American Public Television announced this month that it was resurrecting (literally and figuratively) “The McLaughlin Group,” but you don’t need to be a political pundit — or even play one on TV — to understand why Sen. Doug Jones has been designated the most-endangered of the 34 Senate incumbents up for election in 2020.
Credit the comedian and HBO talk show host Bill Maher for being blunt. He has a gift for making text what is otherwise subtext.
There are reasonable objections to President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency to use military appropriations to build a barrier on the U.S.-Mexican border.
Sometimes the defeated deserve pity, but sometimes only retaliation satisfies.
We've seen unsavory brides in our time, Evita Peron, Imelda Marcos, Eva Braun and the bride of Frankenstein among them. Now comes a new and unfortunate addition to the annals of marital misfortune, "the "ISIS Brides" of the Middle East.
We've been told by Democrats presuming to know all about such things that open borders comprise a matter of high morality. What they don't say is that open borders are actually a matter of political power and money. As the 2020 census approaches, states are preparing to beat the bushes to turn up every last resident because the official tally will determine their number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, which translates into the size of each state's piece of the national funding pie. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, the difference between getting more and less could be determined by noncitizens, including illegal immigrants.
The petty internal squabbles and wars of the Europeans were once thought below the concern of Englishmen, our stuffy cousins across the waters. But members of both Conservative and Labor parties are fighting fiercely among themselves now over the wisdom — indeed, the propriety — of leaving the European Union.
The Hanoi summit was supposed to have been where, building on the goodwill (and not much else) of their meeting in Singapore eight months earlier, real progress would be made toward eliminating North Korea's nuclear-weapons program, and in return, granting sanctions relief. In the event, the Hanoi summit was the ultimate nothingburger.
The best-laid schemes of rats and politicians gang aft agley, as the poet Bobby Burns might put it, and this is a lesson that events have been trying to teach Democrats embittered by losing the 2016 election since shortly after all the votes were counted. But Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and their ilk in the big media just can't get a grasp on reality. The Cohen show this week was another bust.
If you're not driven mad by the incessant shocks of modern life, a wise man once observed, you must be insane.
You can tell a lot about a society and the culture by the people whom it venerates as heroes. Not so long ago in the United States military valor and other feats of physical and patriotic derring do were the ne plus ultra of what determined who became venerated. That's why the crime of "stolen valor" is there in the first place, by men (and sometimes women) who aren't veterans who want to bask in the glory and respect afforded actual heroes. Were American warriors not heroes, there would be no valor to steal.
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will be a nuclear-free North Korea. Many critics complain that the results of the Singapore summit in 2018, where President Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and exchanged polite words, were written in disappearing ink. Many of those critics are saying the same thing this time about a summit in Hanoi. Peace is elusive and the search for it often tedious, but "jaw jaw," as Churchill famously said, always beats "war, war."
When Iran not long ago accused the United States of an attack on elite Iranian forces in Iran's southeastern province of Baluchistan, the lie revealed just how severe some of the regime's problems have become. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rejected as "outrageous" Iranian claims that the United States and its regional allies were responsible for a suicide bombing that killed 27 members of the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Despite the administration's considerable effort to bring China to heel on trade, Beijing still threatens to get the better of us. This may change after President Trump meets with President Xi Jinping, both of whom have indicated a more balanced relationship may be coming soon.
Not everyone welcomes the 15 minutes of fame to which everyone is said to be entitled. Europeans disenchanted with the public spotlight dogging their Internet presence petition for the right to be forgotten. Hermits everywhere just want to be left alone. Americans simply claim they have a right to privacy.
The war of words opposing President Trump's relentless quest for a wall on the southern border has uncorked a flood of flapdoodle toward the fundamental security of the United States. Foolishness can sometimes be funny, but grins fade and eyes roll when the assault on common sense borders on the absurd.
The poisonous activism of social justice warriors has spread into the nation's corporate boardrooms. As activists — some might call them partisan troublemakers — on the outside decry the corruption and evildoing of big business, others have worked their way inside to offer resolutions to require companies to "do good," as the warriors define "good."
Anyone who turns on cable-TV news or looks over the front pages of most big-city newspapers could, unless they're wary of what they see and hear, think President Donald Trump's presidency is in dire peril, if not over.
The only thing President Nicolas Maduro has to offer the Venezuelan people now is more Marxist cruelty. He has plenty of that. His country is slowly starving to death, with vast stocks of food (and medicines) awaiting delivery from Colombia and Brazil just next door. The groceries have collected there, a gift from the largesse of the United States and dozens of other nations.
A meeting between Kim Jong-un and President Trump in Singapore in June is presented by the White House as something of a triumph by the president for defusing the possibility of conflict on the Korean peninsula.
Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, announced her candidacy for president the other day and several Republican colleagues were prominent among those who noticed. If the Republican side of the U.S. Senate were an oil field, Mrs. Klobuchar hit a gusher.
Spooks sometimes like to make up their own rules. They're often up against a ruthless enemy of the nation, and it's tempting to think anything goes. It's becoming clear now that certain officers within the U.S. intelligence community took considerable liberties with the tools of their trade to watch certain civilians inside the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
