With President Bush’s State of the Union speech and the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic primaries behind us, the election year is underway, and the choice could not be starker. The Democrats are obviously eliminating all moderates and anyone who espouses support for the campaign in Iraq, and Bush, for his part, is openly defiant. […]

As much as he deserves credit for his bold foreign policy, the President deserves criticism for a total lack of restraint in domestic spending, and, as much as they wish, administration apologists cannot lay it off on wartime spending as the culprit. As the Heritage Foundation reports, since 9-11-01, 55% of the total federal spending […]

In my view, President Bush’s re-election prospects depend less on our success in Iraq than on his success on the domestic front, read broadly to include the economy of course, but also spending and other aspects of domestic policy. Frankly, although they have been relatively muted in their criticism, much of it so far has […]

As I write during the final days of the California gubernatorial recall campaign, we are yet to know the outcome and what it will mean for the political future of that state and its implications for the national elections. However, regardless of the results of the election (and incidentally, as a social conservative, I don’t […]

Once again, I am intrigued by E. J. Dionne, who believes that the passage of President Bush’s tax cut bill is a watershed in American politics because of the raw partisanship (he calls it “hyperpartisanship”) it demonstrates. I have news for him—elections have consequences—and I am reminded of John F. Kennedy’s remark shortly after his […]

Contrary to much of the mainstream commentary on the November 2002 election, it was very much about ideas—right ones and wrong ones. Shortly after the election, James Howard Gibbons wrote an editorial in The Houston Chronicle entitled “How a Tiny Tribe Won All the Marbles”, a screed about how the forces of evil, i.e., Republicans, […]

I’m not sure I’ve seen a more egregious example of the tyranny of the majority (the greatest fear of our founders) than the gross violation of the rule of law now unfolding in the U. S. Senate election in New Jersey. As I write, the U. S. Supreme Court has not responded to the Republican […]

“If the choice is between doing too much and nothing at all, I’ll choose the latter every single time.”—Jonah Goldberg “If you see ten problems rolling down the road, nine of them will roll into the ditch before they hurt you.”—Calvin Coolidge Thank God Congress will soon be in recess! Maybe back in “flyover country” […]

If, as I believe, one of a President’s key responsibilities is to be “teacher-in-chief”, George Bush was in top form for his State of the Union message. Plainer words are rarely as well spoken by a political leader and critical passages of the speech about war and the evil we face could not have been […]

About a week ago, I happened to read a “letter to the editor” from former Senator Bob Dole that really resonated. In it, he laments the confusion of the media in its failure to reflect the concerns of most Americans in reporting current events. In part, Dole says, “Perhaps I’ve lost touch with the soul […]