Category: Web

On Wednesday night Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spoke at the same prime-time television event for the first time. The “forum” was not a debate; the candidates appeared back-to-back, answering Matt Lauer’s questions about their qualities and qualifications to be commander-in-chief. He let Clinton—who appeared first—speak without disruption, but repeatedly interrupted Trump. On the other...

Monday brought the sad news that Phyllis Schlafly had died, at the age of 92. Schlafly was a tireless advocate for conservative causes for over half a century, from the publication of A Choice, Not an Echo in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964, to the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the...

In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly of Alton, Illinois, mother of six, wrote and published a slim volume entitled A Choice Not an Echo. Backing the candidacy of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the book was a polemic against the stranglehold the eastern liberal establishment had held on the Republican nomination for decades. A Choice sold 3 million copies....

Speculation is mounting that Theresa May, emulating Richard Nixon’s epoch-making visit to China, may be planning a visit to Washington with a view to laying the foundations for a trade deal between the UK and US. She has already been to China for the G20 meeting in Hangzhou, where Xi Linping has told her that...

Order withdrawal  of troops and materiel from Afghanistan and Iraq. (Without bringing   the indigenous population with you.) Perhaps a small CIA presence might be maintained just for intelligence-gathering, which is what they are supposed to be doing anyway. Join with Russia to destroy ISIS in preparation for a withdrawal from Syria. This will allow the...

In accepting the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto to fly to Mexico City, the Donald was taking a major risk. Yet it was a bold and decisive move, and it paid off in what was the best day of Donald Trump’s campaign. Standing beside Nieto, graciously complimenting him and speaking warmly of Mexico and...

Hillary Clinton’s speech at the American Legion National Convention on August 31 was an exultant restatement of the two-decades-old doctrine of “benevolent global hegemony” justified by the dogma of American exceptionalism. She provided the blueprint for never-ending wars and crises wholly unrelated to any rational understanding of this country’s national interest. “The United States is...

A week or so ago, the Never Trump crowd at National Review was chortling that Trump was softening on immigration. The chortling wasn’t prompted by any genuine concern over immigration. After all, NR was a stalwart defender of George W. Bush and had no trouble supporting John McCain as the Republican nominee. Instead, the grandees...

The debacle that is U.S. Syria policy is today on naked display. NATO ally Turkey and U.S.-backed Arab rebels this weekend attacked our most effective allies against ISIS, the Syrian Kurds. Earlier in August, U.S. planes threatened to shoot down Syrian planes over Hasakeh, and our Iraq-Syria war commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, issued a...

The promoters of infanticide have a new weapon in their arsenal. “Storytelling” is the new “safe, legal, and rare” of the pro-abortion movement.  See as Exhibit A the new HBO documentary, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, released a few weeks ago in select theaters. The film focuses on women in Missouri, a state where only one abortion...

The Remainers, having lost the war, have now entered the franc-tireur phase and have taken to the hills where they continue the clamor for the lost provinces. Their current spokesman is Owen Smith, pretender to the Labour throne. He wants a second referendum, as does that Ozymandias of Left-wing power Tony Blair. But Smith has...

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have reached such a fraught point in their campaigns that they’ve taken accusing one another of America’s unpardonable sin: Racism. The broadcast news outlets are all delightedly agog. This is understandable. Nothing sells better in America than accusations of racial preference. It’s a near certainty that Barack Obama was elected...

Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. For consider what the Associated Press reported this week: The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of...

Issue one! To understand John McLaughlin, it was helpful to have been a 13-year-old entering an all-boys Jesuit school in the 1950s. For when John yelled “Wronnng” at me from his center chair of The McLaughlin Group, it hit with the same familiar finality I had heard, many times, from Jesuits at the front of...

A month ago the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) took control of the Castillo Highway in northern Aleppo, the rebels’ last supply route into their eastern redoubt. By July 27 it looked like the complete reconquest of Syria’s largest city by government forces was only a matter of time. In the first week of August, however,...

“I did it my way,” crooned Sinatra. Donald Trump is echoing Ol’ Blue Eyes with the latest additions to his staff. Should he lose, he prefers to go down to defeat as Donald Trump, and not as some synthetic creation of campaign consultants. “I am who I am,” Trump told a Wisconsin TV station, “It’s...

RT International interviewed Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles, on August 17 regarding U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Belgrade. RT:  You once mentioned that Serbian officials are warmly welcoming Biden because they want to hurry their way into EU. But what has Biden to do with the EU? ST: Biden actually...

Donald Trump has been rebutting the media for its relentless attacks on him. The “conservative” Wall Street Journal editorial page, which always has disliked his candidacy, responded, “Donald Trump lashed out at the media on Sunday after more stories describing dysfunction inside his presidential campaign. ‘If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and...

Yesterday brought the sad news that John McLaughlin, the host of the McLaughlin Group for 34 years, had died at the age of 89. McLaughlin managed to create a show that was informative, lively, and friendly to conservatives. When the McLaughlin Group premiered in 1982, political programming on television, by contrast, was mostly an exercise...

On Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2016, the national debt is projected to reach $19.3 trillion. With spending on the four biggest budget items—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense—rising, and GDP growing at 1 percent, future deficits will exceed this year’s projected $600 billion. National bankruptcy, then, is among the existential threats to the...

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve. “Dangerous,” “toxic,” came the recoil from the media. Trump is threatening to “delegitimize” the election results of 2016. Well, if that is what Trump is trying to do, he...

No one paying attention with even one eye and half an ear can be ignorant of the fact that when it comes to this year’s election the MSM are lying shills for Hillary. But now it seems they’re all suffering from amnesia too. The latest “OMG, Trump said that!” moment is The Donald’s claim that...

“Isolationists must not prevail in this new debate over foreign policy,” warns Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The consequences of a lasting American retreat from the world would be dire.” To make his case against the “Isolationist Temptation,” Haass creates a caricature, a cartoon, of America First patriots, then thunders that...

It is not Europe’s darkest hour yet—not quite on par with the peak of the Black Death 1346-53, or the impasse of the Western Front 1915-18, but on current form it is approaching fast. What is likely to happen in the next two to three decades is the darkest nightmare imaginable: a massive barbarian (overwhelmingly...

The media attacks on Trump have become relentless. For some reason, Washington Post headlines show up in my Facebook feed, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the news stories from the opinion pieces—they all merge into a seemingly endless anti-Trump torrent. One example: a news story on Trump’s economic policy team was headlined “Trump’s...

At stake in 2016 is the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate and, possibly, control of the House of Representatives. Hence, Republicans have a decision to make. Will they set aside political and personal feuds and come together to win in November, after which they can fight over the future of the party, and...

Columnist Wes Pruden, writing in the Washington Times, calls the presumptive GOP nominee an “uneducated lout.” But give him credit for balance: he also gives Hillary a hard time though he spares her any ad hominem insults. He finds the choice we face in the presidential election this November terrifying, and thinks we should, too. He...

The Lords are pawing the ground. You might think that after the recent referendum the Peers v. People issue had been settled, for a time. And it is true that a heavy majority of Remainers wore ermine on parade. But no: the Resistance movement is headed by Baroness Wheatcroft (nee Patience Wheatcroft, a financial journalist)...

With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. Not funny, and close to “treasonous,” came the shocked cry. Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need...

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, Scoundrel Time to the nth degree was on full display in Philadelphia last week. The closing days of the Democratic Convention featured an orgy of frenzied flag-waving (never mind the minimal presence of Old Glory at the opening) and orchestrated chants of “USA! USA! USA!” (doing double...

Wednesday was the best night of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and Barack Obama testified to her greatness and goodness and readiness to be president. And all saw in the Republican Convention in Cleveland a festival of darkness and dystopia. Nor is this unusual. For, as the saying goes, the ins “point with...

Two weeks after the failed coup and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent mass purge, three facts seem clear. Turkey has ceased to be a democracy in any conventional sense. The army’s reputation and cohesiveness have suffered a massive blow, with uncertain consequences for its operational effectiveness. Most importantly, Turkey’s foreign policy and regional security strategy...

Waving off the clerics who had come to administer last rites, Voltaire said: “All my life I have ever made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The tale of the thieved emails at the Democratic National Committee is just too good...

Groupthink is the grand code of political commentary, together with its corollary; groupthink is wrong, nearly all the time. Last year saw a spectacular instance in British politics. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats party, accepted a challenge from Nigel Farage to debate the EU on TV. “He’s mad!” we said. “Nobody comes alive...

Donald Trump has made it clear from the beginning that he’s in it to win it. He has said that if he ends up losing the presidential race it will all have been for nothing: “If I don’t go all the way, and if I don’t win, I will consider it to be a total...

The self-righteousness and smugness of Ted Cruz in refusing to endorse Donald Trump, then walking off stage in Cleveland, smirking amidst the boos, takes the mind back in time. At the Cow Palace in San Francisco in July of 1964, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, having been defeated by Barry Goldwater, took the podium to introduce a...

There are some simple rules governing modern American political conventions. If you speak at the convention, you endorse the nominee. If you can’t endorse the nominee, you don’t go. You certainly don’t use a prime time speaking slot to try to sabotage your party’s fall campaign. A number of Trump’s foes have refused to endorse...

Last Saturday, during lunch with Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf at Rockford’s Prairie Street Brewhouse, I expressed suspicion that the coup in Turkey—just over 24 hours old at that time, and in the final stages of collapse—was Erdogan’s Reichstag fire: a stage-managed event, carried out by clueless stooges, meant to enhance the power of the...

While what’s said before the TV cameras at a political convention is important, just as important is what goes on behind the scenes in the meeting rooms. That’s where policymakers of all stripes meet and hammer out a political party’s future. That’s what’s going on this week in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention and...

On Monday night, I had the good fortune to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, thanks to the generosity of a friend who gave me a guest pass.  There has been much media-generated doom and gloom about this convention, but the negative expectations generated by a hostile press were not confirmed by what I...

Neither George W. Bush, the Republican Party nominee in 2000 and 2004, nor Jeb, the dethroned Prince of Wales, will be in Cleveland. Nor will John McCain or Mitt Romney, the last two nominees. These former leaders would like it thought that high principle keeps them away from a GOP convention that would nominate Donald...

This will mark an historic turning point. The tension in Turkey has been intense. Not any more. Erdogan will now “cleanse the military,” as he put it. In other words, he will make sure that the military is never again able to defend what it considers to be its prime mandate: the secular democratic constitutional...

“Her mind is shot.” That was the crisp diagnosis of Donald Trump on hearing the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the possibility he might become president. It all began with an interview last week when the justice was asked for her thoughts on a Trump presidency. Ginsburg went on a tear. “I can’t...

Back when the Republican feedlot was full of wannabes for the next presidential nomination, this site published my little tongue-in-cheek pieces, “Looking for Mr. Republican” (Sept. 13, 2013) and  “Don’t Look Any Further, Mr. Republican Has Been Found” (April 3, 2015), describing the ideal Republican candidate. First, he must be presentable and respectable—someone you would...

We’ve watched this movie before. We will soon watch it again. In mere minutes following the latest jihad attack in Nice—assuming another hasn’t occurred before this appears in print—the script had already written itself. Shockingly, it seems the perpetrator is—again!—a Muslim. What are the odds? Evidently, a Tunisian who moved to Nice is a “Frenchman.”...

Conservatives may be tempted to wonder whether it’s worth fighting.  In this soundbite, instant-dislike, tl;dr, flashsnipe, banal, fractious, impressionistic, politicized culture of ours, our instinct can be to retreat, to separate fully, to disengage.  I’ve been there, and when I have, I’ve been wrong.  So long as we are alive, there is ground to be...

After the massacre of five Dallas cops, during a protest of police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, President Obama said, “America is not as divided as some have suggested.” Former D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey, an African-American, says we are “sitting on a powder keg.” Put me down as agreeing with the...

When I awoke on Friday morning, I picked up the copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer delivered to my house and read the headline on the front page, above the fold: “Killing of black men ‘troubling.'”  The article referred to President Obama’s comments in Poland on the police killings of two black men in Louisiana...

Does Hillary Clinton possess the integrity and honesty to be president of the United States? Or are those quaint and irrelevant considerations in electing a head of state in 21st-century America? These are the questions put on the table by the report from FBI Director James Comey on what his agents unearthed in their criminal...

The outcome of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum on June 23 stunned the London-based elite class. It laid bare the deep chasm between Britain’s political and media machine and the alienated, angry and disillusioned majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to David Cameron’s miscalculation, hoi polloi used the opportunity to express their abiding dislike not only...