With McCain set to win in most of the states on Super Tuesday, there are desperate, rather vain, last-ditch efforts to either throw all anti-McCain support to Romney, embark on a fight-to-the-death insurgency “strategy” or, most revealingly, to declare all McCain voters to be little more than the spawn of the devil and to prepare for the future by pushing for … [Read More]

The most appalling thing to come out of the Florida primary this week was not John McCain’s victory over Mitt Romney. Instead, it came in the days immediately before the vote, when McCain attacked Romney for his supposed “weakness” in supporting the Iraq war.  Romney had made a statement about “timetables and milestones” in the context of Iraqis meeting political benchmarks. … [Read More]

In the last few months, it was common enough to see people invoking the apocryphal quote attributed to Martin Luther, “It is better to be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.” It would take something like a foolish Christian, knowing what someone in the early 16th century could have learned about the status of Christians under the sovereignty … [Read More]

“Just because you didn’t find every Easter egg doesn’t mean that it wasn’t planted.”  So said Mike Huckabee about the lack of WMDs in Iraq at the Thursday night Republican debate in Florida.  He then later suggested in an interview that the missing weapons had been secreted into Jordan. That would probably come as a shock to King Abdullah. Huckabee distinguished … [Read More]

There is a developing conventional wisdom that Mitt Romney primarily appeals to and represents “economic conservatives” within the Republican coalition, a view that has not been shaken very much by the candidate’s interventionist promises to quintuple government spending on technology research to benefit Michigan’s battered auto industry. Romney backers seem to be unfazed by this, just as his record of signing … [Read More]

The answer to this question seems to differ wildly depending on who is responding and when in the last year they have been giving the answer. There is a virtual consensus of pundits and activists at major magazines, think tanks, and community blogs and on radio shows on the right who find Huckabee not merely undesirable, but deeply threatening and, in … [Read More]

At first glance, it is a very encouraging sign for conservatives that the Giuliani campaign is now strapped for cash and on its last legs. During much of last year, we have been treated to the spectacle of putatively conservative people engaging in all kinds of intellectual contortions to justify their support for the power-hungry, pro-abortion, hegemonist former mayor. Last March, … [Read More]

In the bizarre world where Hugh Hewitt and Mitt Romney reside, successfully executing an early-state strategy matters only when your main opposition is supposed to be someone pursuing a delayed, “national” strategy ... even though your claim to be viable and electable rests heavily on being able to win those early contests. Leave aside that it is precisely because your opponent … [Read More]

Since his rise to the Russian presidency in late 1999, Vladimir Putin has represented to the Western media and political class an infuriating obstacle that needs to be removed and a kind of politics that they regard as utterly abhorrent. Increasingly savage criticisms of Putin and his regime have over the past 4-5 years flooded the pages of a certain kind … [Read More]