The Real Existential Threats of 2016

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 ...

Yes, the System Is Rigged

“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 ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin

Will Putin Get a Pulitzer?

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 ...

Is the Party Over for Bushism?

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 ...

Will Hillary Ditch Black Lives Matter?

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 ...

Will the West Survive the Century?

“Nativism ... xenophobia or worse” is behind the triumph of Brexit and the support for Donald Trump, railed President Barack Obama in Ottawa. Obama believes that resistance to transformational change in the character and identity of countries of the West, from immigration, can only be ...

Trolling for War with Russia

Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons,” they claim, “would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led ...

Islam & the West: Irreconcilable Conflict?

On Saturday night, Omar Mateen was a loner and a loser. Sunday, he was immortal, by his standards, a hero. Mateen had ended his life in a blaze of gunfire and glory. Now everybody knew his name. He had been embraced by ISIS. His face was on every TV screen. His 911 call to Orlando police ...

The Donald & The La Raza Judge

Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge? Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is ...

Houses of Parliament, London

Will There Always Be an England?

In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union—in terms Americans can understand. Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in ...