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…
Although this magazine has frequently lamented President Trump's tendency to praise Vladimir Putin and his regime in public, we've also applauded the administration for its punitive actions against the Kremlin's dictator. And we've urged the administration to go further by, for instance, listing…
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…
“The powerful Jews are my enemy,” remarked Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at his organization’s annual “Saviours’ Day” celebration in Chicago in late February. That was just one of several choice anti-semitic tropes. Another one, oddly stated in the third person: “The FBI has been the worst…
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…
After President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its embassy accordingly, western politicos and commentators heaped contempt on the move and predicted violence and bloodshed in Israel and in the Arab street. Hamas, the Islamic terror…
When it comes to prizes and awards, it is entirely possible that our European friends are making gentle fun of us Americans. How else to explain, for example, the Nobel Prize in Literature for Bob Dylan? Or the Charlemagne Prize awarded to Bill Clinton a few years ago?
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 Thursday, President Donald Trump tossed out a characteristically jarring idea: Arm teachers. His original statements were less than clear, so at a White House public forum he clarified: “I don’t want teachers to have guns, I want certain highly adept people that understand weaponry, guns—if they…
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.
“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” That, of course, was President Barack Obama's rather lame joke, delivered during the third presidential debate of 2012. He was ridiculing Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia is America’s…
"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…
Electing a billionaire agitator to the presidency may have its advantages. Such a man can break conventions that should long ago have been broken and advance policies that more established politicians might believe in but fear to execute.
When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Turkish officials tomorrow, he’ll have plenty of unpleasant topics to discuss. At the top of Turkey’s list of grievances is American support for the YPG, or the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish-Syrian militia that has wreaked devastation on ISIS…
The Trump administration recently announced that it will “reassess” American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). That’s the agency charged with overseeing Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and, of equal importance, their descendants. The United States will…
“We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation,” President Trump said in his inaugural address. On Monday, the administration attempted to make good on that promise by announcing what many in the media mistakenly called a…
The Man Booker Prize is Great Britain's most prestigious literary award. It is conferred annually on a novel, written and published in English, and guarantees a considerable boost in sales plus global fame (and about $70,000 in cash) for the novelist. In the United Kingdom, and in various parts of…
The 2018 Winter Olympic Games have opened in the mountains of northeastern South Korea. The next two weeks will showcase some of the finest athletes in the world: men and women who’ve trained relentlessly and, whether they win a medal or not, deserve our esteem and best wishes. The United States…
With Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress, you might expect to see some budgetary restraint. Or at least some gesture to fiscal conservatism. You would be wrong. Consider the bloated budget deal the Senate arrived at on February 7.
Every year since 2010, the venerable baby food company Gerber has chosen a “Gerber baby.” This year’s winner is 18-month-old Lucas Warren of Georgia—the first Gerber baby with Down Syndrome. Lucas’s mother, Cortney, entered her son into the company’s annual contest, which drew around 140,000…
Donald Trump used his State of the Union address last week to celebrate U.S. and coalition gains against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The president reminded his audience that a year earlier he had “pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later,…
If you hold stock—and most Americans do—the financial news of the last few days has been pretty jarring.
The only thing we can say with absolute certainty regarding the controversy over the Devin Nunes memo is this: It’s unwise to accept any claims made with absolute certitude about its contents and their meaning.
President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was a success. The theater was unbeatable. The president’s special guests were particularly moving at this year’s address: a double amputee who somehow escaped from North Korea by sheer strength of will; a police officer who adopted a drug…
A recent study of abuses in for-profit postsecondary education highlights a reputational disparity within American higher education. For-profit programs and colleges are distrusted and maligned. Their proven value to populations for whom traditional college is out of reach and the various…
A recent study of abuses in for-profit post-secondary education highlights a reputational disparity within American higher education. For-profit programs and colleges are distrusted and maligned. Their proven value to populations for whom traditional college is out of reach and various good-faith…
The State of the Union address is perfect for President Donald Trump. His showmanship and sense of dramatic timing; the endless applause and moving stories, lovingly told; the pleasure he takes in enunciating truths no one could disagree with—it’s almost as if the whole cockamamie tradition were…
The state of our union is divided and anxious.
The trial and conviction of Larry Nassar, team doctor for USA Gymnastics and osteopathic physician at Michigan State University, has exposed something rotten at the heart of an American Olympic sport.
The once-great nation of Venezuela hardly looks like a state anymore, far less a great one. This week government forces finally caught up with Oscar Pérez—the former action-movie star and police officer who led a ragtag band of pro-democracy protesters. He and six of his confederates were killed in…
On January 22, President Trump announced the imposition of a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels and a 20 percent tariff on imported washing machines. The Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to impose duties when an imported product becomes “substantial cause of serious injury” to the…
On Tuesday, January 22, President Donald Trump announced the imposition of a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels and a 20 percent tariffs on washing machines. Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to issue duties when an imported product becomes “substantial cause of…
On January 17, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told us what she’s really up to. She was the keynote speaker at the American Enterprise Institute conference “Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned.” There she gave a tough-but-fair appraisal of the costly failed federal attempts at education…
Now that we have one full year of the Trump presidency in the history books, isn’t it time for Trump’s conservative critics to acknowledge his election was worth it?
Diplomatic “talks” are often little more than that—gabfests—but Tuesday’s meeting in Vancouver signals a hard-headed determination to deal with the problem of North Korea. The talks, hosted by the U.S. and Canada, brought together 20 nations, primarily those that aided South Korea in the Korean War…
He was twice on the cover of National Review. He was the subject of admiring profiles in the Washington Post, Time, and, yes, THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Throughout his first term as governor of New Jersey, he was described time and again as a “rising star” of the GOP and a certain presidential contender.…
The Bundy family are anti-government extremists. The ranchers have been behind two armed standoffs with the federal government—a showdown in Nevada over cattle grazing rights in 2014 and the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge building just outside of Burns, Oregon, to protest…
On New Year’s Day, Donald Trump fulminated on Twitter that the United States had “foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt…
It should have been a simple vote to reauthorize an important law, but ideologues allied with exhibitionists to turn it into a circus. Throw in a badly informed Trump tweet, and we had a carnival of folly—which is to say, an ordinary day on Capitol Hill.
On Sunday night at the Golden Globe awards in Beverly Hills, Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award and delivered what many considered an inspiring speech. Since then, the center-left media have been abuzz with talk of a Winfrey presidential run in 2020. Gayle King,…
In October, we recounted Tennessee senator Bob Corker’s speedy journey from being a cautious ally of Donald Trump to being one of the president’s sharpest critics. By the end of that journey—or that leg of the journey—the Tennessean was calling the White House an “adult day care center” and…
We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump poses a severe challenge to conservatism. What we’re only just beginning to appreciate is that Hillary Clinton poses a challenge, too. The challenge may be stated in the form of a question: Does the right favor the prosecution of Clinton, or not?
The American left has always been more comfortable with domestic policy than foreign. Progressives are happy to talk about injustice at home. But what about injustice abroad? Are there circumstances in which the United States can use its power and influence to advance justice or to check repression…
The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Orrin Hatch of Utah, has announced that he will not seek reelection. Mitt Romney, as The Weekly Standard was first to confirm, intends to run for the seat. This news item provoked a characteristically fevered round of speculation and theorizing from the…
The country’s economic outlook is, in general, very good. The stock market broke records in 2017. The nation’s unemployment rate stands at 4 percent and appears to be falling, with so-called discouraged workers (those who had given up looking for employment) now reentering the workforce. If the…
At this point, the evidence is irrefutable: The Obama administration got Iran wrong. So did the international foreign-policy establishment. So did the New York Times and nearly every major center-left media outlet in the United States and Europe.
The Obama administration will be remembered for a number of disgraces in foreign affairs, prominent among them its terrible deal with Iran and its dithering over the war in Syria. Deserving of a place on that list is America’s acquiescence in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, to which the Trump…
We didn’t think congressional Republicans could pass a major tax bill without creating something worse than the status quo. The party’s ideological confusion and fractiousness, its thin majority in the Senate, the president’s penchant for distracting tweets: We assumed the worst. And yet the tax…
For progressives and members of the resistance determined to find evidence of fascism, the story was too good to disbelieve. A report in the Washington Post last weekend claimed that “the Trump administration has informed multiple divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS]…
As Republicans prepare to celebrate their tax reform victory, a potential disaster lurks right around the corner.
“Another entry from the authoritarian handbook,” says David Axelrod. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes thinks it’s a “hunt” for “ideological subversives.” The public is financing “lies” to “eviscerate environmental protections,” according to Robert Reich.
Despite the best efforts of the president and the Republican National Committee, voters in Alabama didn’t elect a man credibly accused of sexual predation to the U.S. Senate.
Very few congressional Republicans wanted Roy Moore to win. They knew, for one thing, that Democrats were prepared to link them to him for at least the next three years. Rather than make it clear that Moore had no place in the GOP, however, many referred blithely to “the will of the people” and the…
Very few Congressional Republicans wanted Roy Moore to win. They knew, for one thing, that Democrats were prepared to link them to him for at least the next two years. Rather than make it clear that Moore had no place in the GOP, however, many referred blithely to “the will of the people” and the…
Last week, President Donald Trump openly acknowledged what everybody knows: that Jerusalem in the capital of Israel. He promised that the United States would build an embassy there and thus defied America’s foreign policy establishment, the European Union, the British foreign secretary, the French…
In May, when deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” we welcomed the news. So did the president. “As I…
On December 5, the Republican National Committee formalized its support for Roy Moore by sending $170,000 to aid his campaign in the race’s final week. The decision came days after President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of Moore. The money is a pittance in the world of modern campaign…
Any Republican tax bill is bound to be hotly criticized. That’s politics and the mainstream media. We were unprepared, however, for the outpouring of hysterical denunciation we’ve witnessed over the last several days as the GOP tax plan comes closer to final passage.
"If we’re going to make the investments we need,” remarked President-elect Barack Obama in 2008, “we must also be willing to shed the spending we don’t. . . . We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because…
This should have been a terrific week for Donald Trump. The Senate, even with its slim and quarrelsome majority, appears ready to pass the major tax overhaul the president has been pushing for. An attempt by a rogue federal agency to forestall the president’s appointment of a new director was…
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un seems increasingly addicted to scaring the world by firing ballistic missiles. After a lull of over two months, the regime fired another on Wednesday, the 16th this year. The launches have become more frequent and more aggressive. In August and September, the regime…
Greg Schiano will not get the head-coaching job at Tennessee. Indeed, he may never again get a top-level head-coaching job.
If you asked any ordinarily informed citizen if the State Department considered North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism, the answer would likely be “Of course.” And yet for nine years, from the end of the George W. Bush administration until November 20, the world’s most sinister and repressive…
In 1986, President Reagan signed the largest overhaul of the U.S. tax system since the New Deal. The law simplified the tax code and substantially reduced individual rates for the second time in Reagan’s presidency—the top rate coming down to 28 percent from 50 percent. When Reagan had appealed for…
In 1986, President Reagan signed the largest overhaul of the U.S. tax system since the New Deal. The law simplified the tax code and substantially reduced individual rates for the second time in Reagan’s presidency—the top rate coming down to 28 percent from 50 percent. When Reagan had appealed for…
Widespread allegations of sexual harassment have in recent weeks rocked legislatures across Europe and North America. In London, harassment claims have brought down one cabinet minister and are threatening to bring parliamentary business to a standstill. In Brussels, the European parliament has…
The urge to vote for the outsider—the dissenter, the maverick, the troublemaker hated by those elites—is a reasonable one. Political parties become stale and predictable, their officeholders self-seeking and cowardly. The ordinary voter, exasperated by his elected leaders’ inability or refusal to…
There are, in essence, three things wrong with the federal tax code. They are, in descending order of importance, that corporations pay an absurdly high rate; that the code is a labyrinthine mess that turns the work of paying one’s taxes into a nightmare; and that marginal individual rates have in…
“Iran has never had a better friend than Obama,” Donald Trump tweeted in December 2013, as U.S. negotiators were finalizing a deal with Iran over the country’s nuclear program. So began Trump’s long campaign of ridiculing Barack Obama for the latter’s hopelessly gullible view of the Iranian regime.…
The allegations made against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, published in the Washington Post last week, would seem to be indisputable. In his 30s, according to the Post’s story, Moore cultivated romantic relationships with teenaged girls and in one case initiated sexual contact with a…
The November 7 elections, in which Democrats took governorships in Virginia and New Jersey and most of the other closely contested offices, have been analyzed and debated in the way off-year races always are. The winners interpret their wins as a sign of imminent triumph; the losers make excuses.
It's impossible to know—and difficult even to contemplate—what sort of nihilistic depravity could drive a man to do what Devin Kelley did on the morning of November 5. Kelley killed 26 and injured at least 20 at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas.
This post has been updated.
The word “hypocrisy,” as we’ve had occasion to remark in this space before, is among the most misused and abused terms in American politics—which, given the state of our discourse, is saying something. Generally missing in attributions of hypocrisy is the essential element of secrecy or…
Last week’s Senate hearings on Russia-linked social media accounts inciting political animosity gave us a vivid picture of one way in which the Russian government is making trouble in America. You don’t have to believe that Russian social media “bots” and “trolls” stole the election from Hillary…
Henry Kissinger aptly characterized two centuries of Russian foreign policy in his 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? “Throughout its history, with all its ups and downs,” he wrote, “Russia has conducted a persistent, patient, and skillful diplomacy: with Prussia and Austria against the…
We don't use the word “lie” with abandon in these pages. It’s used far too often in public life, to the point at which nearly every statement someone disagrees with is characterized as a “lie.” The L-word is tightly regulated in parliamentary bodies—in Congress, for example—and rightly so. Once you…
News broke Monday that the FBI is investigating what appears to be a suspect deal between Puerto Rico’s state-owned power company, Prepa, and a small Montana-based company called Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC. Under the terms of the $300 million contract, Whitefish was to assist in the rebuilding…
It’s not the sort of news President Trump’s Democratic adversaries were hoping for, but it was far from nothing. On Monday we learned of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates. We also learned that a foreign…
American universities are out of control. Tuition rises even as the quality of teaching sinks and the value of a degree falls into question. Students assault speakers and suffer no punishment. Others are accused of crimes and condemned without evidence or due process. All the while, curriculums are…
Everyone’s talking about the civil war in the Republican party. It seems more like a surrender to us.
In a speech on the Senate floor on October 24, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced his intention not to seek reelection in 2018. We regret his decision and the state of affairs that led him to make it: Flake is a solid conservative and a decent man, an implacable critic of government waste and a…
For a moment, we were transported back to the 1990s. There was Hillary Clinton being asked about yet another highly suspect circumstance involving gross improprieties and brazen lies and sidestepping the question by blaming that ever-present confederation: her enemies. “I think the real story is…
In a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced his intention not to seek reelection in 2018. We regret his decision and the state of affairs that led him to make it: Flake is a solid conservative and is a decent man, an implacable critic of government waste and a…
"Do we want Iran to have a nuclear weapon or not?" asks Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in a video making its way around the Internet. “The answer? No. So why is President Trump trying to make it easier for Iran to get a nuclear weapon?”
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
There are fewer and fewer economic principles on which Democrats and Republicans can agree, and any point of consilience will surely be forgotten as some momentary partisan need overwhelms reason and sense. Surely, however, we can all agree on a few points:
There are fewer and fewer economic principles on which Democrats and Republicans can agree, and any point of consilience will surely be forgotten as some momentary partisan need overwhelms reason and sense. Surely, however, we can all agree on a few points:
"Do we want Iran to have a nuclear weapon or not?" asks Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in a video making its way around the Internet. “The answer? No. So why is President Trump trying to make it easier for Iran to get a nuclear weapon?”
Celebrities are mostly left-wingers. The statement is boringly obvious to any mildly intelligent person. But we still have to say it because the celebrities themselves don’t seem to know it. Indeed, the high-profile personalities of our entertainment industry seem to think of themselves as…
Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that, among other things, stops cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. The purpose of these payments is to lower the deductibles and co-pays for lower- and middle-income Americans purchasing health plans on the Obamacare insurance…
The Soviet Union took an intensely discriminatory attitude to its history. What the regime wanted remembered, it magnified beyond all recognition; what it wanted forgotten, it erased. The Battle of Stalingrad, for instance, was endlessly propagandized by the Soviets; whereas the First World War, a…
American liberals dominate this country’s cultural life. Universities, the news media, the entertainment industry, our cultural institutions—these are populated and run mainly, and in many cases exclusively, by liberals. What liberals, the vast majority of whom identify as Democrats, don’t dominate…
On October 1, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced that it would accept girls into membership. Beginning next year, Cub Scout programs will admit girls, with the ultimate goal of allowing girls to progress to the rank of Eagle Scout.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump disparaged the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in characteristically superlative terms: “My number-one priority,” he said to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2016, “is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in…
In examining the GOP tax plan in this space, we noted that the provision eliminating the estate tax looked a lot like a bargaining chip “to be negotiated away to placate deficit hawks.”
In examining the GOP tax plan in this space, we noted that the provision eliminating the estate tax looked a lot like a bargaining chip “to be negotiated away to placate deficit hawks.”
From almost the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in June 2015, the term “Republican establishment” has been ubiquitous. Sometimes it means Republican moderates, sometimes it means GOP officeholders generally, and sometimes it just means any Republican not named Donald…
You don't have to be a liberal or conservative, woman or man, to find Harvey Weinstein's conduct repulsive. Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax Films and the eponymous Weinstein Company, producer of dozens of well-known, well-regarded, and multiple-Oscar-winning movies over the past three decades,…
Just occasionally, the United Nations gets things exactly right. A fine example of that is the recent release of a report from its special investigative mission on human-rights abuses in Crimea. The U.N. verdict? There have been “multiple and grave” violations—up to and including illegal detentions…
Presidential candidate Donald Trump disparaged the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in characteristically superlative terms: “My number-one priority,” he said to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2016, “is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in…
“Over the years,” wrote the editors of the New York Times, “the gun lobby, claiming to defend the convenience of hunters and other gun owners, has so bullied Washington that . . . sensible proposals seem beyond reach. But as gun mayhem continues to mount, the political roadblock looks less and less…
Responding to tragedy is never easy, but the best response is often the one involving the fewest words. That’s true when a friend receives terrible news—nothing’s worse than the loudmouth uncle trying to be “helpful”—and it’s true in moments of national grief like the present one.
“To preserve our civil liberties,” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch remarked in an address last week, “we have to constantly work on being civil with one another. . . . In a very real way, self-governance turns on our ability to try to treat—to try at least to treat—others as our equals, as…
Sanctions hurt everybody. That’s the problem with imposing them on a reckless and brutal regime. Instead of pressuring the few in charge, you punish the people as a whole. Sometimes that’s necessary, but it’s never ideal.
The last time Republicans advanced a serious plan to overhaul the tax code, Madonna had a No. 1 hit and Back to the Future had just been released on VHS. The new Republican tax plan harkens back to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 reform package, promising a future of stronger growth with less economic…
Stories about expensive presidential vacationing appeal to very few people outside reporters and political hacks. For all our belief in equality, we Americans will tolerate a touch of royalism in our presidents. Barack Obama’s travel may have cost taxpayers around $10 million a year, and Donald…
During the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats were vehement and clamorous defenders of Americans’ civil liberties. They inveighed against the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs as though the agency were spying on ordinary Americans in their homes and generally behaving like the East…
To understand the pragmatic realities of federal governance in the 21st century, one must recognize the existence of a fourth branch of government: the administrative state. We have some two million federal bureaucrats with extraconstitutional legislative powers. Not only do they write the reams of…
American liberals think of themselves as champions of the excluded and ill-treated, friends of the little guy persecuted by the system. Their instinctive sympathy for the disadvantaged and overlooked is evidence of a charitable worldview and a peculiar inheritance of Christian humanism. For a…
"I will immediately terminate President Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration. Immediately.” That was Donald Trump speaking on the day he launched his presidential campaign: June 16, 2015. The executive order he was referencing was the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. It…
To understand the pragmatic realities of federal governance in the 21st century, one must recognize the existence of a fourth branch of government: the administrative state. We have some two million federal bureaucrats with extraconstitutional legislative powers. Not only do they write the reams of…
You may remember the grim warnings of draconian budgets cuts issued by liberal pundits, congressional Democrats, and the Obama administration in early 2013. That was just before “sequester” took effect—a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which ordered automatic, across-the-board budget cuts…
Even before the Senate failed to pass a weak health care reform bill in mid-July, congressional Republicans were rationalizing their failure: Health care wasn’t their issue, they reasoned. But tax reform—now there was something they could win with.
Even before the Senate failed to pass a weak health care reform bill in mid-July, congressional Republicans were rationalizing their failure: Health care wasn’t their issue, they reasoned. But tax reform—now there was something they could win with.
The effort to repeal and replace Obamacare isn’t quite dead. It will officially expire on September 30 without any further congressional intervention. According to guidance handed down by the Senate parliamentarian just before Labor Day, the end of the federal fiscal year is when this year’s budget…
A “hypocrite,” in modern political parlance, is someone who holds two opinions thought by political opponents to be incompatible. And so, since political views are always colored by circumstances and rarely align with each other with perfect philosophical consistency, the word has become a kind of…
"We’re a nation of laws, not of men.” Politicians use this line so often that it has begun to sound like a cliché. It’s a loose rendering of a phrase John Adams put into the Massachusetts constitution in 1780, but the idea is a much older one. It was given its most distinct and memorable expression…
"Make no mistake,” writes New Yorker editor David Remnick, “white supremacists are now at the forefront of American politics.” That platitudinous “make no mistake” put us in mind of Joe Queenan’s observation years ago in these pages. The phrase is “an underhanded way of clinching an argument…
"Make no mistake,” writes New Yorker editor David Remnick, “white supremacists are now at the forefront of American politics.” That platitudinous “make no mistake” put us in mind of Joe Queenan’s observation years ago in these pages. The phrase is “an underhanded way of clinching an argument…
American politics is at present dominated by two sorts of commentator. The first are those who will never find anything good to say about Donald Trump. Nothing he says and nothing his administration achieves will ever be praised by them for any reason. Any new development is an excuse to remind the…
For more than six months, the White House has been a chaotic mess—its internal processes disordered by feuds, its diplomacy and relations with Congress undermined by leaks and backbiting, its external communications confused by an undisciplined boss. John Kelly, made chief of staff in early August,…
In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.
In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.
On August 15, Alabama Republicans will begin to choose their candidate for the race to fill Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat. If none of the 9 candidates wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two will face each other in a runoff on September 26. And the winner of that contest will face the top…
“We do not seek a regime change,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on August 1, speaking of North Korea. “We do not seek the collapse of the regime . . . We’re trying to convey to the North Koreans: We are not your enemy. We are not your threat. But you are presenting an unacceptable threat to…
We’re not fans of adding “ism” to the names of presidents—“Reaganism” and “Jeffersonianism” make sense to describe those men’s political worldviews, but you wouldn’t use the formulations “Fordism” or “Clintonism” and expect to be understood. Nonetheless, “Trumpism” meant something definable to a…
We’re not fans of adding “ism” to the names of presidents—“Reaganism” and “Jeffersonianism” make sense to describe those men’s political worldviews, but you wouldn’t use the formulations “Fordism” or “Clintonism” and expect to be understood. Nonetheless, “Trumpism” meant something definable to a…
One of the most effective rallying cries against the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010 was a simple question: “Have you read the bill?” The question was an indictment of a 2,700-page measure that was poorly understood by those voting for it, sold to the public under false pretenses (“if you like…
It’s true that the Trump administration is flailing. The president hasn’t managed to accomplish a single major reform or win a single policy victory. The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, moreover, seems likely to bring charges against one or more people associated with the…
Six months into its existence, the Trump administration seems unsure what its stance toward Iran ought to be. That’s less because the current president and his advisers don’t know what they think about Iran’s leaders than because the previous president committed the United States to a reckless and…
“My number one priority,” Donald Trump said to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee on March 21, 2016, “is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Six months into Trump’s presidency, it’s looking more like number 10 or 20.
It took some time, but here we are. After decades of minimizing the menace posed by Russia—recall Barack Obama’s gibe, in response to Mitt Romney’s suggestion that Russia was our greatest geopolitical threat, that the 1980s had called and wanted their foreign policy back—American liberals are…
It took some time, but here we are. After decades of minimizing the menace posed by Russia—recall Barack Obama’s gibe, in response to Mitt Romney’s suggestion that Russia was our greatest geopolitical threat, that the 1980s had called and wanted their foreign policy back—American liberals are…
In June, the Senate passed a bill codifying U.S. sanctions on Russia. The bill—based on a series of Obama-era executive orders retaliating for Russia’s de facto invasion of Ukraine and, later, its meddling in the U.S. elections—passed the Senate by an overwhelming margin: 98-2.
In the first two years of the Obama administration, “Read the bill!” was an effective anti-Obamacare rallying cry. Republican congressmen, as well as conservative and Tea Party activists, demanded that legislation weighing in at more than 2,000 pages and affecting one-sixth of the economy be…
Journals like this one exist, generally speaking, not to praise politicians but to chastise, to upbraid, or at least to criticize them. And so, after hearing about the terrible shootings at the Alexandria baseball field the morning of June 14; after making the mistake of sampling the incivility and…
Journals like this one exist, generally speaking, not to praise politicians but to chastise, to upbraid, or at least to criticize them. And so, after hearing about the terrible shootings at the Alexandria baseball field the morning of June 14; after making the mistake of sampling the incivility and…
This week Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. It was an important move, and one that President Donald Trump made unavoidable with his erratic and irresponsible behavior over the past fortnight.
It's not a good idea, but it's not a crisis either, when the sitting president of the United States invents claims of massive voter fraud or misstates crime rates or does many of the other things Donald Trump has done. It is an institutional and perhaps constitutional crisis when the president of…
We at The Weekly Standard have had plenty of advice for Republicans on how to criticize (and occasionally to support) Obama administration foreign and defense policies. But as the GOP presidential campaign heats up, it seems that some candidates are more tempted to imitate the foreign policy…
Irving Kristol, writer, editor, and social philosopher, has died in Washington at the age of 89. His wisdom, wit, good humor, and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants.
Irving Kristol, writer, editor, and social philosopher, has died in Washington at the age of 89. His wisdom, wit, good humor, and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants.
Dean Barnett began contributing to the online and print editions of THE WEEKLY STANDARD in early 2005. In less than four years, he became a favorite of our discerning readers--and of other writers. He wrote witty and penetrating essays and blog items on such diverse topics as presidential politics,…
For the second time this year, the New York Times has taken an interest in the vast collection of documents captured in postwar Iraq. The Times first noticed these materials six months ago, when the U.S. government began posting images of them on the Internet. In a dismissive report, the Times…
LATE FRIDAY MORNING, MAY 5, the White House called the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees with urgent news: CIA director Porter Goss would announce his resignation at the White House in a few hours. The news came as a surprise. Although insiders knew that Goss was increasingly…
"WHERE WAS THE NUCLEAR material transported to?" asks an aide to Saddam Hussein, in a taped conversation released last week. He answers his own question: "A number of them were transported out of Iraq." This provocative snippet is part of 12 hours of taped exchanges between Saddam Hussein and his…
THE CBS REPORT issued last week by Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi left a number of interesting questions unanswered. The Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular are a means of harnessing open-source information. So we'd like to invite the blogosphere to help answer some of the…
ON THE SURFACE, it might seem like a simple case of media bias. In the November 24, 2003, WEEKLY STANDARD, Stephen F. Hayes summarized and quoted at length a recent, secret Pentagon memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The memo laid out--in 50 bullet points, over 16 pages--the relationship…