Author: William Murchison (William Murchison)

With Jim Webb’s resignation from the presidential race goes a piece of history. Will a moderate to maybe-just-a-little-bit-conservative man—or woman—emerge ever again to offer Democrats a national leadership profile independent of the Hillary or Bernie template? You never know. But I don’t believe I would give long odds on it. Gone are the days when...

Notice the Washington Post-ABC News poll on Pope Francis. The results indicate that people over here love him. He throws open doors too long closed. “He’s calming, he’s relaxing, and he’s reassuring,” says one Catholic quoted by the Post. Another—a sociologist at Catholic University—says, “He talks like a person who actually knows something about human...

Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who was jailed for refusing to give out marriage licenses to gay couples, is out of the clink at last. But in political and cultural regards, her nation and ours is not in the clear. Moral consensus has broken down, resulting in the empowerment of the strongest, the best connected,...

From across my small office I winked at Marse Robert. He winked back—so his 7-by-6-inch portrait seemed to suggest—white-bearded, gray-uniformed, arms folded serenely and confidently. When the nation whose future military leaders you trained at West Point mauls and mutilates the cause in which you trusted, serenity comes hard. Only a Robert Edward Lee type...

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” —Hamlet, Act I, Sc.5 The Amazing Media Machine, dripping oil and self-satisfaction, roared to new life with Jeb Bush’s declaration of his presidential candidacy. At last—something to talk about. We have Jeb—”Jeb!” as the campaign button puts...

Those Republicans! Here’s the lowdown on ’em—and on their lousy, lowdown approach to governing. They don’t want the wrong people voting. They’re “scared of letting citizens have their say.” They’re engaged in “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the...

You might have another notion entirely. I prefer to see the fruits of Raul Castro’s semi-conversion to Catholicism before reaching conclusions as to his sincerity. “I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries,” said Raul on Sunday, following a meeting at the Vatican with the hugely popular Pope Francis, “and if the pope...

Here’s how it stands with Western civilization—what’s left of it, I mean—insofar as various Westerners are concerned. You keep your lip buttoned whenever foes, internal as well as external, jump up and down on you, kick you around, make known their fondest wish is to do you in, ideals and all. You hope for the...

Well. I really can’t believe I am saying this. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to tell us what marriage means. Not speculate; not explain. Tell: as in, “Wipe that smile off your face and listen to what I’m telling you.” We are at a remarkable moment in human affairs: one we would hardly have...

Andrew Jackson was sort of a rough-and-tumble president, undoubtedly, but the United States, in the 1820s and ’30s, was sort of a rough-and-tumble country. Notice how refined and civilized we’ve gotten since then, to the point that a coalition of lady activists is ready to pull President Jackson’s mug off the $20 bill, substituting—well, that’s...

I’m. Just. So. Excited. That. Hillary. Clinton. Is. Ready. To. Be. My. Champion. I mean, she says she’s ready, what with “the deck . . . still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Oh, ma’am, we “everyday Americans,” I can tell you, have had it up to here with the “top” people running...

Cinematically, as well as politically, we are sort of in a John Wayne moment: which is where Ted Cruz comes in. Things in this town of ours ain’t a-going real good right now. Everything, in fact, seems to be falling apart, save in the eyes of folk who wish America would either drop into the...

Maybe the question is, who’d want a degree from a university whose administration, on learning of a frat-boy incident on a bus, behaves as though God had personally dispatched the whole academic bureaucracy to wreak revenge. “P-o-o-o-o-or Okies,” as we Texas Longhorns used to chant from the Cotton Bowl stands. I mean, what else do...

In a week when the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page lectures the Republican Congress for tactical stupidity; and Israel’s prime minister lectures the Obama administration, whose insiders lecture him back; and no one can believe Obama has believable plans for anything; and he can’t believe anybody would believe such a thing—with all this going on,...

A number of maxims surround the practice of war. The main maxim runs to this effect: When you get attacked, fight back. Unless, to be sure, you don’t care whether you win or lose—an option, to be sure, not given to American presidents and other national leaders, assuming, to be sure, they take with maximum...

It’s been kind of fun, I tell you: a Florida Democratic congressman, one Alcee Hastings, calls Texas a “crazy state.” Texans—e.g., Rick Perry—joyfully, jubilantly acknowledged the craziness that has made our state (yes, I am one of the assorted bedlamites) foremost in the country for economic growth. How come Texas leads in job creation and...

Bethlehem. Ah. Yes. There we were as a matter of fact, and not many weeks ago, either. Also at Nazareth. Also—of course—at Jerusalem, where everybody goes who goes to the Holy Land, with a sense of immense events and occasions to be taken in, the more so as Christmas draws near. I can say this...

The human tempests presently sweeping the country—rape allegations at the University of Virginia and in the U.S. military, racial protests and rioting over police conduct, growing and growling bitterness during the sweetest of seasons—have as much to do with moral decay as with circumstances. A moral system presupposes some general level of personal restraint in...

“The polls” have it that Americans in 2014 expect virtually nothing from the 2014 style in Washington politicians. Amid the horrors we trip over every morning when evacuating our beds, this revelation may count as very, very, very good news. We don’t want to expect much from our politicians, of whatever sex, party, creed, and...

The really troubling point that Joel Kotkin makes in the New York Daily News is that New York can’t figure out how to do the economic equality thing we hear so much about in this and every political season. “Gotham,” writes Kotkin, “has become the American capital of a national and even international trend toward...

“(Wendy) Davis is running (for governor) against Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is heavily favored to win in a state that remains strongly Republican.” Katie Glueck, in “Wendy Davis and the ever-longer odds,” Politico, Oct. 19. Yes, yes, lady, fine; you got it. But this is barely to scratch the surface of the thing....

Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies—oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead. Mandatory voter ID laws passed by Republican legislatures in Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin have been under legal assault by...

The way to have the foreign policy you want is first to figure out what kind of foreign policy you want. It is a task at which American leaders grow less and less adept, possibly on account of Americans’ general inability to figure out what they want: involvement, isolation or variations of the two? What,...

Down with a resounding bang comes the wrath of that great moral institution, the National Basketball Association, upon the noggin of Donald Sterling. Boo! Hiss! Get the hook! And once you’ve paid your $2.5 million fine, Sterling, for the offense of lax language during a private conversation, why don’t you just die? That would be...

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9 This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling,...

Barely eight years ago, 76 percent of Texas voters affirmed by constitutional amendment their commitment to heterosexual marriage as the proper relational norm. But, hey, so what, when a federal judge informs Texans that “[S]tate-imposed inequality can find no refuge in the United States Constitution”? Accordingly, Texas joins the melancholy parade of Southern states—Virginia, Kentucky,...

Look, the Wendy Davis candidacy for Texas governor isn’t going anywhere. (Ain’t goin’ nowhere, Bubba, as we might say in Texas.) What’s with the New York Times Magazine cover story on Feb.  16 – Wendy looking sleepily seductive,  blonde tresses streaming down to her shoulders; the headline inquiring in pseudo-provocative fashion, “Can Wendy Davis Have...

  The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things—bread and circuses. —Juvenal, Satires Except that instead of circuses we call them football games—a term linked indissolubly with the mess at Penn State: NCAA fines and penalties, disappearing statues of head coaches...

  When Congress, split seven ways from Sunday on the question, squelched legislation granting resident status for those formerly called “illegal aliens,” President Obama said, in effect, so what?—we’ll do it anyway. And so he did it anyway, announcing last Friday the birth of a new immigration policy affecting an estimated 800,000 illegals. These illegals—according...