In most of the European Union, when the authorities hold a plebiscite and don’t get the result they want, they hold another, and another, until the voters see it their way. The English tradition holds democracy in greater esteem than that. Or at least it used to, before the Brexit mess.
Anti-Israel boycotts used to be a thing for left-wing loonies. No more.
High-ranking public officials have resigned for less than what these documents allege.
Elections aren’t immune from the human tendency to bend the rules and cheat.
Rand Paul is a grandstanding obstructionist whose chief joy seems to be blocking the few bills on which there is wide agreement.
A quiet leader, and a good one.
On November 25, Russian military forces opened fire on three Ukrainian ships off the coast of Crimea, rammed one of them, and seized all three. The ships were manned by 23 crew members. Ukrainian authorities say between three and six were injured.
On November 28, Democrats officially nominated Nancy Pelosi to be the next Speaker of the House. No one ran against her; she received 203 yeas against 32 nays. Democrats who vowed during the campaign to vote against the former speaker were always a small group. Their opposition—largely rhetorical,…
The E.U.’s faith in Iran is foolish, dangerous—and a mystery.
Vladimir Putin’s deliberate provocation is important. What’s more important is the U.S. response.
The U.S. has a way to further impair the Maduro regime.
He that hath knowledge spareth his words,” says the biblical proverb. All of us can profit from these words, but perhaps Donald Trump needs to hear them more than most. His helter-skelter, self-exculpatory statement on his administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia was Trump at his logorrheic…
For Vladimir Putin, Interpol is just another tool.
A new report details the U.S. military is ill equipped to meet the threats of the next decade.
The last two years have seen a great deal of handwringing about the future of democracy. Scores of commentators, left and right, have claimed America’s democratic institutions are under siege. Some, mostly on the left, advocate a variety of changes to the Constitution in order to make our electoral…
A hudna is not a resolution.
From "fire and fury" to summits and appeasement.
A federal judge finds a way.
The Obama administration’s decision in 2014 to trade five imprisoned Taliban fighters for Bowe Bergdahl, the deserter captured by Afghan insurgents, continues to spawn ill consequences.
The midterm elections were a draw, with both sides able to make claims of victory. The Republicans bolstered their majority in the Senate, thanks largely to the Democrats’ shameful treatment of Brett Kavanaugh. The Democrats took the House, cutting off any chance that the GOP will pass major…
The real reason Jeff Sessions was fired.
The Obama Doctrine is over—at least in Latin America.
The U.S. captured them after 9/11. Now they’re negotiating the U.S. exit.
Liberals would prefer that he go away quietly. He won’t.
In the days since Robert Bowers murdered 11 congregants inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Americans have contemplated and debated the most urgent questions in our common life. There has been mercifully little discussion of gun laws. Observers on both sides have grasped that these…
The NRCC takes a stand.
Government by fiat—again.
No state that actively supports terrorism and foreign insurgencies ought to have access to the global financial system.
Lock them both up?
More and more Democrats are embracing socialized health insurance, but calling it that won’t necessarily help.
Demagoguery doesn’t always work.
The royals admit to murdering Jamal Khashoggi—but without admitting it.
A peculiar argument has begun to circulate on the right: Conservatives who care about the future of conservatism should not only refuse to vote for Republicans who share Donald Trump’s worst traits on November 6, they should support Democrats across the board. Doing so, this reasoning goes, would…
How should the U.S. respond to the crimes of a reforming ally?
On Monday, the Treasury Department announced that for the 2018 fiscal year, the federal government ran a $799 billion deficit. That’s $113 billion more than the year before, which is a 17 percent increase in the difference between the Treasury’s revenues and government spending. The 2017 tax cuts…
Nebraska’s junior senator finds hope all around—but not on TV, not on a screen, and not in Washington.
The lawsuit against Harvard may spell the end of race-based college admissions. Applauding that end is right—but insufficient.
When Democrats go low, Hillary Clinton goes with them
Swift fills in the blank space.
The California senator has plunged the nation into a bitter fight from which it will not soon emerge.
Putin’s malevolence revealed, again.
An ugly, dishonest and ever-changing attack on Brett Kavanaugh and the nomination process.
Administration officials seem to have talked the president out of leaving Syria. They’re right.
President Trump gets a laugh out of his relationship with the world's worst mass murderer.
“The burden is on the nominee”?
On September 20, 2001, speaking to a joint session of Congress, President George W. Bush famously articulated the key component of what would later be called the Bush Doctrine: “From this day forward,” the president said, “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by…
Christine Blasey Ford delivered sincere testimony and deserves respect and empathy. But the burden of proof was not met.
The return of the Bush Doctrine?
We haven’t “wiped out” ISIS. Or Al Qaeda. Not even close.
It’s hard for Republicans to talk about the economy when Trump’s talking about everything else. They should try anyway.
If only her Democratic colleagues would speak as plainly.
Rarely have we witnessed so many people pretend a controversy was about one thing when it was so obviously about another. Since September 16, when the name of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser became known—Christine Blasey Ford, a California psychologist, alleges that he sexually…
The ‘pay for slay’ program continues.
Bloomberg’s running again. And why not?
New hearings, little reason for hope.
To no one’s surprise, Russia is the main suspect in the mysterious attacks on U.S. diplomatic personnel in Cuba. Since 2016, 26 people at our embassy in Havana have experienced sudden and severe cognitive difficulties, and intelligence officials believe it’s due to attacks engineered by agents of…
Senate Democrats disgrace themselves again.
It’s a party of scoundrels and ideologues.
Aggression in the pursuit of policy victories is no vice.
The PLO was a malign presence in official Washington. Good riddance.
If Europe’s establishment parties won’t deal with immigration, voters will find a party that will.
I’ve decided not to seek reelection.” These words are spoken far too seldom in American politics, but few have spoken them with better reason than Rahm Emanuel. In his nearly eight years as Chicago’s mayor, he has failed by almost any metric.
Time for Republicans to pull up their big-boy pants.
“Cancel Brett Kavanaugh,” they reasoned.
She’s running for president and wants to get the Native American thing behind her. Good luck.
Beijing's crimes should elicit world condemnation.
If all this blustering is a preface of a policy reversal, it can’t come sooner.
Trump’s fabrications notwithstanding, voter fraud is a thing.
Hardly an overhaul, but it could have been much worse.
The Obama policy of engagement failed. Bring back the stick.
Donald Trump just couldn’t help it.
If the goal is to postpone the Supreme Court nominee's hearings, any argument will do.
The primary election victory for Wyoming’s Mark Gordon on August 21 was widely interpreted as a defeat for Donald Trump. And it was—just not in the sense the pundits thought.
Almost two years ago, the American Presbyterian minister Andrew Brunson was taken hostage by the Turkish government. The charges against him—“political or military espionage” and “support for a terrorist group”—are absurd. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants the Islamic cleric Fethullah…
There’s a reason U.S. presidents don’t normally have fixers.
California lawmakers want you to know how much they care.
The leading Democrat has somehow escaped real scrutiny.
If Wuerl keeps his job, then the Catholic Church's "zero tolerance" policy is a sham.
Obama officials wanted to shut down for-profit colleges altogether. They almost did.
Mistakes were made, wreaths were laid.
Senate Dems request thousands of trivial Kavanaugh documents. Nice try.
Why not deregulate everybody?
"This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics—and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!” So tweeted President Donald Trump on August 5. He was referring to members of his immediate family and his campaign team having met with Russian…
Colombia is a functioning republic with a bright future. Venezuela, its neighbor, is a nightmare. What accounts for the difference?
The search for a decent writer exposes the editorial board’s unprincipled prejudice.
The recent news that government revenues are down, combined with the Treasury Department’s announcement that federal borrowing is up, has evoked howls of we-told-you-so from our friends on the left.
The continuation of tax cuts by other means.
Democrats predict Armageddon. Because, guns.
“Good for the country, good for them, good for us.”
The White House disinvites Kaitlan Collins.
The Pyrrhic logic of trade wars.
The president’s blustery tweet was part of a defensible policy on Iran.
A multi-million-dollar agency gets free work from poor writers.
Did the president’s “team” actually discuss handing over U.S. citizens to Kremlin interrogators?
Donald Trump has long been loath to concede that operatives of the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election, feeling as he does that the media like to talk about it mainly to suggest that he only defeated Hillary Clinton thanks to the aid of foreign troublemakers. It’s…
Must everything be about the Washington and the presidency?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she’s “willing to learn and evolve.” That would be good.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to nominate federal judges “in the mold of” Antonin Scalia, and he has lived up to his word. Neil Gorsuch was a superior pick to replace the late Justice Scalia in 2017. And the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme…
Much to lose, little to gain.
One of China’s bravest departs again to the darkness.
President Donald Trump visited Brussels on July 10 as part of his three-nation European trip. There he offended our NATO allies and outraged both the American and European news media by excoriating the many alliance members who spend below the 2 percent of GDP they agreed to spend on defense in…
Do Democrats know what a judge does?
Let the hearings begin.
North Korea was never going to “denuclearize.”
It’s hard to think of a more American company than Harley-Davidson, the Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker. Anybody who has ever seen a Harley—or, more likely, heard one—knows it has a sturdy and uniquely American style. The company’s motto: “All for freedom. Freedom for all.” So you might expect an…
Yes, elections have consequences.
Is anyone paying attention to Iraq?
Schumer to Waters: Cut it out.
Why must museums patronize their visitors?
Images of screaming children torn away from parents, photos of toddlers and even babies sitting alone in characterless detention centers, repellent bloviators defending the new policy as if splitting up families were itself the goal . . . the controversy over the Trump administration’s new “zero…
On June 14, Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice’s inspector general, released a long-awaited report on the partisan shenanigans of a few FBI agents in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The report sharply criticizes then-director James Comey for his bad judgment and disregard for agency…
The Human Rights Council was a hangout for anti-Semitic cranks.
Call it what you like—it’s still racial discrimination.
Maybe we’ll actually enjoy the tournament this year—for once
The June 12 meeting in Singapore between Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong‑un has generated a bewildering array of responses from observers around the world. These responses do not fall along predictable ideological lines. Back and forth across the ideological span, we find…
“He found the way and I jumped on it.”
The campaign bus, sans the candidate.
What do you do with a problem like Aquarius?
When are we going to start doing very, very well?
Senate Democrats have turned the confirmation process into an exercise in sabotage.
We all will—in about eight years.
The absurd logic of hyper-individualism is upon us.
On the network’s employment of Joy-Ann Reid, Ben Rhodes, and other champions of truth.
The tension between peaceable nations and the Russian Federation intensifies with each passing week. It is the path Vladimir Putin has chosen. The latest development is more serious than it may sound: Russian billionaire and Putin crony Roman Abramovich has had his visa renewal application…
Greitens, Trump—and us.
The world body’s leader on disarmament? Syria, of course.
Into the light—or back to the shadows?
There is a great deal we don’t know about the case of Stefan Halper, the Anglo-American academic who insinuated himself into the Trump campaign in order to help the FBI learn about any connections to Russian election meddling. The president and his allies claim the FBI planted Halper as a spy with…
The partial repeal of Dodd Frank could have gone farther, but it's a good start.
The arrest of 10 women’s rights advocates is as disturbing as it is mysterious.
Pompeo is right: You can’t separate a rogue regime from its roguery.
It wasn’t a real election. But for the Chavistas, there was definitely a point.
The eminent scholar who helped the West understand itself and its adversaries
Is Donald Trump a masterful negotiator or an unqualified bumbler? The truth likely lies somewhere in between, but we want to avoid closed-mindedness here and accept the possibility that a mercurial president can secure a beneficial agreement by means of wrong-footing the other side’s negotiators.…
One year ago—on May 17, 2017—deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein signed Order 3915-2017. To “ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” he appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to be special counsel for the…
Democrats won’t find pickups as easy as they hoped.
They’re not protests. They’re suicide-riots.
We like what he’s done. But the time has come.
Early on the morning of May 10, Donald Trump tweeted a dramatic 32-second video celebrating the return home of three U.S. citizens held until last week in North Korea. It was a made-for-TV moment, and the slick video ensured that millions of Americans who didn’t stay up until 3 a.m. to watch it…
With the delusion of U.S.-Iran harmony now over, what’s possible?
Why can’t Democratic grandees admit that somebody else is in charge?
Progressives are free to remit their savings to the U.S. Treasury.
If Democrats love the United States and loathe Donald Trump as much as they claim—and we have no reason to doubt their sincerity in these regards—they ought to express delight and gratitude when the president appoints someone with none of his own odious qualities to a high-level position. Instead,…
In Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado, teachers have refused to teach until lawmakers agree to raise their pay. Some have stormed statehouses; others have closed their schools and walked out. The mainstream press affords them lavish and highly sympathetic coverage, and…
So much of any week’s White House news falls under the category of palace intrigue that it’s easy to overlook the crucial revelations. This week’s report by NBC News that White House chief of staff John Kelly regularly calls Donald Trump an “idiot” and has cast himself as the country’s “savior”…
Whatever he may say, Kim Jong-un wants the Americans gone.
In Arizona and elsewhere, teachers aren’t getting rich—but are they as poor as the media claim?
Heads, Iran wins. Tails, the U.S. Loses.
Not a great weekend for the American news media.
"The military mission to eradicate ISIS in Syria is coming to a rapid end, with ISIS being almost completely destroyed,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced on April 4. “The United States and our partners remain committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria that…
A bracing reminder of an easily forgotten commonplace.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by our medical and scientific professionals.
Enough with the Randstanding already.
Albright denounces fascism but not its precondition.
Tight messaging and internal discipline don’t make a presidency—the Obama administration was extremely disciplined in its public pronouncements and a disaster in almost every other respect. But the present administration suffers from an almost total lack of coherence in its statements to the…
For 16 months, Democrats have complained that Republicans have put their political party over the best interests of the country by rationalizing and normalizing the unbecoming behavior of Donald Trump. We’ve often agreed with those assessments. Republicans, sadly, have made a habit of putting…
Diplomacy matters.
Diplomacy matters.
Evidence of delusion?
It’s mean and unreasonable, but maybe the base likes it
It's time for the FBI to release them.
In pardoning Scooter Libby, President Trump does the right thing.
Speakers of the House of Representatives don’t ordinarily retire before they’re turned into minority leaders. But on April 11, Paul Ryan announced he would leave his seat at the end of this term. His decision, which had been rumored for months, wasn’t entirely surprising. His children are still…
In foreign affairs, there’s a lot to be said for unpredictability. Puzzlement can induce one’s enemies to hold back or make stupid decisions. Henry Kissinger famously portrayed Nixon as acting “somewhat crazy” to keep the Soviets guessing—even to the point of dramatically elevating the readiness…
The U.S. must bring hellish consequences on the dictator of Damascus.
There were many decades when the visit of a crown prince of Saudi Arabia to the United States didn't cause much stir in world affairs. But these are different days for the Middle East and for the globe. The three-week visit of Mohammed bin Salman, in which he met with the president and an array of…
Republicans are just over six months away from the 2018 midterm elections, and there's plenty to worry about. Midterms almost always favor the party out of power, and Democratic voters are far more enthused about the coming elections than their Republican correlatives. And although one should never…
Republicans are just over six months away from the 2018 midterm elections, and there's plenty to worry about. Midterms almost always favor the party out of power, and Democratic voters are far more enthused about the election than their Republican correlatives. And although one should never…
Republicans have been awfully quiet over the last few days, and they probably should have been. The question is why they were so quiet.
To say antisemitism is on the rise in Europe is commonplace. A dismayingly high percentage of Europeans (often in the 40s, according to surveys) believe Jews are too powerful in their countries' governments, too influential in their media, and probably more loyal to Israel than to the countries in…
The international effort to punish Vladimir Putin for the March 4 attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal and his daughter is an enormously encouraging sign that free nations are at last turning against the Kremlin and its dictator. Britain has expelled 23 Russian diplomats from their posts in the…
On Thursday, March 29, Ben Carson found himself in the news again. This time the problem wasn't his purchase of an expensive dining hutch (for which the housing secretary received condign criticism, including from this magazine) or his aim of shortening his agency's garbled mission statement (for…
On Tuesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un paid a surprise visit to Beijing. It was his first time out of his country since well before he became Dear Respected Leader in 2011. Kim arrived in an armored train, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping, and the two appeared in a series of photo-ops…
Berkeley, California, has long occupied a soft spot in the liberal heart. In popular mythology, it's the 1960s birthplace of the free speech movement, in which idealistic young hippies helped push for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.
It’s not often that the head of a federal agency asks Congress for less money than the agency received the year before. So infrequent is it that one might reasonably assume the circumstance would generate some hint of intellectual curiosity on the part of reporters and politicos. If an agency head…
This weekend, hundreds of thousands of young people participated in the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., the culmination of efforts by student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who had survived the recent shooting that claimed 17 lives.
We would have more respect for Vladimir Putin if he simply dispensed with his country’s elections and declared himself president-for-life. This would spare us the idiotic burden of discussing the Russian state’s sexennial public-relations stunts. Everybody inside and outside the country knows the…
American liberals love the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” clause. They remember their brave forerunners—muckraking journalists, civil rights activists, religious and political dissidents—and venerate the constitutional right that enabled their eventual vindication. Yet it’s striking how…
Imagine: A high-level political consultant admits he mined Facebook data to target likely voters in swing states. He says he helped “build this thing called targeted sharing” that “allowed us to use Facebook to persuade people.” Cambridge Analytica? No, that was Democratic strategist Jim Messina,…
Liberals love the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” clause. They rightly remember their forerunners—liberal journalists, civil rights activists, religious and political dissidents—and venerate the constitutional right that eventually vindicated these brave citizens. Yet it’s striking how often…
Public officials tend to spend too much money on themselves and their offices. It’s an unfortunate part of the human condition—by definition public officials spend resources that don’t belong to them, and so they will often spend more than they have to. Media allegations of excessive spending by…
Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, was fired on Friday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions had received a report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General following a probe into McCabe’s conduct while he served in the FBI. McCabe, who took over as…
On March 13, President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—via Twitter—and replaced him with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo. The choice of Pompeo to lead the State Department is an excellent one. At Langley, he earned the respect of a bureaucracy deeply…
It is highly likely that on March 4 Russia used a military-grade nerve agent in an attempt to kill one of its former spies in the United Kingdom. On March 14, British prime minister Theresa May retaliated by banishing 23 Russian diplomats “who have been identified as undeclared intelligence…
British Prime Minister Theresa May took action against the Kremlin on Wednesday when she banished 23 Russian diplomats “who have been identified as foreign intelligence officers” from her nation’s shores. The expulsion was in direct response to the alleged—but “highly likely”—Russian use of an…
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering a plan to integrate drones across U.S. national airspace. Several large corporations have proposed a low-altitude control grid, which they would operate, to manage these unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), popularly referred to as drones. For…
We’re aware that some elected officials—perhaps more than a few—regard the average voter with contempt. Such politicians may succeed for a time, but contempt is hard to hide, and they soon find themselves giving talks at ritzy confabs about their regrettably brief time in public life.
President Donald Trump’s decision last week to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum—25 percent and 10 percent, respectively—rivals in sheer unpopularity the president’s early-2017 travel ban. Many of this nation’s chief trading partners lobbied against the tariffs—Canada, South Korea, Japan,…
Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. And believe me, right now dealing with Congress—believe me—believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. . . . But that’s not how—that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy…
"The powerful Jews are my enemy," remarked Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at his organization’s annual “Saviours’ Day” celebration in Chicago on February 25. That was just one of several of his choice anti-Semitic tropes. Another one, oddly stated in the third person: “The FBI has been the…
President Trump’s recent decision to slap huge new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum is certain to wreak havoc on the American economy. So we argued last week when the decision was announced: Tariffs often make plenty of political sense but penalize domestic industries no less than foreign…
On March 1, President Donald Trump was widely expected to announce a new round of trade restrictions on steel and aluminum. But that morning word leaked out that the announcement had been postponed—maybe permanently canceled. Then we heard the president had called industry leaders to the White…
There’s something wrong with politics when it becomes personal—especially when we’re wrong about the person.
“Pyongyang is a crucial node in the international network of proliferation that already includes China and Russia as primary providers, Pakistan and North Korea as active disseminators, and Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia among the final consumers. No less unsettling is the prospect that North Korea…
In 2007, Warren Buffett took a $1 million bet on an investment. He won. In his annual letter to Berkshire-Hathaway investors, made public on Saturday, he detailed the wager’s final tallies.
On Saturday, the United Nations Security Council adopted a “30-day ceasefire” for Syria to be implemented “without delay.” As we might have expected, that’s when the shelling started.
On February 14, a deeply troubled young man named Nikolas Cruz walked into the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz, 19, took an AR-15 rifle out of a black duffel bag and began firing at students in the hallways and in classrooms. In all, he murdered 17 people and injured…
On Tuesday, Walmart’s value, as reflected in its stock price, dropped by more than 10 percent. That’s nearly $31 billion. It had a bad quarter and in no small part suffered as a result of complications with its online inventory restocking system—it ran out of some items in demand and so couldn’t…
Yesterday the U.N. Security Council convened on “the Palestinian question.” This is a regular, and regularly absurd, occurrence. The absurdity reached a new level, however, with a theatrical display of pique by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
"Drain the swamp." The phrase went from catchy rallying cry to grating cliché in the space of a year. But phrases often become clichés because they signify some important truth. The swamp does, in fact, need draining: Our federal bureaucracy has become so expansive, power-hungry, and unaccountable…
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