Author: Patrick J. Buchanan (Patrick J. Buchanan)

  Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell. Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The latter said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.” As...

In the near term, bet on the men with the guns. The Egyptian Army, being slowly squeezed out of its central role in the nation’s life by Mohammed Morsi, waited for the moment to oust the elected president and crush his Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi was deposed and arrested, and the Brotherhood leaders rounded up and...

  “There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking,” said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin. The reason: Putin’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at...

  Apparently, the threat is both serious and specific. The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens. The threat comes from Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization. “After Benghazi,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “these Al Qaida...

  In his second term, Richard Nixon had Watergate, but also the rescue of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. In his second term, Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, but also a treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe, his “tear-down-this-wall” moment in Berlin and his lead role in ending the Cold War. In his...

  “The First Black President … Spoke First as a Black American,” ran the banner headline of Sunday’s Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up? “A week of protests outside the White House, pressure building on him...

  “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Ben Franklin is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often...

  On U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’ … I say let Allah sort it out.” So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is not infrequently the case, she nailed it....

  Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two...

A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years...

  Ten years ago today, U.S. air, sea and land forces attacked Iraq. And the great goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us or transfer to al-Qaida for use against the U.S. homeland. Exact retribution for Saddam’s complicity in 9/11 after we learned...

  Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to declare a filibuster and pledge he would not sit down until either he could speak no longer or got an answer to his question about Barack Obama’s war powers. Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the absence of an imminent threat,...

“To govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.” With those brave, wise, simple words,...

  “What the president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked.” Thus did political analyst Mitt Romney identify the cause of his defeat in a call to disconsolate...

  Usually, not always, the peace party wins. Gen. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and March to the Sea ensured Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. William McKinley, with his triumph over Spain and determination to pacify and hold the Philippines, easily held off William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Yet Woodrow Wilson won in 1916 on the...

  Mitt Romney on Wednesday night turned in the finest debate performance of any candidate of either party in the 52 years since Richard Nixon faced John F. Kennedy, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan’s demolition of Jimmy Carter in 1980. But where Reagan won with style and quips—”There you go again”—and his closing...

  For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives. From the fall of Berlin in 1945...

  Both the 20th and 21st centuries have seen failed presidencies. William Howard Taft lost in 1912, though he might have retained office had not his old friend and former leader Theodore Roosevelt run as a third party Bull Moose candidate and won more votes than Taft. Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his...

  After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.”...

  “Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. … One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.” So wrote H.G. Wells in What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War in the year...

  “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble during the Super Bowl. And understandably so. For this was no gaffe, said Romney, this is what Obama believes. This is straight out of...

  The first criterion in choosing a vice president, it is said, is that he or she must be qualified to be president.   Yet there is another yardstick by which candidates measure running mates. Do they bring something to the table? Can they help with a critical voting bloc? Can they bring a crucial...

  For John Roberts, it is Palm Sunday. Out of relief and gratitude for his having saved Obamacare, he is being compared to John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Liberal commentators are burbling that his act of statesmanship has shown us the way to the sunny uplands of a new consensus. If only Republicans will...

  In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote for Life magazine a controversial article on a subject that has been the cause of spirited and acrimonious debate ever since. He listed the consensus of our academic elite as to which American presidents had been Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failures. Leading the list were Abraham Lincoln,...

  Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in. Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is president of Egypt, while the military has dissolved the elected parliament that was dominated by the Brotherhood, and curbed his powers....

  “The entry into force of the U.S.-Korea trade agreement on March 15, 2012, means countless new opportunities for U.S. exporters to sell more made-in-America goods, services and agricultural products to Korean customers—and to support more good jobs here at home.” Thus did the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative rhapsodize about the potential of...

  In 1919, after Boston police went on strike to protest the city’s refusal to recognize their new union, Gov. Calvin Coolidge ordered the National Guard into the streets. Sam Gompers, the legendary father of American labor, wrote the governor that the Boston police had been denied their rights. Coolidge’s terse reply put him in...

  When Hillary Rosen said that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life,” it was among the better days of the Romney campaign. For Rosen—present whereabouts unknown—both revealed the feminist mindset about women who choose to become wives and mothers and brought Ann Romney center stage. Before a Connecticut audience recently, Mrs....

  After taping John Stossel’s show on May 16 in New York, the Mrs. and I took the 10 a.m. Acela back to Washington. Once we had boarded the train, who should come waddling up the aisle but Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard editor seemed cheerful, and we chatted about the surge in Mitt Romney’s popularity...

  Three months ago, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Handcuffed, taken in and interrogated, Zimmerman told police Trayvon had been acting suspiciously that dark and rainy night, that he had followed Trayvon, been knocked down and battered on the ground, and, fearing for his life, pulled...

  Among the more controversial chapters in Suicide of a Superpower, my book published last fall, was the one titled, “The End of White America.” It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity. That book and chapter proved the proximate cause...

  When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working...

  It took Joe Biden’s public embrace of same-sex marriage to smoke him out. But after Joe told David Gregory of Meet the Press he was “absolutely comfortable” with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a...

  “Bibi” Netanyahu was disgusted. “My initial reaction is that Iran has gotten a freebie. It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation.” The Israeli prime minister was referring to Saturday’s meeting in Istanbul of the P5-plus-1—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany—with representatives from Iran. Subject: Iran’s...

  Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged. In a January visit to the Vatican, American bishops were warned by Benedict XVI that “radical secularism” posed “grave threats” to their Catholic faith. Your religious freedom is being circumscribed, said the pope....

  Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to veto Germany’s demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence. With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU: “British surrenders of sovereignty come to...