is a fraud. Law Professor Steven Carter shakes his disapproving finger and sets Governor Romney and the rest of us straight: "If you think President Obama has bad ideas, say so. If you want to crit...

April 3, 2012

The Obama Administration's Dispensable People

Last week, Donald Verilli and George Zimmerman learned officially that they have become dispensable people.  Both men exhibit more than a qualifying level of characteristics that should place them solidly in the ranks of protected classes, but n...

March 29, 2012

How Mitt Can Win

Romney might win or might lose adhering to his current approach, but one thing is sure: he would a win bigger, for him and the nation, with a different one. With apologies to everyone who thinks the Etch-a-Sketch simile captures the right's problem w...

March 4, 2012

No Fluke at all

Charles Murray would recognize the Sandra Fluke we all met at Nancy Pelosi's dog and pony show as the very model future denizen of the "archetypal upper-middle-class" enclave described in his recent Coming Apart. This alarm-clock owning, well put tog...

February 10, 2012

It's the Leadership, Stupid

The recent anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth brought home why so many have been discouraged by the Republican primaries.  We remembered that while Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, et.al. have been scrambling to, as the current usage goes, "show le...

November 10, 2011

Cui Bono? Cain's Bono

In all the speculation and finger-pointing regarding the renewed, and likely continuing, parade of women accusing Herman Cain of acting like a jerk, creep or Bill Clinton, designated suspect leakers have been Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and the "Democra...

October 6, 2011

When will the GOP contenders wake up?

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October 1, 2011

The Fat Guy and the Skinny Guy: More Alike Than They Appear

For all their contrasting looks, Chris Christie and Barack Obama are alike in one critical respect: both are the kind of politician endangered elites offer up when they correctly perceive their power threatened.  To preserve their dominance, est...

August 22, 2011

Bonny Prince Barry?

Is our current "Young Pretender" preparing to fly the coop even before his Culloden in 2012? Until the advent of Barack Obama, Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), called The Young Pretender, was a prime contender for the title of greatest narcissistic...

August 15, 2011

A New Role for Baby Boomers

The entitlement crisis: an opportunity for proto-Geezers of the Baby Boom finally to stop whining and make themselves useful Normally I'd be inclined to dismiss something from a former Deputy Campaign Manager to the mealy-mouthed, politically faithle...

August 10, 2011

Senator Manchin Gets the Bum's Rush

"I respectfully request the opportunity to serve as a member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction created by the Budget Control Act of 2011...If selected, I will commit to working across party lines to achieve commonsense solutions, ...

August 8, 2011

Democrats Are Right to Scream About the S&P Downgrade

In the aftermath of the Great S&P Debt Downgrade Democrats are screaming "foul," and, from the perspective of what is  in the best interests of the party and their president, they are right, but not for the reasons they  are claiming. B...

July 31, 2011

A Fine Weekend in Washington

First of all it is very hot in Washington, DC, and yet those who pass themselves off as our nation's leaders, but who really are better described as its tormentors, are stuck there, rather than enjoying The Vineyard, Bozeman, Boothbay or Bohemian Gro...

July 30, 2011

The Federalist from Texas

We will know within the next few weeks whether Rick Perry will follow the course of widespread speculation and become a candidate for president of the United States.  This is a very good thing -- not just because he has great hair, and not just ...

June 27, 2011

What a Real Victory in 2012 Would Look Like

We now have it from a conservative political observer whose judgment has proven sound over the years, Emmet Tyrrell, of The American Spectator, "I believe Barack Obama will be retired to private life (after 2012)."  Assuming for the purposes of ...

June 3, 2011

The GOP and the Working Class

Republicans are beginning, finally, to construct a positive case for why one of their own should move into the White House.  A compelling one will require more than the fiscal and economic emphasis we have seen so far.  Obama's mess has don...

May 17, 2011

Obama on the Arab Spring

Obama is thinking.  Fareed Zakaria says so, and so does National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon.  Obama had better be thinking, and hard, because as Andrew McCarthy observes, the Obama administration needs to prepare "the political gr...

May 6, 2011

Our Master of Deconstruction

The bin Laden raid is but the latest example of Obama's governance by deconstruction. By deconstruction, I‘m suggesting that its meaning has been leached out, in the manner of the dead-end school of literary criticism of the same name. What in ...

April 28, 2011

Obama's Real Strategy

Watching the machinations of Barack Obama, it seems as though he is creating what the Marxists call "internal contradictions." Gas prices ready to breach the $5 mark, but a relentless Administration campaign against increased domestic energ...

April 17, 2011

Trump? What Do We Know?

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March 23, 2011

General Ham 'Strung'

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March 19, 2011

Obama and the Libya decision

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March 9, 2011

Central Virginia Honors the Memory of a Young Airman

Knots of neighbors gathered in tribute in front of the little strip malls, gas stations and fast food joints that line US Route 29 in Ruckersville, Virginia,  on Tuesday as the remains of Greene County's Airman First Class Zachary Ryan Cuddeback...

February 24, 2011

The Price of Weakness

As the big sign outside the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 prophetically proclaimed, "America can't do a thing."We "deplore," we "condemn," of course, "our hearts go out," and "our thoughts are with those......

February 20, 2011

The Obama Gang Has Miscalculated

As they did in the great legislative offensive of 2009, the Obama gang seeks to exploit an opening that is actually much smaller than it appears, while underestimating the soundness of their opponents' position in the battle over collective barg...

February 2, 2011

Egyptians Calculate the Costs

As the week began, we learned that Muhammad Ghannen of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood had declared "The people should be prepared for war against Israel." That should have been the first indication that events in Egypt just might not play out a...

January 19, 2011

They can't tell you where to sit

My first reaction on hearing about the ever-so-earnest Congressman Udall's notion of replacing the current World Cup model of congressional seating with the sports bar model was to laugh. I imagined the likes of a doddering Frank Lautenberg and an ou...

January 12, 2011

The counter-revolution has begun

Surveying the stupefying spectacle of barefaced lies and weasly distortions, facile abandonment of previously-heralded high principle, cynical exploitation of pain and loss and official fatuousness, can we  be blamed for asking: "What is go...

January 10, 2011

Don't Blame Claude de Contrecoeur or Rush Limbaugh for Jared Loughner

On YouTube the Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner identifies the prime source of whatever phantasmagoria passed in his troubled mind for political thought :   "My favorite activity is conscience dreaming: the greatest inspiration for my po...

November 26, 2010

Airport 2010 or Crazy in Cincinnati

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November 21, 2010

The Troubled Policies Relief Program

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November 16, 2010

Dem 'compromises' on tax cuts should be ignored

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November 5, 2010

Credit where credit is due

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October 31, 2010

Democratic civil war may be birthed in New York

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October 28, 2010

Too Expert to Fail

When the midterm Hurricane strikes, large numbers of experts will be proven wrong; politicians to be hardest hit.If, after November 2, Harry Reid, Alan Grayson, maybe even Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank, find themselves pursuing other lines of w...

October 8, 2010

Fox News Celebrates an Anniversary

As Mediaite puts it, "14 years ago today, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched the Fox News Channel-a network that has dominated cable news since 2002, when it overtook CNN." No doubt they are not celebrating this anniversary at the Whit...

September 19, 2010

Incitatus, Larry Craig, John McCain and the Soon-to-Be Esteemed Colleagues

The Roman historian Suetonius in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars claims that the first century Emperor Caligula planned to name Incitatus, his favorite race horse as Consul, and thereby entitle him to preside over the Roman Senate. Along with a numbe...

September 17, 2010

It's Tough Out There

"It's hell. I can't stand it!' This cri de Coeur is attributed by Madame Bruni-Sarkozy to Michelle Antoinette Obama, but it might equally be attributed to John Boehner, Karl Rove, what used to be called the Mainstream Media, most sitting members...

September 1, 2010

Whip Uncertainty Now: An Exit Strategy from Obama's Economy

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August 26, 2010

Generals Axelrod and Pflouffe Take Their Stand at the Ground Zero Mosque

For those observers puzzled over Obama's decision to wade into the Ground Zero Mosque dogfight here is a theory: the mosque controversy represents the only kind of battle that Obama and those still willing to stand with him can fight.The campaign for...

August 22, 2010

For Obama in New Orleans: Remember "God don't like ugly."

Robert Gibbs, before he went into hiding, announced that President Obama would visit New Orleans on August 29 "to help mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina." One suspects that if it is left to Pflouffe, Axelrod & Co. the bon...

August 17, 2010

A rebuilt WTC might have softened the controversy

Opponents of what is being called the "Ground Zero Mosque" are now concentrating their fire on President Obama, criticizing his failure to make a firm moral judgment about the appropriateness of building the Cordoba Cultural Center and Nata...