Articles by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
I am supposedly on holiday in Madrid. I take a break from politics, from public policy, from culture, and take in life in the country that I am visiting, but in Spain that means the bullfight. Las Ventas is the major league in Spanish bullfighting, and I am not disappointed in what I see. These are fine bullfighters and ferocious bulls, though I wish Spaniards would give more consideration to the safety of the bulls. This evening I saw six bulls slain, and two bulls pull up lame. At least those lame bulls did not taste the sword.
Published
May 21, 2019
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The Virtue Patrol is prowling around on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It hunts down racists, xenophobes, anti-feminists, homophobes and almost every kind of bigot except for bigots within its own ranks. Those bigots are exempt. If the Virtue Patrol were to attack its own kind what a spectacle that would be, but of course it would mean the end of the Virtue Patrol. So, the Patrol looks outward, never inward.
Published
May 14, 2019
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Has it ever been noted by the republic's historians — all of whom are Democrats save for a lone Republican who remains undercover somewhere in the Midwest — that one characteristic that distinguishes Democrats from Republicans is not very flattering to the Party of the Jackass.
Published
May 7, 2019
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Steve Moore, one of the oracles of free market economics, is President Donald Trump's choice for the Federal Reserve Board, and the long knives are out for him. Yet, I am told by conservatives everywhere not to worry. He is a shoo-in.
Published
April 30, 2019
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Over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal, Brian Lamb, the founder of C-Span, tendered a Solomonic statement in his valedictory interview after some 40 years before the television cameras. Said Mr. Lamb, "Lying is the word that I would use to describe this town." And he went on, "I don't know if it will ever stop. It's gotten worse rather than getting better, and both sides do it. You've got to listen very carefully to what they're saying." By "they" he meant politicians, journalists and practically anyone listening to them. He referred to the politically alive as, shall we say, the political class.
Published
April 23, 2019
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If a politician of Japanese extraction were addressing a "largely Japanese-American audience" and characterized the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor as "some people did something," would you think that those words diminished the loss of life and of property suffered by our country 78 years ago in the Pacific Ocean? I would, but apparently Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat, would not.
Published
April 16, 2019
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Well, I guess I have been right all along. Others have been saying that special counsel Robert Mueller was going to be swept up by the Kultursmog and become a tool of Hillary's conspiracy. She said Russian hackers were the cause of her defeat — see page 395 of "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign"— and she ordered her media to investigate.
Published
April 9, 2019
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I wonder if at the outset of his career back in woodsy Vermont Bernie Sanders — Crazy Bernie, as we say — ever imagined that years later at the age of 77 he would be running for president, have developed a taste for private jets, be the master of three homes, and run on a platform that included Medicare for All, Free College for All and a Minimum Wage of $15 an Hour for All, that and the rest of the Green New Deal with no hint of how he would pay for it. No one is making a very big issue of it that Crazy Bernie has already rung up a tab of trillions of dollars that the taxpayers will have to pay somewhere down the road.
Published
April 2, 2019
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Did you hear the rumor that The New York Times late last week spent over two pages on a front-page news story about the investor and philanthropist, Michael Steinhardt, being accused of sexual harassment? Well, it is more than a rumor. It is true, or at least it is true that seven women have come forward with such claims. I read the whole piece. Michael is a friend of mine, and I wanted to see what the old boy is charged with.
Published
March 26, 2019
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Have you heard the good news? Large numbers of students worldwide are going to be skipping school on Fridays until they educate us on the perils of global warming.
Published
March 19, 2019
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It was in the mid-1980s that I resuscitated the term "crack-up" and applied it to political movements that were not very healthy. I say I resuscitated the term because it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who first used it as a title for a 1945 collection of essays that were mostly personal and first published between the 1930s and 1940s. When he did finally crack up the term fell into disuse.
Published
March 12, 2019
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One of the greatest characters I have encountered in Washington died years ago. He was the legendary political operator Paul Corbin. He had worked for John F. Kennedy and more closely for Bob Kennedy. He was loyal to the Kennedys to the end, but after the Kennedys were assassinated he wandered. Eventually, he linked up with my lawyer, Bill Casey, President Ronald Reagan's head of the CIA. That is how I came to know Paul. We both admired Casey and I admired Paul. He was a shrewd observer of politics and a fabled practitioner of politics' darker arts. A rumor that has circulated about Paul for years is that he helped the Reagan team win the presidency.
Published
March 5, 2019
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I have been assiduously studying the case of Jussie Smollett, the chap who claims that two pro-Trump ruffians wearing MAGA hats accosted him on a Chicago street during one of the coldest nights of the year at 2 a.m. shouting anti-gay (Mr. Smollett is openly gay) and anti-black (Mr. Smollett is openly black) slurs at him while beating him and placing a noose around his neck, which he did not take off for hours, according to the police. Incidentally, Jussie's first name is not a typographical error. It is spelled with a "u," but it is pronounced as an "e" for reasons that have yet to be divulged. Perhaps it will be in the final police report.
Published
February 26, 2019
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Pope Francis is increasingly showing his hand. He came into the papacy promising to clean up the church, especially on matters of sexual abuse. In doing so, he raised hopes among the laity, especially in America and Latin America. He said all the right things or at least many of the right things. He traveled the world. Now it is increasingly obvious that he means none of it.
Published
February 19, 2019
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As President Donald J. Trump climbs to the highest approval rating he has reached in his presidency, we keep hearing about how much trouble he is in. He cannot possibly be re-elected, the critics tell us, while his approval rating rises above 50 percent and his disapproval rating detumesces.
Published
February 12, 2019
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Whatever is to be the ultimate fate of the wretched Gov. Ralph Northam of the great Commonwealth of Virginia, I wonder what he now thinks about those who use the term racism as loosely as he did in his race with Ed Gillespie. In his rabble-rousing 2017 campaign, he actually rebuked Mr. Gillespie for Mr. Gillespie's non-existent "racist rhetoric and fearmongering."
Published
February 5, 2019
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The Great Debate between President Donald J. Trump and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives came to a rather shabby end just before the book-reviewing sections of our great newspapers reviewed an anthropological marvel, "The Goodness Paradox." In this lively book, and in an earlier book, "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence," Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University, examines the extraordinary violence of chimpanzees.
Published
January 29, 2019
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Do you remember when rock 'n' roll took its turn for the worse? It was sometime in the 1960s when Bob Dylan and those in his thrall began singing songs about politics.
Published
January 22, 2019
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Do you recall back in July of 2016, when candidate Donald J. Trump brought down the house at a campaign press conference in Miami by jokingly pleading with the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton's emails?
Published
January 15, 2019
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As every public-spirited citizen of these United States knows by now, 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Published
January 8, 2019
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