A Cold Can of ‘America’
WASHINGTON — Because advertising is a barometer that often accurately measures America’s psychological atmosphere, attention must be paid to this: From May 23 through the presidential election,...
View ArticleThe Inaugural Address We Won’t Hear, But Should
WASHINGTON — The mere possibility of a Donald Trump presidency — gold-plated faucets in the house first occupied by John and Abigail Adams — will perhaps have a salutary effect. It might demystify an...
View ArticleBritain At The Crossroads
LONDON — Sixty-five years ago, what has become the European Union was an embryo conceived in fear. It has been stealthily advanced from an economic to a political project, and it remains enveloped in a...
View ArticleAn Independence Day for Britain?
LONDON — Leaders of the campaign to end Britain’s membership in the European Union hope that next month’s referendum will make June 23, 2016, a date as luminous in modern British history as May 3,...
View ArticleThe British Will Choose Their Destiny
LONDON — Sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of the House of Lords, watching the Thames flow, Lord Nigel Lawson explains that the June 23 referendum, which he hopes will withdraw Britain from the...
View ArticleBritain, too, is infected with political silliness
LONDON — Misery loves company, so refugees from America’s Republican Party should understand that theirs is not the only party that has chosen a leader who confirms caricatures of it while repudiating...
View ArticleThe Price Paul Ryan Has Paid
WASHINGTON — The Caligulan malice with which Donald Trump administered Paul Ryan’s degradation is an object lesson in the price of abject capitulation to power. This episode should be studied as a...
View ArticleIn Britain, Anti-Semitism Endures
LONDON — Of the fighting faiths that flourished during the ideologically drunk 20th century, anti-Semitism has been uniquely durable. It survives by mutating, even migrating across the political...
View ArticlePurdue Has The President America Needs
WASHINGTON — Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University, knows that no one in the audience is there to hear a commencement speaker. When, however, he addressed...
View ArticleWhen Party Establishments Mattered
WASHINGTON — Months before the 1940 Republican convention nominated Wendell Willkie, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s waspish daughter, said that Willkie’s support sprang “from the grass...
View ArticleRepublicans: Save Your Party, Don’t Give To Trump
“There’s an old adage about a vat of wine standing next to a vat of sewage. Add a cup of wine to the sewage, and it is still sewage. But add a cup of sewage to the wine, and it is no longer wine but...
View ArticleBritain’s Welcome Revival of Nationhood
WASHINGTON — The Leave campaign won the referendum on withdrawing Britain from the European Union because the arguments on which the Remain side relied made Leave’s case. The Remain campaign began with...
View ArticleThe Hinge Of The Great War
“See that little stream? We could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind.” — F. Scott...
View ArticleThe Corrupting Crusade Against ‘Corruption’
WASHINGTON — The progressive drive to broadly define and thoroughly eradicate political “corruption” has corrupted politics. But discord is not altogether pandemic in Washington, and last week a...
View ArticleThe Sobering Evidence Of Social Science
WASHINGTON — The report was so “seismic” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s word — that Lyndon Johnson’s administration released it on the Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the...
View ArticleIs Anemic Growth The New Normal?
ST. LOUIS — America’s economy has now slouched into the eighth year of a recovery that demonstrates how much we have defined recovery down. The idea that essentially zero interest rates are, after...
View ArticleThe Travesty Of Teacher Tenure
LOS ANGELES — The mills of justice grind slowly, but life plunges on, leaving lives blighted when justice, by being delayed, is irremediably denied. Fortunately, California’s Supreme Court might soon...
View ArticleGOP Minds Are At Sea — But Not The Right One
WASHINGTON — Neither the unanimous decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, nor China’s rejection of it, was surprising. The timing of it was, however, as serendipitous as China’s...
View ArticleA Wall Too High For The GOP?
WASHINGTON — Political conventions are echo chambers designed to generate feelings of invincibility, sending forth the party faithful with a spring in their steps and hope in their hearts. Who would...
View ArticlePence The Pliable
WASHINGTON — Crucial political decisions often concern which bridges to cross and which to burn. Donald Trump’s dilemma is that he burns some bridges by the way he crosses others. His campaign depends...
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