It is always dangerous to be right, noted Voltaire, in matters where the established authorities are all wrong. In 2002, barely a year after the attacks of 9/11, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, three papers that rarely agree editorially on anything more ...
There are very few things I'm sure of in the latest, and worst, chapter in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation saga. It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book in which every chapter ends with a thud at the bottom of an old well or the clanking shut of a dungeon door. What if Christine Blasey ...
WASHINGTON -- In one of Brett Kavanaugh's responses to allegations that he sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl when he was in high school, a charge he has denied "categorically and unequivocally," he suggested that, perhaps, this was a case of mistaken identity. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a ...
While questioning Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh about abortion during his Senate confirmation hearings, Senator Dianne Feinstein grossly misstated statistics about abortion deaths before Roe v. Wade. "In the 1950s and 1960s, two decades before Roe, deaths from illegal abortions in this ...
Ten years ago, after making piles of money gambling with other people's money, Wall Street nearly imploded, and the outgoing George W. Bush and incoming Obama administrations bailed out the bankers. America should have learned three big lessons from the crisis. We didn't, to our continuing ...
The mantra "It's the economy, stupid," propelled Bill Clinton's candidacy during the presidential campaign in 1992. His decision to highlight the nation's then-struggling economy (and promise to fix it) helped him win the White House. One theme in this year's midterm elections is the renewed ...
WASHINGTON -- After several days of showboating and judicial hazing, Democrats pulled out their biggest weapon against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh -- a letter from an anonymous woman claiming sexual misconduct in high school. There are no words -- except perhaps desperate, scurrilous ...
If Franz Kafka had written about confirmation hearings, he couldn't have come up with a better scenario than the one now unfolding in the U.S. Senate. Brett Kavanaugh, who the day before yesterday was an unimpeachable pillar of the legal establishment, stands accused of a heinous offense that ...
WASHINGTON -- Should an unaccountable United Nations court, created by a treaty to which the United States is not a signatory, and that the Senate has not ratified, be allowed to investigate, try and imprison American citizens? Unfortunately, this is no longer a theoretical question. In ...
President Donald Trump is showing that it's possible to preside over a period of peace and prosperity and still be notably unpopular. Over the past several months, Trump has opened even more of a wedge between the largely benign material conditions in the country and his own political ...
The one Manafort juror to go public, Paula Duncan, was a strong supporter of President Trump. She voted for him in 2016, and she apparently plans to vote for him again in 2020. “I did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty,” she said after the trial in an interview on Fox News. “but he ...
In our highly polarized era, we too often judge election results from the confines of partisan politics. That's not nearly as useful on the state and local levels, where elected officials have roads to fix, kids to educate and budgets to balance. Voters want people who can do the job. Ideology ...
WASHINGTON -- The beginning of another academic year brings the certainty of campus episodes illustrating what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, distinguished professor and venerated politician, called "the leakage of reality from American life." Colleges and universities are increasingly susceptible to ...
A prediction. When the history of this era is written, when future generations wonder how a mostly educated and largely literate nation became mired in "truthiness," when they ask how we became so mentally muddled that we lost the ability to identify facts and the capacity to care, they'll ...
On the day after his inauguration, Donald Trump gave a speech at CIA headquarters. He lied about the number of people attending his inauguration, claiming the crowd was far larger than it was. He also lied about the media, falsely accusing journalists of manufacturing his feud with the ...
HOUSTON -- Nationally, the Democratic Party, which gave indispensable assistance ("Basket of deplorables"!) to the election of today's president, seems intent ("Impeach!"; "Abolish ICE!"; "Free stuff!", "I am Spartacus!") on a repeat performance. Here, however, in the 7th Congressional ...
When I was running for Congress in 2012, a very nice couple who lived among the rolling hills of Augusta County offered to hold an event for me to meet-and-greet their friends and neighbors. They excitedly told me that their group would include some of their Republican friends from their ...
The economic recovery is really beginning to reach into Trump country. The president is famous for his extravagant promises, involving, invariably, the biggest and the best. The landscape is littered with examples, although he never promised to create blue-collar jobs at the fastest clip since ...
Supreme Court confirmation hearings have mostly been theater for a long time. The dismaying thing about the latest episode -- the Brett Kavanaugh show -- is that it became the theater of the absurd. In the classic absurdist dramas of the 1950s and 1960s, Brittanica.com explains, European ...
Yale Law School, from which Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh got his law degree, issued a statement about him with glowing quotes from professors attesting to his impeccable legal credentials. Perhaps the Yale Law faculty deemed his credentials impeccable because he graduated from Yale ...