The New York Times has written in explaining why the political parties have lost the confidence of the public: "Their machinery of intrigue, their shuffling evasions, the dodges, the chicanery and the deception of their leaders have excited universal disgust, and have created a general readiness in the public mind...

Neoconservatives, Reaganites and other militarily assertive factions in the United States are sometimes accused of thinking it is always 1938 (Britain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich) -- that there is always a Hitler-like aggressor being appeased and about to drag the world into conflict. There is sometimes merit in that...

With apologies to George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and their 1935 classic song, "Summertime" (and the living is easy):

Summertime,
And the living is queasy
Taxes jumpin'
And foreclosures are high

Over the past year, the Democrats fixed on what they thought was a devastating four-word slogan to defeat Republicans in 2010: "The Party of No." Unlike many campaign slogans, it was fair enough. After all, the Republicans had opposed almost unanimously all of President Obama's major bills (socialized health care,...

Abraham Lincoln:

"I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence."

Abraham Lincoln in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:

"That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty ... to the people of this country ......

Is it possible for an American president to carry out accidentally an isolationist foreign policy? That odd question crossed my mind last week as I talked with various foreign-policy experts about the Middle East, Russia and Afghanistan. There can be no doubt that by his words and his travels, President...

Since last summer, President Obama has publicly doubted whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai's corruption and incompetence make him a fit partner for our policy goals in Afghanistan. Now, according to Saturday's New York Times:

"Mr. Karzai (has) lost faith in the Americans and NATO to prevail in Afghanistan."

Regretfully, both...

In life, generally, honorable people play by the rules. This is particularly true in the United States Senate, which has historically defined itself by its adherence to its unique rules -- rather than, say, by its representational or proportional nature. And so, as we enter the confirmation process for Elena...

This country is divided into three parts concerning national politics. About a third think President Obama is moving in the right direction, with many of them impatient for the president to be bolder with his leftist agenda. Somewhere in the vicinity of 40 percent to 50 percent of Americans are...

Former President Bill Clinton last week inadvertently demonstrated Karl Marx's shrewd observation, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." The historical event in question is the attempt to deter by smearing a broad-based, popular, American anti-high-tax, anti-big-central government movement as likely to induce seditious violence against the government.

The Republican Party must break with its long-established cautious instincts and make a bold stand for first principles of freedom and constitutional limitations on government -- from full repeal of Obamacare to rolling back multitrillion-dollar deficits. This is not so much reproach of past Republican conduct as it is recognition...

Last summer, President Obama spent several months publicly anguishing over what he would or wouldn't do in Afghanistan. Finally, he agreed to ramp up troop levels but warned that he intended to start getting American troops out in 18 months. After anguishing in several columns over the president's anguishing, I...

The late, splendid Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously asserted, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." The senator was wrong. (Of course, for those of us who still believe that objectivity is objective, a fact is still a fact, though the heavens may fall.)

We are beginning to enter the Kansas-Nebraska Act stage of the socialist crisis of the republic. At our constitutional founding, the evil of slavery had been crudely evaded. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise was enacted, prohibiting the abomination north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes (about the middle of Missouri.)

In Tuesday's Financial Times, their healthcare headline read: "US falling into line with other nations--European-style system forecast: Cost controls have yet to be tackled."

OMG. Americans are to be turned into Euro-socialists.

My thoughts immediately flashed to the movie Invasion of the...

The president and the Democratic congressional leadership are fighting furiously to pass, with no Republican votes, the ever-less-popular health bill. An Associated Press poll last week shows that four in five Americans don't want the Democrats to pass a health care bill without bipartisan support, while almost all polls are...

The publishing of the Declaration of Independence 233 years ago by our Founders was responded to in London by two of the 18th century's greatest minds: Dr. Samuel Johnson (after whom a literary age was named) and Edmund Burke (the intellectual father of modern Anglo-American conservatism).

Dr. Johnson made the...

One of the sadder categories in the history of human misfortunes is the list of those things that are obvious, but wrong. By definition, if something is obvious, most people agree with it, and thus, it is likely to win the day -- but lose the verdict of history. The...

If you want to see broken government, consider the fall of the constitutional Roman Republic and the rise of Julius Caesar: "Fortune turned against us and brought confusion to all we did. Greed destroyed honor, honesty and every other virtue, and taught men to be arrogant and cruel, to neglect...

"No new ideas." That was the most prominent of the criticisms of Sarah Palin's speech at MSNBC's too-cool-for-school Morning Joe on Monday. The more general critique of former Gov. Palin's future was that while she certainly had star power, she could never speak to more than a fraction of even...