June 12, 2020

America’s New Caste System?

Some have correctly pointed out that the nationwide urban unrest largely stoked and pursued by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is much more about class warfare than racism.  Beyond making this observation, it’s important to understan...

June 5, 2020

The politics of murder

When George Floyd died under Officer Derek Chauvin's knee, there was nearly universal revulsion at obvious police misconduct.  This belied the narrative that black lives don't matter to white people, or that the American institution...

May 20, 2020

Materiality is the Key to the Flynn Impasse

There are two aspects to the current imbroglio over the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the Michael Flynn case, which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan so far has rejected.  The first is procedural -- whether Sullivan following Ru...

May 14, 2020

CBS reporter got the response her 'question' deserved

The mainstream media's latest heroine/victim is CBS reporter Weijia Jiang, who got into a tussle with President Trump at his May 11 coronavirus briefing.  Jiang, of Chinese descent, asked Trump an argumentative question, got a...

May 4, 2020

Undermining the Case Against China

There is a deliberate attempt on the part of many in the mainstream media, and within the Democrat party, to confuse evidentiary concepts when it comes to tying the Chinese Communist regime to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.  This commonly t...

May 2, 2020

Biden's weakness has been his strength, so far

Sometimes it's better to be weak than strong.  That's not true if you are a wildebeest on the savannah, unless you're too big to take down or can hide in the herd, but it's often true in human societies.  Strong fi...

April 23, 2020

Suing China

The Chinese regime is responsible for the spread of the COVID-19 virus.  Only the extent of the regime’s culpability is in question.  That should be resolved legally if possible, not only on behalf of the United States, but all n...

April 17, 2020

A Double Game behind the Biden Double Standard?

On April 12, the Washington Post and New York Times broke – and really carefully soft-pedaled -- a story that a woman named Tara Reade had accused Joe Biden of a sexual assault dating from 1993.   Some other mainstream news outlets co...

April 15, 2020

The Media Controls the 'Crisis'

The President, Congress, state governors and epidemiologists may argue about coronavirus policies, but the people driving matters are without constitutional authority or expertise of any kind -- the mainstream media and its social media accelerant....

March 25, 2020

Coronavirus containment: Choosing the least uncertain course

The coronavirus pandemic presents many uncertainties.  The two most critical uncertainties are how many Americans will die from the disease and what effect draconian preventive measures will have on the nation.  Of these two uncer...

March 21, 2020

End the coronavirus war

We are not at war with the coronavirus.  It's a public health problem, not a conflict.  Historically, comparing domestic societal problems to war — e.g., drugs or poverty — has been counterproductive. ...

March 1, 2020

Elizabeth Warren's dishonest and hypocritical Letter to the Cherokee Nation

In 1835, President Andrew Jackson wrote his Letter to the Cherokee Nation, which briefly argued the benefits of removal west, which ultimately became the Trail of Tears.  Jackson didn't flat-out lie, but he was disingenuous.  ...

February 24, 2020

The Coming Bloomberg-Sanders Train Wreck

While Michael Bloomberg's Nevada debate performance was justly and widely panned, he attacked Bernie Sanders effectively, demonstrating he's probably the only candidate who can derail the Vermont senator's nomination.  By the sa...

February 16, 2020

How Bernie might beat Trump

Although we are relatively early in the process, it is probable that, barring some unforeseen turn of events (for example, a health issue), Bernie Sanders will be the Democrat presidential nominee.   The left-leaning but respected prog...

February 11, 2020

After Three Years of Hate, the Dems Have Lost It

Writing in the Atlantic (“This is No Way to Beat Trump”) Thomas Nichols, a self-described former Republican and #NeverTrumper, castigates Democrats for their failure to take down President Trump, in light of the disorganized Iowa Caucus a...

February 1, 2020

The Problem with Bernie

Supposedly in the new four-hour (yikes!) documentary Hillary the subject says of Bernie Sanders “Nobody likes him.”  As with most of Hillary’s judgments, especially when it comes to gauging human desires, she is way off the mar...

January 20, 2020

Why Trump’s Impeachment is Effectively Unconstitutional

If you peruse the mainstream media, there are all sorts of reasons being bruited justifying the Democrat demand to call witnesses at President Trump’s impeachment trial.  Generally speaking, they sound quite reasonable; after all, trials a...

January 14, 2020

The Score: US 10, Iran 0

  By any conventional evaluation the United States clearly came out on top in the recent imbroglio with Iran.  Put simply, had a Democratic president been in power, the print media, airwaves and internet would have been awash with paeans...

January 7, 2020

Overwrought fear of Iran

If the Iranian leadership is smart, and there is some reason to believe that it is, the Islamic state will not substantially retaliate for the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani.  Why not?  They don't need to....

September 17, 2019

Beto's Boast

Some time ago a young man named Robert Francis O’Rourke decided he wanted to become a Democratic president.  Self-aware enough to realize he wouldn’t get there as a white guy, he decided to become Hispanic, adopting (at least by his ...

August 22, 2019

Virtue-Signaling Jewish Dems Betray Israel and Themselves

President Trump has ripped the Band-Aid off a festering wound: the increasing division between Israel and American Jewish Democrats.  This split has been worsening for decades, but the anti-Zionist infection afflicting Jewish Democrats has ...

August 19, 2019

The Authorities Should Assume that Epstein was Murdered

Given the choice of choosing between human genius or human stupidity for someone being caused harm, you are almost always better off selecting stupidity.  That’s a truism, and it underlies the argument that, as a result of an unf...

August 3, 2019

Little Stalins

Assessing the Democratic stable of candidates based largely on debate performances is fodder for all manner of analogy and descriptors. Comparing the debates to a reality game show is popular.  Few if any of the candidates display any re...

July 15, 2019

Jeffrey Epstein, Alex Acosta and an Elephant Named Bill

An interesting and much-missed aspect of the Jeffrey Epstein indictment is the way Democrats and Republicans view the matter.  Republican politicians and pundits have tended to focus on the legalities of the arrest, Epstein’s guilty plea, ...

July 13, 2019

Trump Clears Democrat Smokescreen with Removal of Acosta

Why did Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta resign?  His supposed “offense” was declining to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein in return for the billionaire sex predator’s guilty plea in state court (and concomitant jail sentence)...

July 3, 2019

African-American/not African-American

Kamala Harris' mom is South Asian, something Donald Trump, Jr. apparently didn't know until a few days ago.  He saw it on a tweet, found that interesting, and retweeted it (which is evidently something Twitter people do)....

June 29, 2019

Kamala Harris: Victim in chief

Kamala Harris is not so much the anti-Trump as she is bizarro Trump.  The consensus winner of Thursday's debate, she did so by playing to her strengths — that is, her sex and racial identity.  Like Trump, Harris is a bully...

June 27, 2019

The Truth about Reparations

The genesis of the Democratic Party’s current infatuation with the idea of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow can largely be traced to an article in the Atlantic from 2014 by Ta’Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations....

June 14, 2019

What a Toxic Rout Tells Us about Women's Soccer

On Tuesday the U.S. Women’s National (soccer) Team (WNT) obliterated a hapless Thailand squad in a 13-0 rout.  That’s about 91-0 in football terms, but in a sense even worse, given soccer’s relative dearth of scoring.  It ...

March 1, 2019

The Democrats Embrace Not Making Sense

“Stop Making Sense” is a classic 1984 concert film featuring the alt-rock group Talking Heads.  The title has a certain punkish frisson, but is also a joke.   Not so the modern Democratic party which might as well adopt ...

February 8, 2019

Virginia Politics and the Death of 'I Believe Her!'

When it comes to logical yoga, nobody ties himself up in knots better than Democrats.  The current mess that is Democrat Virginia politics is the most recent case in point.  The Democrats have a chance at a win there, but it will ...

January 31, 2019

Howard Schultz -- What Difference Does it Make?

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s announcement that he’s considering an independent presidential run is causing Democrats conniptions.   Hysteria -- always bubbling just below the Democratic surface -- can’t be far beh...

January 22, 2019

Kamala Harris's Identity Ticket

Now that first-term Senator Kamala Harris has formally announced for the presidency in 2020, she has to be considered the odds-on favorite to win the Democrat nomination. This stems not from anything in Harris’s relatively slight résum...

November 6, 2018

Generals, Borders, and Militias

A few days ago, the Washington Post gleefully announced in a front-page headline that some retired American generals are criticizing President Trump’s decision to send Army troops to our southern border.  The troops are being sent to suppo...

October 31, 2018

The Feds and the Pittsburgh Killer

The murder of eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue has been widely reported in the media as the worst attack on the American Jewish community in U.S. history.  This is not necessarily true, but it enhances the media meme that the right-w...

October 17, 2018

Warren's Clintonian Smoke Signals

For folks on the right, Elizabeth Warren's proffered "proof" of American Indian ethnicity is both laughable and puzzling.  Her proof is nothing of the kind, and she's seemingly reopened herself to merciless mockery by cons...

October 11, 2018

Defending the FBI Reinvestigation

Since the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the left continues to question the legitimacy of his appointment.  This is based in part upon the claim that the FBI conducted a cursory or even sham reinvestigation of his background, rela...

October 1, 2018

Blasey Ford's Redemptive Lie

In the court of public opinion and the U.S. Senate, Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s problem is that Christine Blasey Ford has a narrative and he does not. He has only the forceful and angry denials of an innocent man.  But a counter-narrative does...

July 30, 2017

Trump's Trans Muddle

President Trump's tweets announcing that he will order the military to reimpose a ban on so-called transsexual service members may please his political base, and also further galvanize political opposition on the left, but as a matter of policy, ...

June 17, 2017

The sacred, the profane, and the resistance

In religious philosophy, the "profane" refers to that which is not sacred.  We associate the term most commonly with its linguistic extremes, exclamations that reflect a rejection of value or are designed to hurt.  The modern left...

June 17, 2017

Bare-naked hypocrisy

Ocean City, Maryland is a blue-collar resort town featuring a thin strip of beach sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and dozens of condo high-rises, which themselves back up to the traffic-snarled Coastal Highway.  It's not the type of pl...

June 8, 2017

Is Trump Regretful?

During the presidential campaign last year, it seemed at times that Donald Trump was as surprised as the governing and chattering classes when he surged to the lead in the Republican primaries and secured the nomination.  During and after the co...

May 14, 2017

Trump is acting like an innocent man, and it's hurting him

When I asked in a piece last week why President Trump had not yet fired then-FBI director James Comey, I did not expect Trump to do it 48 hours later (and no, I don't think my column played a role).  We still don't know why Trump kept Co...

May 8, 2017

Maryland's Liberal Double Standard on Rape

Late last week, in the Friday afternoon media dead zone, Montgomery County, Maryland prosecutors announced their decision to drop rape charges against two illegal aliens who were accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl at a local high schoo...

May 7, 2017

Why Is James Comey Still Around?

James Comey epitomizes a lot of what is wrong with Washington and the elite culture of which he is a part. The question Americans ought to be asking after his recent testimony before Congress is not “What happened?” with Hillary Clinton, ...

April 16, 2017

Some Perspective on the Syria Strike

A good rule of thumb for conservatives is that If Nancy Pelosi favors something, oppose it.  Pelosi liked the administration's April 7 cruise missile strike on Syria. Time to roll out another truism: there is an exception to every rule....

April 11, 2017

Intersectional Nonsense

An interesting thing about reading that most of us experience pretty early on is that when you learn a new word, all of a sudden you start seeing it, when before it passed by meaninglessly.  As one develops vocabulary this happens less frequentl...

March 27, 2017

Another First for the Israeli Military: Risks and Opportunities

On March 17, a flight of Israeli F-15s screamed low over the eastern Mediterranean into Lebanon and continued to Syria, where they apparently bombed an Iranian weapons shipment destined for Hezb'allah.  Israel has made such strikes many time...

March 27, 2017

A brief look at WaPo's latest book reviews

A few weeks ago, much to the wife's dismay, the Washington Post, in another apparent cost-cutting move, outsourced its daily crossword to the LA Times.  A few years ago, with the same goal, the paper dropped its Sunday book re...

March 20, 2017

Mr. President(s), Meet Frau Merkel

The latest example of the mainstream media rewriting history to damage President Trump is falsely and adversely comparing his first meetings with German chancellor Angela Merkel to former President Obama's.  Per the Washington Post...

March 18, 2017

If You Set Out to Destroy ISIS, Destroy ISIS

President Trump promised to destroy ISIS, and the movement of conventional American ground troops into Syria marks a substantial departure from the Obama administration’s feckless policy. Trump is delegating authority and allowing his new Defen...

March 9, 2017

Obama Used the Presidency; So Should Trump

The front page of the Washington Post on Wednesday showed a charming picture of a gaggle of school kids on a White House tour excited by a surprise appearance by President Trump. The Post is overtly hostile to Trump, but editors find it hard to resis...

February 28, 2017

The Israeli Approach to Women in Combat

The American military and the Israel Defense Force (IDF) have some things in common and differ in others. One current difference regards the integration of women into combat forces. Under the Obama administration the American military opened all jobs...

February 27, 2017

Fourth Circuit Sets the Stage for a New National Gun Ban

In an unusual opinion that at times reads more like an op-ed at the New York Times than a legal ruling, the 4th Circuit Court last week upheld Maryland's highly restrictive "Firearms Safety Act."  It's apparent that the 4th Cir...

February 18, 2017

Taking on the Mandarins

Bureaucrats benefit complex societies and are necessary to modern industrial states, but also impose costs and perils. Modelling the United States’ civil service in part on the Chinese use of mandarins, 19th-century government reformers hoped t...

February 13, 2017

Maybe It's Small Ball after All

After Mr. Trump won the election but before he took office, I suggested that he govern playing "small ball," analogizing to the successful baseball practice of grinding out scores rather than swinging for the fences.  Others disagreed....

February 1, 2017

An ungood reading of Orwell

George Orwell would be spinning in his grave if he could see the modern left’s recent attempts to link the dispute over the attendance at Trump’s inauguration with Orwellian dystopia and the misuse of language.  This rather laughable...

January 28, 2017

Why Obama Did Not Pardon Bergdahl

Before he left office Barack Obama commuted more federal sentences than any other president in history, most famously that of former Army Private Bradley Manning, who divulged hundreds of thousands of classified documents and seriously damaged n...

January 22, 2017

American Flag Hijab

The print edition of Friday’s Washington Post, on the last page of the A Section, contained a full-page advertisement featuring a “painting” of an arresting Muslim woman in an American flag hijab.  The image appears to be the w...

January 14, 2017

Jerusalem Truck Attack Raises Some Interesting Questions

The brutal Palestinian-Arab truck attack on a group of largely female Israeli officer cadets earlier this week raises a number of interesting questions. These may impact the way Americans approach gender issues and rules of engagement in the military...

January 12, 2017

Obama's Phony War on ISIS

It was recently mentioned that U.S. Forces have dropped over 27,000 bombs on Syria and Iraq during Operation Inherent Resolve, the Obama administration's campaign against ISIS.  Given the current controversies over the reliability of and pos...

January 6, 2017

Who Has More Privilege Than Barack Obama?

Thankfully, America is not a land of nobility, but not all noble ideas are un-American.  The sense of aristocratic obligation, recognized in the French noblesse oblige or German Adel verpflichtet, is a decent, honorable idea for those in this co...

December 31, 2016

Divine Islamic Revelation Now International Law

Who is the real winner in the passing of U.N. Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli “settlements” in so-called Palestinian land? It is not the Arabs who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, nor the leftist BDS movement, nor the world co...

December 26, 2016

Germany’s Choice

The recent terror attack in Berlin has heightened concern within Germany and beyond over that country’s liberal immigration policies and soft policing of potential terrorists. It is not uncommon to hear Western and especially American pundits d...

December 21, 2016

How Will Russia React to the Assassination of its Turkish Ambassador?

Taking a long historical view, the videotaped assassination of Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov is disturbing for more reasons than its public and shocking nature. Few modern nations have fought as frequently or as viciously as the Rus...

December 12, 2016

Fake News: CIA Says Russia Preferred Trump

The Washington Post has unflaggingly stirred up hysteria over so-called "fake news," so it's extra-ironic that the media giant is one of the country's foremost purveyors of the same.  In the Post's world, a bunch of guys wi...

December 5, 2016

Can Trump Push Islam towards Reform?

The mainstream media and the Obama administration, like the media and governments in many Western countries, goes out of its way to excuse Islamist terror, and actively paints a picture of Muslims in the West victimized by supposed Islamophobia....

November 29, 2016

The Obama Apologists Tour

As President Obama winds down his final term, his defenders are in a goal line stand defending his accomplishments to an increasingly critical audience. Obama failed to fundamentally transform the nation, resuscitate the economy, improve American sta...

November 26, 2016

An Empty and Posturing Hamilton

The much publicized and ballyhooed “statement” by the cast of the hit musical Hamilton directed at vice-president elect Mike Pence last week was worse than rude. As some have pointed out, it is yet another example of the left’s atte...

November 21, 2016

How Trump Wins: Small Ball

"Small ball" is baseball jargon for producing runs without swinging for the fences, by doing little things like bunting, walking, and stealing bases.  It is more common in the conservative National League than the progressive American,...

November 11, 2016

Hubris, History, Hillary, and Hysteria

The Democratic machine and mainstream media tried mightily to paint Donald Trump’s campaign as one based upon white working class anger, anxiety, and gloom. Certainly Trump’s rise was in part fueled by such feelings, especially perhaps in...

November 4, 2016

Obama’s Gambit

The Roman historian Suetonius recounts that in his waning days, the emperor Tiberius had grown “thoroughly disgusted with himself” having besmirched the honors and successes of his youth with extravagant devotion to a great variety of sex...

October 30, 2016

Comey's Mess

FBI director James Comey really stepped in it.  He should have known that cleaning up one of Hillary Clinton's messes would be just like wiping that proverbial dog poop off your shoe.  You think you've got it, but there is always so...

October 28, 2016

Clinton vs. Cartwright: Much Worse than a Mere Double Standard

A number of articles have pointed out the blatant double standard applied by the FBI and the Justice Department in the cases of retired Marine Corps general James Cartwright and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.  Cartwright, dogged by t...

October 22, 2016

Why Should Trump Accept the Election Results?

The headline on the October 20 edition of the Washington Post blared, "Trump won't vow to honor results," referring to the election that the Post devoutly hopes will go to his opponent, the corrupt and criminal Hillary Clinton.  Th...

October 10, 2016

Unworthiness, Shame, and Fear: BLM and the Slavery Comparison

The release of Birth of a Nation, a new film about the Nat Turner slave rebellion, has spurred more than a few references to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the liberal press.  Though the movie is obviously being marketed with modern co...

October 3, 2016

Comey Should Resign. But He Won't.

In National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy does for James Comey something akin to what Comey did for Hillary Clinton in July.  Just as Comey effectively indicted Clinton for extreme carelessness in her email scandal but fell s...

September 26, 2016

Behind the Clinton Immunity Deals

We now know that the Justice Department granted immunity to at least five of Hillary Clinton's close aides during the FBI's investigation of her email scam.  However, it's hard to understand, in light of the ultimate disposition of t...

September 19, 2016

Trump Negotiates a New Deal with American Voters

Donald Trump's surge in the polls coincides not only with the public's growing appreciation of Hillary Clinton's moral and physical decrepitude, but also with the revamping of his own campaign with new managers and a new deliberate, posit...

September 13, 2016

Unlike Obama, Putin Is a Patriot

Donald Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin during the recent televised commander-in-chief forum has come in for widespread scorn, especially on the left, but also from some conservatives. The comments were perhaps politically ill-advised as they d...

September 5, 2016

FBI's 302 Report Proves Complicity in Clinton Email Scandal

The biggest and most damning takeaway from Hillary Clinton's July interview with the FBI, at least as it concerns the FBI itself and by extension the rectitude of our government, is, to borrow from Arthur Conan Doyle, the dog that didn't bark...

August 29, 2016

Comey's Corrupt and Shameful Conduct Revealed

James Comey's rationale for not referring Hillary Clinton's email crimes to the Justice Department rested almost entirely on a single, quite thin, legal and ethical plank, which was that she did not act intentionally when she sent and receive...

August 29, 2016

The burkini: Not a teenie-weenie issue

New flash!  France is not the United States.  They speak a strange language, saying things like “quel dommage” and “zut allors!”  The French eat snails and frogs, and when the food is not peculiar, they give it ...

August 21, 2016

Colin Powell Goes under the Clinton Bus

To the list of victims, common folks, and politicians left in the wake of that runaway bus of crime and corruption known as Clinton, add one more -- former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Leaks emerging from the Congressional acquisition of the heav...

August 17, 2016

How Elites Destroy Themselves

An 18th Century European lord puzzling over the accelerating decline of the aristocracy only had to look in the mirror to find his answer. Chronic inbreeding ensured the degeneration of the gentry, and yet even though the nobility well knew this, the...

August 12, 2016

Trump's 2nd Amendment Problem

I don't much doubt that Donald Trump is pro-gun rights, at least far more so than Hillary Clinton.  Supposedly he has a concealed carry permit, and his sons are firearms enthusiasts.  But in the midst of a hotly contested election, agai...

August 11, 2016

Honest Hillary and a Corrupted FBI

Time to revisit FBI Director James Comey’s statement that no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges against Hillary Clinton. Not only was it a lie that allowed Hillary to abscond, we have been predictably rewarded with more lying, more evide...

August 7, 2016

Yes, the Descendants of Murdered Polish Jews Should Be Compensated

Last Saturday, American Thinker published an article by a pseudonymous author called Mike Konrad that asked why Jews should seek to reclaim property lost during World War II in Poland.   Mr. Konrad's piece never answers that question....

August 5, 2016

Three Things Trump Must Do but Probably Won’t

This has been an awful week for the Trump campaign. Trump engaged in an ongoing self-defeating fight with a Gold Star family, refused to endorse Republican leadership (who now barely endorse him), displayed ignorance of events in Ukraine, possibly ma...

August 2, 2016

What Trump Should Have Said about Khizr Khan’s Speech

Donald Trump’s imbroglio with the parents of slain Army officer Humayun Khan is another example of his instincts gone awry. On the one hand he was correct to see the speech of Khan pere as a blatant Democrat ploy to attack Trump’s on...

July 28, 2016

Whom Does Putin Really Want in the White House?

Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook recently suggested that Russian intelligence leaked Democrat National Committee (DNC) emails in an attempt to undermine his candidate and promote Donald Trump.  In doing so, Mook followed the example ...

July 22, 2016

Democrats Will Not Be Asked in Philadelphia to Vote Their Consciences

Here is a safe bet. Nobody at the Democrat party convention will be invited to make a speech wherein they refuse to endorse Hillary Clinton and instead urge the delegates to vote their conscience. For all the controversy and hot air that Ted Cruz...

July 20, 2016

Playing into Mosby’s Hands

On Monday night at the Republican Convention, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Sherriff David Clarke effectively juxtaposed the recent murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge by a militant black ex-Marine, with Baltimore City’s own militant and lawl...

July 17, 2016

An Armed Citizenry Can Frustrate and Deter Vehicle Attacks

The Islamist terror attack in Nice France, carried out by a jihadist in a heavy truck, should be yet another blow to the Democrat gun control movement in the U.S., and an indictment of the Euro-socialist model of government that the left adores. ...

July 16, 2016

Trump's Mistakes: PC Isn't among Them

Perhaps Donald Trump’s most attractive trait to his diehard supporters, and even those of us who are less enthused, is his stubborn refusal to bow to leftist political correctness (PC). So it is predictable that those Republicans still clinging...

July 8, 2016

Comey Makes the Case for Trump

Thanks to FBI Director James Comey I will vote for Donald Trump. As is the case with a lot of conservatives, Trump is not exactly to my taste, and while never a part of the Never Trump crowd, I’ve remained on the fence about him. But elect...

July 4, 2016

No, Loretta Lynch Was Not 'Ambushed' by Bill Clinton

Sifting through the facts slowly emerging from the tattered veil of secrecy surrounding the tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, it is likely that the popular narrative that the Attorney General was ambushed is false. In all likelih...

July 1, 2016

A Suspicious Meeting in Phoenix Probably Means FBI Charges against Clinton

On Tuesday Attorney General Loretta Lynch met former President Bill Clinton at a Phoenix airport where they held a discussion that lasted at least thirty minutes. Lynch’s explanation for her meeting with Clinton was that it was entirely coincid...

June 28, 2016

Bet on the Baltimore Police Show Trials Continuing

The acquittal of Baltimore City police officer Caesar Goodson in the Freddie Gray case has led to a flurry of speculation as to whether state's attorney Marilyn Mosby will continue the prosecutions of Goodson's fellow officers, having so far ...

June 22, 2016

How Competitive is Trump?

Donald Trump is blustery, aggressive and loud. But is he competitive? By that, I don’t mean whether his campaign is competitive with Hillary Clinton’s. If that were the question the answer would be relatively easy -- Trump isn’t ver...

June 18, 2016

Trump’s Wrong on Muslims and Guns

Nobody expects a president to be a constitutional scholar. If our current chief executive is any guide it ought to be considered disqualifying -- though Obama’s claims to constitutional knowledge and scholarship are actually much thinner t...

June 13, 2016

Armoring Clinton against the FBI

Looking at the morning paper last Monday gave me a start, and not just because color photos of a wild-eyed Hillary Clinton with a pasted on smile still shock.  The Washington Post headline screamed that Hillary had won the Democratic nomination,...

June 6, 2016

Transgender Privilege and the Americans with Disabilities Act

There is a lot behind the Obama administration’s diktat to public schools requiring them to treat transgender students in accord with claimed gender identity.  The administration is pandering to radical LGBT activism, attempting to expand ...

June 1, 2016

Trump, Sanders and the End of Irony

World War I was probably the most important event of the 20th century for many well-known geopolitical, military, and social reasons but it also had a profound psychological impact as well, which strongly resonates, particularly in the West. It was W...

May 28, 2016

Hillary Clinton -- Career Criminal

At the conclusion of an article on the State Department IG’s findings that Hillary Clinton brazenly violated federal record-keeping statutes, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy asks: “What are we to make of Mrs. Clinton’s...

May 25, 2016

Baltimore Police Officer Acquitted in Gray Case on Narrow Grounds

On Monday Judge Barry G. Williams acquitted Baltimore police officer Edward M. Nero of all charges stemming from the arrest, transport and death of Freddie Gray.  While this is good news for those who regard the prosecution of police officers in...

May 21, 2016

The Redskins and Liberal Logic

As noted in another piece on AT, the Washington Post on Friday published a poll that categorically demonstrates that Native Americans by a huge majority do not consider the moniker of Washington, D.C.’s football team – Redskins -- offensi...

May 20, 2016

The Army Won’t Try Bergdahl on Obama’s Watch

On Tuesday an Army judge postponed the trial of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from August 2016 to February 2017. For those keeping track, this means that Bergdahl’s trial for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy will conveniently take place afte...

May 17, 2016

Trump Should Abolish the Department of Education

As with many things, Donald Trump’s position on education policy is less than entirely clear. On the other hand, President Obama is not only intent on using the Department of Education to politically indoctrinate future generations, but as...

May 13, 2016

Another Baltimore Show Trial Commences

This week the second trial of a Baltimore City police officer over the death of small-time hood Freddie Gray is set to commence. The officer now in the dock, Edward M. Nero, is being prosecuted on the unprecedented grounds that he lacked probabl...

May 13, 2016

Interpreting the latest clinton email scandal tea leaves

The most recent revelatory tea leaves available to interpret in the Clinton email scandal give us a bit more to go on.  Those recent events are the Cheryl Mills FBI interview and FBI director James Comey’s recent comments on Clinton’...

May 10, 2016

Obama the Fabulist

A number of people at AT and elsewhere have written about the New York Times’ fascinating but also deeply disturbing story of how Ben Rhodes, a callow, unsuccessful but well-connected short-story writer became the Obama administration’s p...

May 6, 2016

Conservatism on the Ropes?

Donald Trump’s claiming of the Republican nomination, along with fellow New Yorker Bernie Sanders’ popular and effective campaign for the Democrat one (with Hillary Clinton the alternative) are heavy blows to the conservative movement in ...

April 27, 2016

God, Comey, and the Clinton Email Scandal

The Wall Street Journal had an otherwise interesting editorial the other day that discussed Hillary Clinton's rising unpopularity despite effectively securing the Democrat nomination "barring an act of God or FBI Director Jim Comey[.]"...

April 26, 2016

Finding Shakespeare and Conservatism

When "William Shakespeare" (born William Shakspere of Stratford) died on April 23, 1616, there was virtually no notice taken in Britain, nor anywhere else, for that matter – a fact among many others that has led a small but not incons...

April 18, 2016

The Perilous Politicization of the Military

We are looking at a permanent structural change in the American armed forces that will not only weaken the nation’s ability to defend itself, but endanger constitutional principles. A year ago in an article titled “Obama’s Generals,...

April 4, 2016

Hillary’s Fingerprints on Selection of Aides’ Lawyer

The news that Hillary Clinton’s closest aides have retained well-connected D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson to represent them in their boss’ email scandal is bad news for those that held out some hope that justice would be done in the case. I...

April 3, 2016

The Problem with Belgium

There is an old joke about Belgium that goes something like this:  The problem with Belgium is that there is almost no unity. The Walloons hate the state because it is not French enough. The Flemish hate the state because it is not Dutch...

March 29, 2016

Another Reveal into Obama’s Confused Psyche

President Obama’s deep-seated narcissism and overweening self-regard is old news to objective observers of his administration. That Obama is an odd psychological duck is a given, but when new facets reveal themselves it is often train-wrec...

March 28, 2016

Yes, Let’s Carpet Bomb ISIS

Let’s talk about carpet bombing, Dresden, and obscure Syrian city called Raqqa, the de facto capital of the ISIS caliphate. Ted Cruz has taken a lot of scorn from Democrat politicians, the press, and pundits on the left and right for his r...

March 22, 2016

The Media’s Merrick Garland Kabuki Dance

The faux nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court is another remarkable example of how the mainstream media carries the water of the Democrat Party and the left under the guise of “reporting news.” In this, the major news networ...

March 14, 2016

A Tale of Two Immunities

Criminal immunity is not usually a hot news topic.  However, in recent days we have seen not only a grant of immunity to Bryan Pagliano in the Clinton email scandal, but another consequential though less publicized immunity grant forced upon Bal...

March 7, 2016

The last refuge of the scoundrel Hillary

Samuel Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel doesn’t apply to Hillary Clinton in her email scandal, because nobody – not even her die-hard supporters – would believe her if she said that she set ...

March 5, 2016

What Pagliano’s Immunity Deal in the Clinton Email Scandal Reveals

The revelation that former Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano was given immunity by the Justice Department in the former Secretary of State’s email scandal has led to a kaleidoscopic array of interpretations, a true Rashomon moment.   Democr...

March 4, 2016

The Road to Autocracy

Autocracy is the most natural form of government, and historically the most dominant form of political organization.  There are more democracies in the world today than ever before, but most are autocracies or so-called hybrid governments that c...

February 22, 2016

Last survivor of Treblinka revolt dies

Samuel Willenberg, the last surviving participant in the Treblinka death camp revolt during World War II, died on February 19 in Tel Aviv, Israel, aged 93.  His death is significant not only because of his role in that difficult and heroic ...

February 17, 2016

Neanderthal Lives Matter!

There is a synergy in our interconnected, media-saturated world that a prehistoric human being might not recognize, but that a modern Neanderthal-American, such has your humble correspondent, can appreciate and report.  For I am, and some of you...

February 16, 2016

Our Once and Future Caudillos

It’s been oft said that Barack Obama has turned the United States into a banana republic through his autocratic style of governance, rejection of constitutional principles, and corruption. You will not get argument from me on that. But add...

February 14, 2016

War hero: The death of Avidgor Ben Gal

Very few Americans have ever heard of Avigdor "Yanush" Ben Gal, who died yesterday in Israel at age 79.  But Ben Gal is an important figure in 20th-century history, who directly contributed to the end of the Cold War and fall of the So...

February 8, 2016

Obama may be Ensnared in the Clinton Email Scandal

Perhaps President Obama’s involvement is the reason that the FBI has not yet referred charges to the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case.  It may be metastasizing so quickly and so dangerously that not only are agents and ...

February 3, 2016

Making Marines and Presidents

Just before the big blizzard hit I spent a couple of days at Parris Island, the Marine Corps east coast basic training base with a group of fellow educators. The Marines took us down there to give teachers, counsellors, and administrators a sens...

January 29, 2016

Donald Trump -- Drama King

There seem to be as many explanations for the remarkable rise of Donald Trump as there are political pundits. He’s a populist, a Euro-populist, a dealmaker, star phenomenon, brilliant strategist, sly cur, faux conservative, cryto-liberal, ...

January 28, 2016

Hillary Decides What’s Top Secret, What’s Not

Hillary Clinton and her campaign minions are trying mightily to dismiss the conclusions of the intelligence community inspector general that highly classified Special Access Protocol (SAP) documents were transferred to Clinton’s unsecured priva...

January 26, 2016

Hillary and the Law of the Jungle

Hillary Clinton claims the email scandal that hovers over her presidential campaign is all about politics. She’s right, but not in the sense that she would like people to believe, i.e., that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” is pe...

January 14, 2016

Sean Penn Sums Up the Left

As many know, actor Sean Penn recently revived interest in his career by interviewing notorious Mexican outlaw Joaquin Guzman for Rolling Stone magazine shortly before the murderous drug lord’s arrest.  About a year before Penn’s art...

January 14, 2016

4th Circuit says FBI can hold women to lesser standards

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected a claim of sex discrimination by a male FBI trainee who was kicked out of the Quantico, Virginia academy for his inability to do 30 pushups.  Jay J. Bauer sued the FBI under Title VII of the Civ...

January 11, 2016

An archaic presidential qualification

I rarely agree with liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, but she’s recently penned two pieces that actually make sense.  Though Marcus is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, she acknowledged a couple weeks ago that Donald Trum...

January 8, 2016

Baltimore Judge Guts the 5th Amendment

Just a day after a weeping President Obama attempted to disembowel the 2d Amendment with a series of unconstitutional executive orders, a liberal judge in Maryland, caving to the mob justice in that plagues that benighted city, gutted the 5th Amendme...

January 3, 2016

Another 'Scientific Consensus' Bites the Dust

The favorite cudgel of leftist climate change fear mongers is the appeal to authority, as in that there is “a scientific consensus” that the earth is warming and that changes over the last century are due to human activity.   Th...

January 1, 2016

Failed Education Secretary's Chief Regret is Lack of Gun Control Legislation

Outgoing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan capped off his disastrous time as America’s chief education bureaucrat with typical incoherence declaring that his “greatest frustration” upon leaving office is that his boss and basketbal...

December 26, 2015

Counting Bullets Doesn't Add Up to Justice

In 2014 Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald sixteen times with his service pistol as the armed hoodlum jogged down a city street slashing tires and brandishing a knife. A year later, California police shot nearly 400 round...

December 21, 2015

Israel Captures, Releases and Kills a Terrorist

Samir Quntar, one of the most odious men on the planet, was blown to bits by the Israeli air force on Sunday in Damascus, Syria. We ought to cheer this development, and the Israeli airmen who braved advanced Russian antiaircraft missile systems to re...

December 20, 2015

An Act against Jihad

President Obama's perverse inability to acknowledge that Muslims perpetrated the San Bernardino attack (and many others) helped provoked the much criticized call by Donald Trump to temporarily ban Muslim entry into the country.  Neither Obam...

December 11, 2015

The Obama Revolution Enters its Radical Phase

Political scientists long ago developed a template for analyzing the course of classic revolutions, which still works pretty well, as for example, recent events in Egypt demonstrate. While the Obama presidency has not been a real revolution, Oba...

December 11, 2015

The left tries, fails to discover an anti-Muslim backlash

If invented crises were stock in trade, the left's inventory would be overflowing – an aisle of spooky climate change here, a stack of bogus campus rape there, and warehouses of racism and white privilege killing black people everywhere....

November 24, 2015

No News is Bad News in the Bergdahl Case

Perhaps the most obvious sign that the Bowe Bergdahl desertion case has been irrevocably corrupted by President Obama’s improper (and illegal) command influence is the unexplained and inordinate delays in processing and completing the case....

November 20, 2015

The end of Native American greatness

As a very late baby boomer, I grew up a Redskins fan, despite two decades of recent disappointment.  In the late 1980s, as an Army officer, deployed at Fulda Germany, in the "gap" through which the Warsaw Pact might pour, I cheered the...

November 19, 2015

Europe's Seven Deadly Sins

The terror attacks in Paris did not happen in a vacuum but are the consequences of deliberate and alterable governmental policies as well as social and political dynamics within Europe. Regardless of the rhetoric of war, François Hollande...

November 16, 2015

Comey Can Nail Hillary - But Will He?

FBI Director James Comey probably holds the fate of the presumptive Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton, in his hands, as his agency investigates her use of a private server for official government emails.  Whether Comey will handle the matter as ...

November 10, 2015

Why is the FBI Spending $80 Million on a New Gun?

When conservatives complain about profligate federal spending, part of the problem is the sheer magnitude of the federal budget, where mere tens of millions seem hardly worth talking about in a flood of dollars, both taxed and borrowed, that is in th...

November 7, 2015

Prominent Black Pundit Approvingly Links Black Lives Matter with Islamist Palestinian Radicalism

In the past few months the Black Lives Matter organization has managed to largely hijack the Democrat primaries by strong-arming both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders into vouching for the movement, despite its radical calls for violence against th...

November 4, 2015

Move over, trans people: Here come the zombies

There is a new rights movement creeping up on you, or at least there should be by the standards of today’s postmodern liberal society: the zombie rights movement.  If you thought zombies were an improbable facet of Haitian voodoo beliefs, ...

November 3, 2015

An increasingly dangerous game

The past few days have seen President Obama frittering away American credibility and strength in the Mideast, putting American fighting men at risk and pretending to fight ISIS while really only marking time until he can hand off his foreign policy d...

November 2, 2015

Obama's Corrupt and Immoral Abuse of the Military

Barack Obama's decision to send American special forces to Syria is not only hypocritical, but also a corrupt and immoral abuse of his powers as commander-in-chief. This is not a comment on his circumvention of Congress, which is something tha...

October 26, 2015

Migrants and the Fall of European Civilization

Whether a massive movement of foreign peoples is a migration, an invasion, or a conquest is a matter of perspective.  To the ancient Romans and later Romance historians, the migration of Germanic tribes into the empire in the 5th and 6th...

October 19, 2015

Liberal Cuts up his Gun, What's Next?

Over the years the Washington Post has lurched steadily leftward in both the news and opinion pages, with its Sunday Outlook section leading the way. The October 18 edition evidenced a new level of liberal inanity featuring a piece by a Californ...

October 18, 2015

An Islamist Intifada

The current Palestinian Arab "uprising" against Israel appears to be a mostly Islamist offensive, not different in any significant ideological way from radical Islamist movements like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Hezb'allah.  The idea that ...

October 12, 2015

The Likely Bergdahl Endgame

According to Bowe Bergdahl’s attorneys, the presiding officer at the his recent Article 32 hearing, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Visger, has recommended that the soldier only face a Special Courts Martial for abandoning his post in Afghanistan and n...

October 9, 2015

Russia Missile Attacks Embarrass Obama, Warn Israel

Russia’s October 7 cruise missile bombardment of anti-Assad Syrian rebels from ships stationed nearly 1000 miles away was probably the most expensively ineffectual display of military firepower since Bill Clinton launched a similar st...

October 7, 2015

Politicizing Liberty

When President Obama emphatically declared, in the wake of the recent Oregon shooting, that he intended to politicize his campaign to implement “common sense gun control” (which in his mind means Australian-like confiscation) my mind turn...

October 6, 2015

Oregon shooter committed suicide

Officials recently announced that the Oregon shooter was not killed by police, but in fact committed suicide.  This is similar to the perpetrators of other notorious shootings – Islamist terrorists excepted – who do not seem to want ...

October 1, 2015

Putin Plays Mideast Chess as Obama Looks On

It is sometimes said that in negotiations with foreigners, American leaders play checkers, while their wilier opponents play chess.   There is perhaps some truth to this, as American leaders sometimes chase short-term political results, a c...

September 23, 2015

Who's Really Guilty in the Bergdahl Case?

No matter the actual truth in the Bowe Bergdahl case, one thing is certain -- the Obama administration has made a complete hash of the matter, badly damaged the Army, American credibility, and security, and possibly Bergdahl himself. Bergdahl...

September 20, 2015

The Bergdahl Case Gets Curiouser and Curiouser

The odd case of Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl got even weirder during his Article 32 hearing conducted by Army officials Thursday and Friday last week.  The Article 32 procedure is the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury, except that the ...

September 15, 2015

They're Baaaaack -- Russian Forces return to the Middle East

In July 1970, Israeli Air Force (IAF) F-4 Phantom fighters took off for an apparent bombing mission near Suez City during the War of Attrition (the intermittent but occasionally fierce fighting that continued after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.)  T...

September 11, 2015

Baltimore's incredibly corrupt settlement of the Freddie Gray case

Baltimore City approved a $6.4-million liability settlement for the family of Freddie Gray, a young West Baltimore drug dealer who died on the way to jail after police arrested him last April.  His death set off days of rioting and unrest in Bal...

September 8, 2015

Jihad Street: 'Pro-Israel' organization shows its true colors

The latest example of absurdity masquerading as principle is the election of Amna Farooqi as the leader of J Street U, the campus adjunct to the supposedly liberal "pro-Israel" organization, founded and run by radical leftists of Jewish ori...

September 1, 2015

Rock great Chrissie Hynde pilloried by left for making sense

In another case of the left eating their own, famed Pretenders front woman and rock-and-roll goddess Chrissie Hynde is being raked over the coals in the liberal press for daring to mouth a bit of common sense about sexual assault and rape, opining th...

August 21, 2015

Hillary -- Don't Look Down!

If you listen to Hillary Clinton, or speak with her liberal supporters, what all will insist is that the email scandal now enveloping her campaign is all about politics. Hillary repeated the mantra recently in Iowa at a contentious news conference. T...

August 15, 2015

Laughable Lists in Support of the Iran Deal

In President Obama’s all-out press to push through his dangerous and likely disastrous deal with Iran, his acolytes are desperately trying to round up the public support of national “elites” to convince the unwashed masses who, with...

August 14, 2015

The Right Not to Keep and Bear Arms?

The left is busy designing a new and seemingly absurd civil right, which threatens to undermine an actual right under the 2nd Amendment. This new “civil right” is to live in a society free of guns and/or “gun violence.” B...

August 4, 2015

Hamas' Black Friday

Amnesty International recently released a “report” chronicling alleged Israel Defense Force (IDF) war crimes in Gaza during last summer’s conflict there. The report concentrates on a single battle in the Rafah section of Gaza w...

July 23, 2015

America's Radical 'Foremost Intellectual'

Readers of this website may not realize it, but America’s foremost public intellectual, especially on matters of race, is a fellow named Ta-Nehisi Coates, who for the mainstream media and liberal elites is the go-to guy. If you’ve ne...

July 12, 2015

D.C Metro Murder Undermines Liberal Talking Points

The brutal killing of Kevin Sutherland in the Washington, D.C., subway on July 4, does much to undermine popular leftist tropes, in this case, race, crime, guns and drugs, just as the murder of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco challenges liberal immi...

July 8, 2015

Say Hello to the 'Identity Person' and Goodbye to Your Rights

The Supreme Court did more than fundamentally rewrite the Constitution in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, they created an entity that doesn’t really exist. In a ruling largely devoid of actual legal reasoning, Justice Kennedy cobbled tog...

June 25, 2015

Lower the Volume on Race and Guns

In the wake of last week’s murderous rampage in Charleston, the liberal media is in fine scolding fettle, dressing Americans down on race and guns. According to respected pundits of the left, we need to talk about both more. We need to rev...

June 8, 2015

Our Nightmare of Reason

The acclaimed Jewish-Austrian author Franz Kafka placed his characters in bizarre, nightmarish situations that challenged their rationality and reason.  One of Kafka’s more insightful biographers, Ernst Pawel, encapsulated this dynamic in ...

May 31, 2015

Hillary's Pathetic Road Back to the White House

Naked ambition is no stranger to politics, and plenty of unworthy men have ascended to the highest rung with little to offer but that, witness our current president.  Hillary Clinton likewise seeks the presidency with little in the way of accomp...

May 22, 2015

The Collapse of Arab Nationalism

Are there many countries country in the Arab world today that really want to be countries? By that I mean where the population by a bare majority, would say, “Yes, I’m proud to be a Syrian/Iraqi/Jordanian/Lebanese/Saudi/Yemeni/Libyan, etc...

May 18, 2015

Obama Green-lights Anti-Semitism

The President of the United States is generally regarded as the most powerful man in the world, and so people pay close attention to what he says and does. When it comes to the State of Israel and Jews, President Obama’s words and actions ...

May 11, 2015

The Clintons and the chronic miscreant pass

In a recent column, Peggy Noonan noted how Bill and Hillary Clinton’s serial misdeeds have become so commonplace that both are essentially inoculated against claims that they are bad people.  No matter what a Clinton does, it’s alrea...

May 9, 2015

Draw Mohammed and Reform Islam

Pamela Geller’s “draw Mohammed” contest in Texas was provocative, but the problem is not with Geller or the contest organizers, it is with Muslims who insist that they were provoked because it violated a Muslim taboo against represe...

May 6, 2015

The Left's Rejection of Good Faith

Leftist ideology has ravaged many urban African-American communities by attacking the concept of personal responsibility and replacing it with ideas of victimization and endemic persecution.  Unfortunately, the election of the first African-Amer...

May 6, 2015

Freddie Gray's knife and the Mosby standard of probable cause

One of the most telling points of Baltimore State’s attorney Marilyn J. Mosby’s case against the police officers who arrested and allegedly killed Freddie Gray was that the basis for the arrest, Gray’s possession of a concealed knif...

March 30, 2015

Defining Terrorism Down

The left has made a business of defining deviant behavior down, as famously noted by Daniel P. Moynihan decades ago. This generally serves its purposes by normalizing antisocial behavior that despised Western societies have carefully defined and...

March 25, 2015

The Bergdahl Fiasco

Update: Today (3/25/15) Bergdahl has been charged: The U.S. military has charged Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with one count each of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, officials announced Wednesday afternoon. The latter count could carr...

March 13, 2015

Obama's Generals

President Obama likes to fancy himself a modern incarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a wartime president who famously struggled to find generals that shared his strategic vision of victory. Obama also seems to be in search of general...

March 12, 2015

Hillary and State Department intelligence

How likely is it that all of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails were free of classified material?  Not very.  Though it’s not widely known, the State Department has a Bureau of Intelligence and Research that is as much a part of the inte...

March 3, 2015

Obama's Court Jews Raise the Dual Loyalty Canard

Accusations of dual loyalty against Jews used to be something one expected to hear, if at all in this country, from the extreme right.  But modern conservatives generally strongly support Israel and rarely display anti-Semitic tendencies. ...

February 20, 2015

Armageddon in Syria?

The Syrian city and province of Da’ara lie hard on the border between Jordan and Syria near the picturesque Yarmouk river gorge. It is an area of dramatic beauty and rugged terrain, difficult for both merchants and armies to cross. Da...

February 9, 2015

Islamist Fan-Boys

ISIS’s immolation of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot renewed international disgust with the group’s tactics. Lost in much of the hyperbole over the shocking killing, depicted at the conclusion of a lengthy video, is the skill with whic...

February 1, 2015

Bergdahl and the Threat to American Democracy

There is increasing and ever more strident doubt in the country over whether the Army is properly processing the case of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.  Even if, despite the fears of many, the Army has acted appropriately in the matter, there is a grow...

January 19, 2015

An Islamic Reformation?

The existential clash between radical Islam and the West has several possible outcomes.   The West might win, defeating Islamist ideologues and their terror warriors through an exercise of will, military power, economic coercion, and moral ...

January 10, 2015

Islamic Executions in Paris

The Islamic terror attack on the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo humor magazine is neither an aberration of historic Islamic belief and practice (as many would like to believe) nor the beginning of a full-scale intifada against the French Republic...

January 1, 2015

Obama's Dangerous Iran Gambit

The mainstream media is out to bolster the president’s coming “détente” with Iran as roughly outlined in his recent interview with NPR. But typical of Obama’s excursions off-teleprompter, the meandering multi-topic...

December 27, 2014

Big Brother in Virginia

Leftist gun control advocates use divide and conquer tactics on a routine basis, to deprive Americans of 2d Amendment rights. A clear current example is the current effort by Virginia’s new governor (and Clinton apparatchik) Terry McAuliffe to ...

December 23, 2014

Obama Comes Close to Withholding America's Veto at the U.N.

Last week saw intense diplomatic activity over the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, leading to rumors that the U.N. Security Council would consider a resolution calling for an almost immediate settlement, on terms clearly disadvantageous and unfair...

December 12, 2014

Barack Obama, Student of History?

Teaching history can be frustrating, but sometimes students actually figure stuff out and learn a thing or two, unlike some of our political leaders. For example, just the other day one of my students asked why there are no great empires anymore, and...

December 2, 2014

Grand Juries and Ferguson

Shortly after a Missouri grand jury declined to indict police offer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, the leftist legal commentariat jumped on prosecutor Robert McCulloch for not presenting evidence in a way that would have produced an indict...

November 26, 2014

How Jerusalem Became Islam's 'Third Holiest City'

Recent Palestinian Arab attacks on Jews in Jerusalem have focused attention on the status of Israel’s capital – and in particular the Old City, home to Judaism’s sacred Temple Mount – and the Islamic shrine and mosque that currently sit atop it (resp...

November 16, 2014

<em>Fury for Real</em> -- Patton's Raid on Hammelburg

The recently released movie Fury is worth seeing, if only because it addresses two aspects of World War II often ignored by movies -- the bloody fighting in Northwest Europe that raged in places other than Normandy, the Ardennes, and Holland, and the...

November 3, 2014

Obama's Israel-Free Dream World

A popular speculative rhetorical question bandied about over the years by various Israel-bashers on both the left and the right is just how peachy things would be in the Middle East had the modern State of Israel not emerged in 1948.  Specifical...

October 14, 2014

Obama's Way of War

There are many reasons that national leaders take their nations to war. They range from the morally repulsive to the ethically sound. But because war itself is man’s cruelest and most brutal endeavor, the rationales for it, whether high-mi...

October 1, 2014

Oklahoma Terror and Gun Control

The horrible murder and beheading of an innocent woman in Oklahoma, committed by a recent Muslim convert, is being studiously ignored by the mainstream media.  As has been pointed out by a number of conservative commentators on AT and elsewhere,...

September 3, 2014

Barack Obama and the Last Czar

This summer, the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, has been bait for all manner of comparisons and commentary.  So let me add one more as President Obama enters the last 29 months of his term in office, a century after Czar Nicho...

August 13, 2014

The Army's Bergdahl Problem

Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl recently returned to duty, and was interviewed by Army investigators. This has many people confused and upset. If Bergdahl is a deserter or even a traitor, many Americans wonder why he still in the Army, or feel that if he...

August 8, 2014

Another Costly Draw

Israel Defense Force (IDF) ground units completed their withdrawal from Gaza on Tuesday, August 5. At first, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that this was part of a strategic Israeli decision to deal unilaterally with Hamas. Then Israe...

July 30, 2014

Israel Does Not Violate the Laws of War in Gaza

The other day Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, appeared on the "Huckabee Show" on FOX News to make the case that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. Huckabee is a strong supporter of Israel, instinctively on ...

July 23, 2014

Israel Must Not Repeat the Mistakes of Lebanon

The fighting in Gaza has now escalated into a full-scale ground war. For supporters of Israel, this is a good thing, despite the loss of life to Israel’s brave fighting men, as well as Arab civilians put in harm’s way by Hamas. However, t...

July 12, 2014

Retribution Not Messaging is What Israel Needs

As Israel embarks on yet another operation against Hamas and by extension its new governmental partner, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, it might do well to reconsider why Israeli deterrent “messaging” doesn’t seem to get ...

June 6, 2014

Israel Not a Model for U.S. on Prisoner Exchanges

One thing supporters of the Obama administration raise to defend the prisoner swap involving apparent Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl is that Israel has done it, too, so that makes it okay.  This is wrong on several counts.  Some Israeli exchan...

May 30, 2014

Liberals, Killers and Gun Fetishes

My 1980 print edition of the Oxford American Dictionary defines “fetish” as an object worshiped by primitive peoples who believe it to have magical powers. When it comes to guns, this definition clearly defines liberal gun control advocat...

December 30, 2013

The Left and Holocaust Denial

The so-called anti-Zionist Left long ago descended into outright anti-Semitism. So it is only matter of time before that debasement becomes complete and Left goes all in on the most pernicious modern anti-Semitic trope of all -- Holocaust denial. Th...

November 12, 2013

A Dangerous Time for Israel

See also: Can Israel Survive Obama? Forty years ago last month the Israeli government faced a critical decision -- whether or not to launch pre-emptive strikes on Egypt and Syria. Israeli intelligence had belatedly determined that the Arabs were abou...

April 23, 2013

The Boston Bombings and the 2nd Amendment

As terrible as the Boston marathon bombing was, it was the subsequent searches and shootouts that might have the greater long-term implications for supporters of the 2nd Amendment, as well as those uncomfortable with the increasing militarization of ...

April 15, 2013

Maryland's Second Amendment Nightmare: Coming Soon to a State Near You?

If you want to see how firearm sales can be effectively banned, look no farther than the so-called "free state" of Maryland.  Although Maryland's newly promulgated "assault gun" ban and licensing requirements will not go into effect until Octobe...

November 28, 2012

How Not to Deter Hamas (and Iran)

According to Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, the first purpose of in launching Pillar of Defense, the country's most recent Gaza campaign, was "to strengthen our deterrence." Now that the operation has concluded, there appears to be little con...

July 31, 2012

Supporting Israel is in America's Best Interest; Can Obama Do It?

In a recent Foreign Policy article, former U.S. diplomat David Aaron Miller astutely states the obvious, predicting a very turbulent period of American-Israeli relations should Barack Obama be re-elected.  The reason for this inevitable trouble,...

July 8, 2012

Does Morsi Really Intend to Uphold Egypt's Treaty with Israel?

Since the election of Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi, there has been considerable discussion about whether Egypt's government will honor the country's peace treaty with Israel.  In reality, the correct question is not whether Egypt will honor...

June 6, 2012

Obama's Syria Dilemma

As the situation in Syria deteriorates, with the Assad regime acting with ever-increasing ruthlessness, the Obama administration's firm policy of inaction has come in for extended criticism from both the left and the right.  That is not to say t...

April 10, 2012

Chutzpah in the Grass

I was in Zurich airport returning from a school trip to Europe and picked up the local newspaper Tages-Anzeiger to read on the plane.  A small blurb on the front page mentioned a new controversy concerning the German Nobel Prize laureate Gunther...

February 10, 2012

Israeli Deterrence and Dolphins

Last week, Germany agreed to sell Israel a sixth Dolphin-class submarine.  Israel already has three of these capable submarines in service.  Two others were either quietly delivered last year, or soon will be -- sources differ.  While ...

January 30, 2012

Lessons from Haditha's Quiet Denouement

Six years ago, in Haditha, Iraq, in the wake of a deadly insurgent attack on their convoy, a Marine quick reaction force raided several houses from which they were taking fire.  At the conclusion of the action it became clear that a number of Ir...

January 1, 2012

Invented People or Invented History?

American pundits have spilled a veritable ocean of ink since Newt Gingrich's comment on the bogus nature of Palestinian nationalism -- Gingrich called the Palestinians an "invented people."  But interestingly, Gingrich's American critics, on bot...

November 29, 2010

Carter's Razor

Occam's razor is the philosophical doctrine that suggests that the best solution to a problem is usually the simplest. But Occam's razor can't always cleanly cut -- to mix metaphors -- every complex Gordian's Knot of America's foreign policy. And whe...

August 5, 2010

Another Silly Education Fad

I am a conservative and a public school teacher. There are a few of us. I became a teacher after a stint in the Army JAG Corps and eleven years of private practice as an attorney. When I switched careers, I was a partner in a well-regarded Maryland l...

July 25, 2010

Surprise! Why An Israeli Strike on Iran is Unlikely

If Israel does launch a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities it will be the most widely anticipated military operation in modern history, even more so than D-Day or the 2003 campaign against Iraq.  The buildup to those operations la...

June 30, 2010

Border Wars

A principal problem in the Afghan war is that it has been improperly defined and thus subject to an unworkable strategy. The replacement of General McChrystal by General Petraeus is not likely to immediately reverse the error, but it at least appears...

June 12, 2010

Blockades and Muslims

No competent legal scholar can seriously question the legality of Israel's Gaza blockade. The Israel Defense Force Judge Advocate has clearly laid out the basis for Israel's action, demonstrating its absolute conformity with international law. The tr...

May 24, 2010

Obama Speaks His Mind at West Point

President Obama used a teleprompter for his West Point commencement address, which means that he took the occasion seriously. What he said, however dull and clichéd, represents not just the sometimes-flighty emanations from his remarkable brai...

March 30, 2010

Obama's Ire, Not U.S. Interests, Directs Israel Policy

It is now beyond cavil that Barack Obama personally dislikes Israel and harbors an affinity for the Muslim/Arab world, to include the so-called Palestinian Arabs. This is no surprise given Obama's background and associations, which range from school ...

February 15, 2010

The Last Shuttle and the Rise of China

President Obama's budget will limit funding of NASA and effectively end America's manned space program. The president sees the exploration of space as either an unnecessary waste of money and resources or not compatible with budgetary constraints, su...

January 6, 2010

Emperor Obama and the Mob

In the film Gladiator, the mad emperor Commodus, enraged that his enemy has won popular acclaim, is soothed by his sister, who notes that "the mob is fickle, brother." President Obama is quickly discovering this to be true as the supposed m...

December 29, 2009

Hard to Explain Away This Attack

Besides the fact itself, a bright spot can be found in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's arrest (in addition to the fact that his attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 failed, thanks in part to the brave and quick action of some passengers and c...

November 29, 2009

Justice for Accused Navy SEALs?

A report that three Navy SEALs will face courts-martial for allegedly abusing a long-sought Iraqi terror suspect during or after his capture has produced quite a bit of outrage and controversy. While it is too early in the process to make a judgment ...

November 17, 2009

A Double-Blow to the Laws of War

The rule of law can be a fragile conceptual edifice. It underpins civilization itself by assuming a basic, shared human interest in honesty, fairness, propriety, and peaceable relations between parties. Warfare has always existed on the edges of this...