The Rise of Putinism

“Abe tightens grip on power as Japanese shun election.” So ran the page one headline of the Financial Times on the victory of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Sunday’s elections. Abe is the most nationalistic leader of postwar Japan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building up ...

Jonathan Gruber

Jonathan Gruber: Honest Liberal

Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved. Yet, something needs to be said in defense of Gruber. For while he groveled and confessed to the sin of arrogance, ...

A Russophobic Rant From Congress

Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government. Last week, the House passed such a resolution 411-10. As ex-Rep. Ron Paul writes, House ...

Who Are the Cowards Now?

In July of 1967, after race riots gutted Newark and Detroit, requiring troops to put them down, LBJ appointed a commission to investigate what happened, and why. The Kerner Commission reported back that “white racism” was the cause of black riots. Liberals bought it. America did ...

Chuck Hagel

Hagel Didn’t Start the Fire

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran and the lone Republican on Obama’s national security team, has been fired. And John McCain’s assessment is dead on. Hagel, he said, “was never really brought into that real tight circle inside the White House that makes all ...

Did We Vote for War?

“How do you like the Journal’s war?” So boasted the headline of William Randolph Hearst’s New York flagship that week in 1898 that the United States declared war on Spain. While Hearst’s Journal, in a circulation battle with Joe Pulitzer’s World, was a ...

The New South—Black and Conservative

In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators and 82 Democratic House members signed a Southern Manifesto pledging to resist the integration of Southern public schools as ordered by Earl Warren’s Supreme Court. Only two GOP House members, both from Virginia, signed. The American South was as solidly ...

Terrorism & ‘The True Believer’

“A mass movement,” wrote Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer,” “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. “Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, ...

Pope Francis

The Price of Papal Popularity

Normally a synod of Catholic bishops does not provide fireworks rivaling the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s boys in blue ran up the score on the radicals in Grant Park. But, on Oct. 13, there emanated from the Synod on the Family in Rome a 12-page ...

Christopher Colombus

Goodbye, Columbus

In 1492, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and discovered the New World. And Oct. 12 was once a celebrated holiday in America. School children in the earliest grades knew the date and the names of the ships on which Columbus and his crew had sailed: the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. ...