Skip to content
TRENDING:
Donald Trump
Advertisement
Author profile
Wesley Pruden

Wesley Pruden

wpruden@washingtontimes.com

Wesley Pruden would have wanted to spend his final hours at his keyboard, deftly deflating the pompous, entitled and arrogant of the political establishment, and he came awfully close. The venerable Washington Times editor, columnist and journalism institution was found dead July 17, 2019, at his home, after putting in a full day at the newsroom on New York Avenue in Northeast D.C., where he had worked since 1982, four months after the newspaper's founding. He was 83.
His remarkable career began 67 years ago as a teenage copy boy in Arkansas, making him among the few old-school newsmen whose sharp political acumen, elegant writing style, and keen sense of the absurd allowed him to remain as relevant in the digital age as he was in the days when the rumpled shirts of reporters were splattered with ink.
To read his obituary, please CLICK HERE

Articles by Wesley Pruden

PRUDEN: Recycling the contempt

Recycling is so popular that even our congressmen, unaccustomed as they are to practicing what they preach, do it. They're reaching back into the dark past to recycle contempt. Never waste a crisis, even if you have to manufacture the crisis.

August 11, 2009

PRUDEN: An old dog keeps his teeth

No wonder the Democrats are dazzled, frazzled and confused. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are sitting on enormous majorities, but they're at the mercy of an obscure conservative congressman from rural Arkansas and a tiny band of Democratic dogs, some blue and some ol' yaller posing as the more fashionable blue. Bow, wow.

July 31, 2009

PRUDEN: A teaching moment in class warfare

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his friends - first among them President Obama - think the most celebrated arrest since Sacco and Vanzetti was all about race.

July 28, 2009

PRUDEN: The bigger the talk, the harder the fall

If Barack Obama really can walk on water, why is he standing hip deep in baby alligators? He's learning the oldest lesson in Washington, that presidents come to town thinking "nothing succeeds like success" and learn sooner than later that "nothing recedes like success."

July 21, 2009

PRUDEN: ‘Wise Latina’ routs gang of white men

Judged against the standard of the U.S. Senate, maybe Sonia Sotomayor has a point. "A wise Latina" certainly came across smarter than most of those white men on the Judiciary Committee.

July 17, 2009

PRUDEN: Franken, a clown for all seasons, arrives in time

We've never had an Official U.S. Senate Pornographer before, though pornographic behavior is frequently the entertainment provided to the public by the world's oldest deliberative body. So Al Franken, the answer to Harry Reid's prayer, should fit right in.

July 14, 2009

PRUDEN: Ministry of Apology would cure all ills

What the country needs now is a new bureaucracy to manage the growing appetite for apologies, amends and remedies for various other slights. The apology could be the lasting legacy of Barack Obama.

July 10, 2009

PRUDEN: Big overflight news suddenly in the air

Barack Obama landed Monday in Moscow, the first stop on his latest magical mystery tour, this time to eliminate nuclear weapons, cool global warming, drop in on the pope at the Vatican (perhaps to apologize for the Inquisition) and make a call on his ancestral Africa (perhaps to apologize for slavery).

July 7, 2009

PRUDEN: Ol’ Stupid begins to notice things

Too bad for Barack Obama and the Democrats, but George W. Bush is the shrinking man of American politics, growing ever smaller on the far horizon. Merely invoking his name will soon no longer frighten women and horses.

July 3, 2009

PRUDEN: America’s Princess Di moment

Good career move. The Hollywood assessment of the death of Elvis Presley 30 years ago eerily applies to Michael Jackson, too. Every great entertainer knows it's important to get off the stage before the hook.

June 30, 2009

PRUDEN: Shriek of outrage

Before there was Fox News, before there was the Internet, before there was talk radio, before there was a wide range of opinion magazines, there was only a barren wasteland of tired, tedious columnists and Op-Ed pages, all repeating the same dreary line of conventional (liberal) wisdom. That was even before the liberals, having ruined one perfectly good word, started calling themselves "progressives."

June 29, 2009

PRUDEN: The hot one from the Democrats

You can't blame the Democrats for hurrying to enact their hot-air legislation. The public is finally paying attention, recognizing the global warming crisis for what it is, a giant scam that will cost every American plenty. The globe isn't warming - it's actually cooling, in fact - and there's no crisis.

June 26, 2009

PRUDEN: Stopping the bomb what counts

Raw numbers don't mean very much in the Middle East, where running into the streets to demonstrate, usually but not always against the Great Satan, is the national sport. It's more fun than evening prayers at the mosque.

June 23, 2009

PRUDEN: Obama feels the clenched fist

Silver linings are deceptive and often hard to find, but that might be a tiny sliver of silver in that dark cloudbank over Iran. Barack Obama got notice from the election results that his tongue, golden and honeyed though it may be, is no match for reality.

June 16, 2009

PRUDEN: When discontent stalks the land

Suddenly it's the summer of everyone's discontent, and we're not even to the Fourth of July. The Democrats are plotting mutiny over Nancy Pelosi's vast and costly scheme to make the weather behave. Bankrupt General Motors gets a new president who says he doesn't know anything about cars. Barack Obama wants the feds to decree how much an executive should be paid for his work. The president's erstwhile pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is baaaack, with more tall tales of Jewish perfidy. Hil and Bill (he no longer gets top billing even at home) not only can't elect a governor of Virginia but can't even get a pal elected the a state legislature, and Barney Frank, ever alert to the sight of a camera, walks out of a television interview.

June 12, 2009

PRUDEN: Every man had to be a hero

The reunion of old soldiers becomes ever more poignant as the boys of an earlier summer move closer to the shadows that eventually embrace us all. The old battlefields that once commanded the rapt attention of everyone become remembrance colored in fading shades of sepia.

June 9, 2009

PRUDEN: ‘Inner Muslim’ at work in Cairo

Now it's on to Normandy, to apologize to the Germans. It's the least an American president can do after the way the Allied armies left so much of Europe in rubble. There's a lot of groveling to do for what America accomplished in the Pacific, too.

June 5, 2009