George Carey arrived at Georgetown University in 1961, the same year that I did. He was a young professor teaching courses on American government when I was a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he taught. My first experience with him as a student was notably unpleasant. Taking his first exam, I went...
During the campaign for the presidency, the major media were relentless in their attacks on Donald Trump. Reading the Washington Post daily I couldn’t believe the news coverage. It was one anti-Trump story after another. The reporters didn’t even bother to disguise what clearly were opinion pieces, passing them off as news. “Racist,” “sexist,” “anti-Semite”—these...
In the United States, the forces of the cultural left have been particularly aggressive in seeking to diminish the influence of our Christian heritage on American society. The Obama administration has led the campaign for the complete separation of religion from the public square. It has used executive orders, regulatory rule-making authority, and the bully...
From the Selous Foundation: Geoffrey Shaw, author of The Lost Mandate of Heaven, has done us a great service in telling the truth about the American betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem and the tragic consequences it had for the Vietnamese people and for those Allied soldiers who gave their lives in that war. [Read Tom...
From Tom Pauken’s article at the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research: I disagreed with President Lyndon Baines Johnson on many issues, but I respected him for his efforts to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. What would LBJ or Walt Rostow, the former LBJ national security advisor who was Dean of the LBJ...
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have written a book entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt on August 29, with the headline “Restoring American Exceptionalism.” In the excerpt, Cheney sought to identify his views on foreign policy with those of Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. That...
The following column by Tom Pauken originally appeared in TribTalk, a publication of The Texas Tribune. Donald Trump has made a mess of things in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. What was expected to be a race between establishment favorite Jeb Bush and a conservative challenger emerging from a large field has instead turned into a...
Life was much simpler for those of us who grew up in 1950’s America than it is for children today. We took for granted an intact family with a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home mom. America was the number-one manufacturing country in the world, and our society was anchored by a strong middle class. Yes,...
Writing recently in Forbes, Brian Wesbury continued a theme that is popular among Beltway Republicans, warning about the dangers of a consumption tax system known as a Value-Added Tax (VAT). Wesbury advances the specious argument that a VAT is bad because it would be placed “on top of the income tax” and “will harm the...
With the able assistance of Jack Hunter, Sen. Rand Paul has written a must-read book for conservatives wondering why we continue to send Republicans to Washington, D.C., who say all of the right things when running for office and then quickly fall in line with the “inside the Beltway” political elites who have controlled the...
The United States is experiencing her highest national unemployment rate since the early 1980’s. Back in 1981, in order to stimulate the creation of jobs in the private sector, President Reagan encouraged Congress to pass the Kemp-Roth Job Creation Act. Today, the Obama administration is doing nothing of the sort. Most Americans are not even...
Michael Steele appears to be a pleasant enough fellow. But he is off to a rocky start as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Within weeks of his election, Steele gave an interview to GQ in which he was quoted as saying that abortion is an “individual choice,” the refrain generally used by “abortion-rights”...
A few weeks after the Republicans were routed in the November 2006 elections, a longtime Bush Republican from Texas told me that it was time for Karl Rove to go. That comment spoke volumes, for it came from someone who had worked closely with Rove ever since his early days as a political consultant in the...
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald called a press conference on October 28 to announce a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff and principal national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald indicted Libby on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of false statements, the charges...
George W. Bush was lauded in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2003 by Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard, for promoting a new brand of “conservatism.” According to Barnes, President Bush is a “big government conservative,” and his administration believes “in using what would normally be seen as...
Karl Rove’s favorite president is Richard Nixon. What a twist of fate it would be if Rove were driven from power as Nixon was over what both men would consider trivial matters—the leaking of a CIA employee’s name to reporters by Rove in 2004 and the Watergate break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the instigation...
How did the Texas Republican Party, which was in the forefront of the battles to win the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, become a wholly owned subsidiary of Karl Rove and George W. Bush? Today, the Republicans in Texas control every statewide elected office, yet...