Tod Lindberg

The late senator was the kind of man the Founders had in mind.

Why the success of the Federalist Society is unlikely to be replicated.

Trump may well prefer for Mueller to play out the string.

For those willing to take it seriously, the question of Trump-ian national security and foreign policy has always been the extent to which the disruptive if not incendiary rhetoric of Donald Trump, the man, would be matched by a Trump administration effort to remake U.S. policy in accordance with…

To those feverishly speculating, whether in glee or in terror, that the election results in Virginia and New Jersey portend loss of GOP control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections a year from now, I ask this question: What difference does that prospect make not as of January 2019…

These are perilous times for understatement and modest expectations. In the age of Trump, even the smallest of things are transmogrified into epoch-defining events. These are the days of mountains out of molehills, “a new low” almost daily, and more proof (as if more were needed) that your…

These are perilous times for understatement and modest expectations. In the age of Trump, even the smallest of things are transmogrified into epoch-defining events. These are the days of mountains out of molehills, “a new low” almost daily, and more proof (as if more were needed) that your…

To those who believed, sequentially, that Donald Trump would drop out soon after entering the GOP primary field; that this or that outrageous provocation of his would fatally turn off primary voters; that while he might be winning primaries, he had a ceiling of support among Republicans in the…

There are no more yellow ribbons. For more than 20 years, in times of travail, the yellow ribbons have come out. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons. And at one time or another since then—can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando…

One noteworthy feature of the ideological divide in Washington is how immune the country’s foreign policy practitioners have been from the disfiguring aspects of hyper-partisanship. Take any random left-wing specialist in constitutional law and a counterpart from the Federalist Society, and odds…

At a White House ceremony on November 12, President Obama will award the Medal of Honor to retired Army captain Florent Groberg. When the president fastens the medal’s light-blue ribbon behind Groberg’s neck, Obama will be doing more than honoring a single American hero. He will be reaffirming what…

Nothing can redeem the harrowing massacre that unfolded last week at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But something does enter on the positive side of the ledger: A genuine American hero revealed himself that day.

It’s an especially tense time for the Baltic states and Russia’s other Western-leaning neighbors. Wariness with regard to Vladimir Putin and long-term Russian intentions toward the “near abroad” has long been the norm here, well before the 2007 cyberattack on Estonia and Russian military action…

Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan

There seems little doubt that 2014 will go down as a truly horrible year for American foreign policy. From the Russian seizure of Crimea and further irregular incursions into eastern Ukraine, to the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, to a worsening security problem in Afghanistan ahead of an…

It's hard to look on the bright side of the dismemberment of a sovereign state by force of arms. But because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing threat Vladimir Putin intends to pose to eastern Ukraine, the Obama administration must now face international reality free of one of its…

It's time for a reset for U.S. policy toward Russia. The original Obama reset has now run its course, and President Vladimir Putin has thoroughly dashed all hope of Russia emerging as a partner of the United States and a constructive contributor to a liberal international order. The armed takeover…

Apparently relations between the United States and Europe are actually maturing. How else to account for the singular absence of transatlantic crisis-mongering over the many, many ways in which the Obama administration has annoyed our allies in Europe?

With his Syria policy careening from inaction to the threat of force to a request for congressional approval to a diplomatic bailout from Russia, the long-vexing puzzle of what makes Barack Obama tick has again come to the fore.

For decades during the Cold War, U.S. policy sought to minimize the role of Moscow in the Middle East. As the Soviet Union weakened dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so too did its capacity to influence events there (and many other places besides). So matters have stood since. A…

The complexity of Washington scandals as they unfold usually involves many moments at which it is possible to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Two such instances have come into sharper relief in recent weeks. One is that we still have no good explanation for U.N. ambassador Susan Rice’s…

Perhaps the least surprising headline in the aftermath of the tax deal last week was the one in Politico declaring that congressional Democrats are planning to run against “chaos” in the 2014 midterm elections. It’s unsurprising because Democrats have been working, with considerable success, to…

Much of the loyal opposition’s response to President Obama’s new position in favor of gay marriage centered on the back-and-forth in which he has indulged over the years getting to it. He was for it; he was against it; now he’s for it again (not that he apparently proposes to do anything to advance…

The United States and Iran have been on a collision course since the Iranian revolution in 1979, when elements of the newly proclaimed Islamic Republic took U.S. diplomats and Tehran embassy personnel hostage. U.S. relations with Iran have been bad ever since. The focus in recent years has been the…

Question: Why would GOP candidates vying to establish themselves as the “conservative alternative” to Mitt Romney attack the one-time financier for his robust practice of free-market economics, layoffs included, during his years at Bain Capital? Answer: Well, because he is vulnerable on that point.

In the mid-19th century, the Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle coined the term “Hero-worship,” by which he meant the high regard, entirely proper in his view, that ordinary people have for the great figures of their history. His project in Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in…

Without doubt, the center ring under the big top in Libya is the act of deposing a brutal dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, whose long record of depredation includes the deaths of hundreds of Americans in acts of terrorism great and small. There is a sideshow not to be missed, however. It concerns the…

Whether he wins the nomination or not, Rick Perry’s August charge into the top echelon of GOP presidential hopefuls marks at least this turning point: In national Republican politics, Texas is the new California.

Let’s assume that it was not President Obama’s intention for the final section of his big Mideast speech, in which he took up the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to entirely overwhelm everything he had just said in support of democratization and the “universal rights” of those living…

There’s a truism of budgeting that goes: The player who makes the first move always loses. That’s because the player with the second move has the opportunity to focus on the drawbacks of what the first player proposed. It’s one reason why some Republicans were nervous about House GOP budget…

In his underdog bid to retain the presidency in 1948, Harry Truman ran hard against the “Do-Nothing Congress,” so much so that his put-down of the Republicans who controlled Capitol Hill became a permanent part of the political lexicon, far more resonant today than anything Truman ever said about…

Halifax, Nova Scotia

No, this is not going to be a full-blown exercise in the fiction genre of Alternative History: A minor adviser to the 2008 McCain presidential campaign chronicles the day-to-day ups and downs of the two eventful years following the American people’s reluctant conclusion that they don’t know a…

Oh, sure, there’s enough particulate matter in the New York City air to turn a white shirt gray by the end of the workday. And a couple whiffs of a narrow West Side cross street tightly enclosed by high-rises on a hot summer day when the trash is overdue for pickup could put even the strongest…

Following Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, speculation in Washington has quickly turned from the possibility that Democrats will lose the House in November to the impossibility that they won’t. It will be interesting to see what happens if congressional Democrats actually internalize…

Warsaw

Perhaps President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will spur a sudden global outpouring of love and affection for the United States, but the American Political Science Association (APSA) thinks our image problem runs deeper: Its 20-member blue chip task force (minus two dissenters) has concluded that U.S.…

If Hogwarts were a school for politicians, there would be a required class on "Defense Against the Dark Arts of Demagoguery." President Obama considers his health reform effort a target of this dark art--indeed, he seems to view it as the main reason reform has faltered on Capitol Hill.

Since there is so little of it, let's start with the good news about the release from prison and triumphant return to Libya of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the terrorist who was supposedly serving a life sentence in a Scottish prison for his role in blowing Pan Am 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie in…

The question of whether to open a criminal investigation into the conduct of Bush administration officials with regard to interrogation methods for detainees is burning bright for the Obama administration and the legal community at home and abroad. For some, the question is a simple one: Such…

The singular advantage of being in the opposition is that the majority has to make the first move, and unlike chess, going first conveys no advantage the majority doesn't already enjoy. What was striking last week about the House's consideration of the stimulus package was the glimpse it offered of…

Historians looking back on these tumultuous times will no doubt argue over the precise date on which the Age of Palin began. Her speech at the Republican National Convention on September 3 certainly catapulted her to national renown. But there is a good case to be made for her introductory…

"In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car." Think about it: Could there be a pithier way of making the point that if you don't own something and have no stake in its long-term future, you're not going to take care of it the same way you would if it was yours? It's suitable…

The sequence of events leading to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, per media reports, goes like this: White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten sends out a directive to senior Bush officials telling them that if they are not planning to stay until the end of the administration,…

There's no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you'd have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats. The hard-core partisans of the Democratic left have never had a bigger megaphone than they now have on the Internet, and while they are…

A miniflap recently broke out over a Politico item about a July 9 memo to "Interested Parties" from Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist. Penn's memo was definitely designed to foster an impression of growing Clinton strength. Politico's Ben Smith went a step farther in his…

Prague

Three weeks ago, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Bush administration's firing of several U.S. attorneys and did so to bad reviews even from conservatives, most of official Washington figured he was a goner. When President Bush stepped…

For years now, the political science literature has been exploring the phenomenon of the "democratic peace," according to which, to state it in its bluntest form, democracies do not go to war with one another. It's not that democracies are pacifist by nature. Democratic countries, acting alone or…

PATHETIC REPUBLICANS, who can save you now? With all due respect to Ming the Merciless and all due deference to Sen. John McCain's pending arrival on a Hawk-man rocket cycle in 2008, the answer is that Republicans can, and are going to have to, save themselves. To do that, what's required is frank…

THE LEGAL CASE OF ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI, the so-called "twentieth hijacker" and the only person hauled into U.S. criminal court for playing a direct role in the September 11 attacks, has been a morass from the beginning. Prosecutors have struggled to shove the square peg of international terrorism…

WITH HAMAS'S SMASHING VICTORY IN free and fair elections in Palestine, the case for democracy-promotion that George W. Bush outlined a year ago in his second inaugural address has been taking on water. Do we really want a political process that results in victory and legitimacy for terrorists? As…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

AS LEAKED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS GO, the "Downing Street Memo" is pretty sexy. Not actually a memo but the official notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting in the British prime minister's office, the document reproduces the thoughts and concerns about Iraq of Tony Blair and his key advisers, including his…

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the "neoconservatives" of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on…

IT IS POSSIBLE that at the end of the day, gay marriage will be an enduring reality, at least in some places. This troubles many people, even as others hold it up as an important element in the recognition of equal human dignity. But how much, really, will be changed by gay marriage? With all due…

DAVID KAY'S interim report on the investigation into Saddam Hussein's weapons programs leaves open as many questions as it answers. Exactly what was underway and at what stage of development is still unknown. But it does establish to a certainty the critical point that Saddam had every intention of…

FROM THE CEASELESS and often disgraceful efforts to tease meaning out of the first two weeks of the Iraq war, two serious lessons stand out. The first is a reacquaintance with the contours of modern tyranny. Saddam Hussein is not merely a dictator; he is the head of a police state administered by…

THE FOLLOWING are selected quotations (approximately two-thirds of the total) included by Seymour M. Hersh in his New Yorker article Offense and Defense (cover date April 7, 2003, posted on the New Yorker website March 31, 2003, ten days before the fall of Baghdad):

THE QUESTION of what to do about Iraq--and moving down the track, what to do about North Korea--typically gets described as a choice between deterrence and preemption (or perhaps better, "prevention"). If Saddam Hussein can be contained and deterred from using weapons of mass destruction, as some…

WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T have more than one good reason to do something? Of course, the proposition that disparate federal agencies with homeland security responsibilities should be combined into one massive cabinet department ought first to be judged on the contribution such consolidation will make to…

AT THE END OF THE DAY, the truest picture of the European response to the war on terror may emerge from, for example, the fact that Germany has dispatched elite special forces troops to fight alongside Americans in Gardez, Afghanistan. That a Social Democratic-Green coalition would send German…

THERE ARE no more yellow ribbons. For more than 20 years, in times of travail, the yellow ribbons have come out. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons. And at one time or another since then--can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando…

TO DATE, THE BUSH administration's handling of the war has been superb. Its handling of the law of war has not. From the president's November 13 Military Order--calling for trial by military commission of certain non-citizens accused of terrorist activities--to the current dispute over the legal…

PRESIDENT BUSH has described the struggle against terrorism in which we are engaged as the first war of the twenty-first century. Presumably he means more by that designation than a nod to the calendar. He is also referring to a new kind of war. But what kind? Well, the novelty is that the United…

ON NOVEMBER 16 begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and some Muslims and Islamophiles at home and abroad are suggesting that its arrival ought to mark a pause in the U.S.-led coalition's war on terror: Finish what needs doing in Afghanistan by then, they say, or risk offending Muslims…

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER TIMOTHY MCVEIGH is scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16 in a federal prison in Indiana, the first person to be executed under the federal death penalty law. Another first: Families of McVeigh's victims and survivors of the attack received an invitation from federal…

AN ENDLESSLY FASCINATING topic of conversation about the 2000 presidential election has been why Al Gore wasn't winning big as the nominee of the incumbent party in times of unprecedented peace and prosperity. He had four aces, and he still couldn't rake in the pot. An equally fascinating question,…

From the time he emerged as a serious presidential aspirant in 1991, Bill Clinton consciously set himself to the task of remaking the Democratic party, cracking it loose from the ossifying ideological liberalism of FDR and LBJ in an effort to broaden its political appeal. Clinton was a New Democrat…

IT SEEMED LIKE a pretty big deal at the time, the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton. And so it was, as political spectacle, as a search in the U.S. Constitution for its fundamental meaning, as the climax of a long-running clash between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president.…

Upon taking office January 20, 2001, our forty-third president, Democrat or Republican, may face an unpleasant but important unresolved matter from the tenure of the forty-second: the issue of a pardon for Bill Clinton.

FORMER PRO FOOTBALL wide receiver Steve Largent of Oklahoma is now one of the more prominent social conservatives in the House of Representatives. The Hall of Famer, father of four, and born-again Christian bears watching as a bell-wether of opinion and sentiment in the rightward reaches of the…

REPUBLICANS BOTH INSIDE and outside Congress have been pleasantly surprised by how well they are doing politically in this year's budget fight with President Clinton. Ever since Clinton squashed the Republican Congress over the government shutdown in 1995-96, the autumnal rites of appropriation…

Fast forward to January 20, 2001. The steps of the U.S. Capitol. The president-elect raises his hand to take the oath of office. Forming the backdrop to the scene: a who's who of the best and brightest of the Republican party, now preparing to sit as the most illustrious cabinet in a generation;…

CONSERVATIVE OPINION OVER THE KOSOVO campaign seems about equally divided between those who consider it a debacle turning into a morass and those who consider it a fiasco turning into a quagmire. These views prevail across the spectrum of where-we-go-from-here opinion--that is, among the bug-out…

In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions: "President William Jefferson Clinton has been impeached and acquitted. What have we learned? What should we do now?"

It will begin like this: The presiding officer of the U.S. Senate will ask the man before him in the Senate chamber, William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, to raise his right hand and take this oath: "I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the…

WHAT A MAGICAL SHAPE-CHANGING BEAST this independent-counsel law is! In its marauding two-decade-long journey through the American political landscape, it has revealed aspects of itself we poor peasants could never have imagined. Republicans and now Democrats have felt the fury of the creature, its…

As WASHINGTON GEARS UP for the arrival in the House of Representatives of Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton's impeachable offenses, a particularly virulent strain of wannabe conventional wisdom has been making the rounds. It is that Republicans would prefer (if they put party ahead of…

NO GOOD MORALITY TALE is complete these days without a wallow in the slough of victimhood, and the Monica Lewinsky affair is no exception. Those laying claim to the mantle of victim are many, ranging from President Clinton (in his blast against independent counsel Kenneth Starr when he was supposed…

The turning point for Bosnia came in August 1995 with a NATO bombing campaign. The air strikes succeeded in doing what no diplomatic effort had: persuading Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to join in ending the four-year-old war over the pieces of the former Yugoslavia. Before the bombing, the…

INDEPENDENT COUNSEL KENNETH STARR believes that, constitutionally, his office cannot indict the president of the United States. What, then, of the evidence the prosecutor is assembling suggesting that Bill Clinton may have lied under oath, urged others to do the same, rewarded them for doing so,…

REPUBLICANS EAGERLY DECLARED that they weren't surprised by Attorney General Janet Reno's decision last week not to seek an independent counsel in the Democratic fund-raising scandal. It's hard to find anyone in the GOP who doesn't think the fix is in -- that the Justice Department and Reno are…

GEE, IN ALL THE EXCITEMENT of demanding that Attorney General Janet Reno seek the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Al Gore's fund-raising activities -- including saber-rattling about possible impeachment proceedings against Reno if she didn't -- Republicans clean forgot to…

SHORTLY AFTER THE 1996 ELECTION, a triumphant President Clinton met behind closed doors with congressional Democrats, who were, if not surprised, at least disappointed by their failure to retake the House of Representatives. According to news reports, the president told his fellow Democrats that…

THE WASHINGTON LAWYER is the quintessential Washington type. He has the huge house in Wesley Heights or Potomac; the million-dollar partnership bonuses; the Rolodex with everyone's private number; the squad of young associates who do the grunt work and call him Godfather; the easy intercourse with…

The Washington lawyer is the quintessential Washington type. He has the huge house in Wesley Heights or Potomac; the million-dollar partnership bonuses; the Rolodex with everyone's private number; the squad of young associates who do the grunt work and call him Godfather; the easy intercourse with…

For three years now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been running an undercover operation called "Innocent Images" that targets people who use computers to traffic in child pornography -- and the results have been oddly reassuring. Innocent Images has nabbed over 70 people so far, from time…

FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS NOW, the investigation of Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr has occupied a huge place in the Washington imagination. The investigation itself has been largely impenetrable, conducted in secrecy before grand juries in Little Rock and Washington by prosecutors who…

LAST YEAR, D.C. CONGRESSIONAL delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton liked to tell the story of her meetings with residents of the nation's capital, lately a site of high and rising crime rates, failing schools, collapsing infrastructure, and impending municipal bankruptcy. The burning question on…

Republicans are in a pretty good mood these days in spite of Bob Dole's loss. Their party successfully preserved its majority in Congress despite an expensive and wildly deceptive Democratic onslaught against Newt Gingrich, Republican freshmen, and GOP efforts on Medicare, Medicaid, education, and…

Robert H. Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah (Regan Books/HarperCollins, 382 pages, $ 25) has an air of authority that borders on the magisterial. The legal scholar, former appealscourt judge, and defeated nominee for the United States Supreme Court has written a work of intellectual history and…

HERE WE HAVE A FELLOW who has made $ 6 million since January off his first novel -- a novel that won nearly unanimous critical acclaim and sold more than one million copies, with another 1.5 million coming out in paperback. His book turned into a pop culture obsession on the order of "Who shot J.…

A FLURRY OF PUBLICITY about the supposed revelations in Roger Morris's Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America has obscured what the book really is. To be sure, Morris gives us some anonymous ex-spooks who claim young Bill Clinton was passing information to the CIA during his notorious…

A FLURRY OF PUBLICITY about the supposed revelations in Roger Morris's Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America has obscured what the book really is. To be sure, Morris gives us some anonymous ex-spooks who claim young Bill Clinton was passing information to the CIA during his notorious…

THE METHODICAL WORK OF A Little Rock jury has put an end once and for all to the proposition, advanced tirelessly by the defenders of Bill Clinton, that nothing really wrong was going on at the intersection of politics and money down in Arkansas during the 1980s.

THE METHODICAL WORK OF A Little Rock jury has put an end once and for all to the proposition, advanced tirelessly by the defenders of Bill Clinton, that nothing really wrong was going on at the intersection of politics and money down in Arkansas during the 1980s.

Even the venue Sen. Alfonse D'Amato picked for the opening salvo of an internecine war against the conservatives of his own party was perfect -- Don Imus's shock-jock, politician-larded radio show. D'Amato went off on a tear against the conservative wing of his party, one that he would still be…

THE REACTION TO NEWS that Bill Clinton's lawyers had just received a check for $ 891,000 from an insurance company to pay the president's defense bills in the sexual harassment suit brought against him by Paula Corbin Jones was entirely typical. It was party time on talk radioshosts and callers…

What was once an almost indecipherable set of wrid financial shenanigans involving the tiny elite of a small Southern state is now afull- blown White House story involving, most recent- ly, long-issing billing records suddenly found in a drawer in the First Lady's offices. Those bills completed…

THE TAX CUTS MAY BE IN PERIL, the line-item veto languishing, welfare reform at a stalemate, and the unzeroed-out National Endowment for the Arts busily preparing for its next foray into the bowels of our culture. But say this for the 104th Congress: You can drive faster.

Maybe we should call it Newt's Revenge: Colin Powell announcing the day after the 1995 elections in no uncertain terms that he is Republican and that his future lies with the Republican party. From his new party's point of view, Powell's timing was perfect. It dissipated most of the talk of the…

WITH LITTLE FANFARE, THE WHITE HOUSE, in he person of Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, took another step in the direction of the GOP budget last week. He allowed as how a budget package offered by conservative House Democrats -- the 20-odd group that has dubbed itself the Blue Dog Coalition -- might…

FOR MONTHS, REPUBLICANS on Capitol Hill complained that "their" Congressional Budget Office wasn't behaving. The CBO had long been a COP bete noire, subject to constant accusations from the right that its supposedly independent studies were cooked for the benefit of the Democrats in charge of the…