Author: Daniel McCarthy (Daniel McCarthy)

The field of Democrats aspiring to be their party’s presidential nominee resembles what the Republican field of four years ago would have been, had Donald Trump not entered the race. With more than 20 contenders, Democrats have had to break up their first two presidential debates into two sets of ten candidates, each airing on...

After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats.  On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.  Mueller recommended no prosecutions—though Barr’s...

Now here’s a headline: “Blackface, sexual assault scandals don’t appear to have tarnished Virginia’s image,” the Washington Post declared on March 3.  The story referred to controversies surrounding each of the commonwealth’s three top statewide officials—all of them Democrats.  Gov. Ralph Northam came under pressure to resign after the conservative website Big League Politics discovered...

The way foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C., talk about Afghanistan, you would think that country had successfully launched a ballistic-missile attack against us on 9/11.  We have occupied Afghanistan for over 17 years now, but still we cannot leave because the Taliban could then return to power and once again grant haven to terrorists who...

As the new Congress was sworn in early in January, the Republican Party unveiled a plan for its own assisted suicide.  In fact, Mitt Romney got started before he was even seated as the latest senator from Utah.  On January 1, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he accused President Trump...

For over three years Saudi Arabia has been fighting a war in Yemen with little regard for civilian suffering.  The war itself has been deadly for thousands of bystanders, but far worse has been the famine the conflict has brought about, which has killed some 50,000 people already and has the potential to kill millions. ...

As of October, the U.S. has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for fully 17 years.  Young men who were not even born when the war started are now almost of an age to serve and be deployed.  And if that’s the case with our forces, you can just imagine how many of today’s Taliban...

Imagine an economic system in which government pays the wages of workers, but the businesses where they work remain privately owned, and profits accrue to the owners.  Could this fairly be called free-market capitalism?  It sounds more like socialism, even Soviet-style communism: Workers are maintained at public expense, while the commissars line their own pockets. ...

Many a new genre of journalism has sprung up thanks to President Trump.  The latest is the “victims of tariffs” industry profile.  As the Trump administration slaps tariffs on foreign steel, aluminum, and manufactured goods of various kinds, trading partners—i.e., rivals—such as China and Mexico are imposing retaliatory tariffs of their own.  The problem for...

NeverTrump really means “forever war.”  Proof of this could be seen in the 2016 election, where anti-Trump Republicans fielded a candidate of their own, ex-CIA man Evan McMullin, rather than casting their votes for a third-party ticket with two non-Trump Republicans on it.  That ticket was the Libertarian Party’s, with former New Mexico governor Gary...

Rep. Adam Schiff knows something about impeachment.  The California Democrat first won his seat in Congress in 2000, when he defeated a Republican incumbent, James Rogan, who two years earlier had been one of the “managers” acting for the House of Representatives in the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.  Now Schiff is the...

Democrats are feeling overconfident.  They won a hard-fought special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District in early March, then saw over a million people take to the streets in cities across the country to march for gun control some two weeks later.  Both are taken as signs of progressives’ organizational prowess and battle-ready morale.  Left-leaning...

Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason.  Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...

Donald Trump’s first year as President is drawing to a close, and it’s been rough.  The Republican Congress proved unequal to the task of repealing Obama Care.  The border wall hasn’t been built.  The administration is packed with generals and hawkish ideologues who push the President toward foreign intervention.  A special prosecutor stalks the land,...

Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran.  President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...

When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy.  He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds.  Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue.  Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...

Decades before Donald Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan heralded the themes that would put Trump in the White House.  Yet despite all that lead time, Trump’s victory was still in one sense premature.  In the interval between Buchanan’s presidential bids in the 1990’s and Trump’s victory last November, the Republican Party paid little heed...

Have you noticed?  Newspapers and television channels across the land have discovered a new kind of human-interest story: the business-owning, family-man illegal immigrant who gets deported after living in this country for decades as a productive noncitizen.  CNN’s website headlined the story of one Joel Colindres, “This is the face of deportation: A dad with...

The party of Hillary Clinton has not stopped losing since last November.  This fact is easily overlooked amid all of President Trump’s bad press, but Democrats have reliably come up short in special elections from Montana to Kansas to suburban Atlanta.  Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running in Georgia’s Sixth District, raised over $23 million by...

A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president.  Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for him.  The Republican wing of the commentariat, however, was equally sure that Trump would fail:...

Contrary to what John McCain and others in Washington are saying, North Korea’s nuclear program is not a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.”  Nor does tough talk from President Trump mean he’s about to launch preemptive strikes against Kim Jong-un.  Where would be the profit in that?  North Korea is not a cripple like...