R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

E. Jean Carroll’s behavior is proof that mainstream media has gone mad

There are a lot of odd stories making the rounds these days. How about the odd stories that E. Jean Carroll has accumulated around her? Unlike any of the other commentators esteeming her of late, I have known her since the early 1960s, when I went to Indiana University with Jean, as she was then called.

July 2, 2019

Search for a ‘breakout moment’ in Democratic debates won’t serve the candidates well

What will happen Thursday night if former Vice President Joe Biden pulls his pants down in public on stage when it is finally his time to speak? I am told that he will have one minute to answer the first question, one minute. Moreover, so will all the other candidates. Apparently there will be a plenitude of one-minute answers whizzing through the Miami auditorium.

June 25, 2019

Democratic presidential 2020 hopefuls are the goofiest collection of mediocrities ever assembled

Last week I suggested that convicted felons would be running for the Democratic presidential nomination this year. Well, now it looks like that will not be the case.

June 18, 2019

Joe Biden flubs it by abandoning support for Hyde Amendment

It is increasingly difficult to be a Democratic presidential candidate.

June 11, 2019

‘Who you callin’ Fascist?’

For over two years now a peculiar combination of the media and the Democrats have been goading Donald Trump, always to painful effect — painful for both sides in this vituperative battle; but particularly painful to the media and the Democrats. Not much good has come of it.

June 4, 2019

It’s a moment for Boris Johnson

Well, the U.K.'s Prime Minister Theresa May has run out of gas. She is going to retire. Now the question is who will replace her.

May 28, 2019

The conservative concern for tradition is on full display at the bullfight

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.

May 21, 2019

‘What we now desperately need is a counter-revolution based on the importance of individuals’

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.

May 14, 2019

The Democrats’ sore loser syndrome

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.

May 7, 2019

Steve Moore confirmation battle will be less bloody if conservatives support him

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.

April 30, 2019

It was Jeff Sessions who ‘held the country together’

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.

April 23, 2019

Democrats appear to see nothing wrong with Ilhan Omar diminishing one of America’s great tragedies

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.

April 16, 2019

The Alger Hiss Democrats in Congress

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.

April 9, 2019

‘Limousine Liberals,’ have been replaced by ‘Sybaritic Socialists’ like Bernie Sanders

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.

April 2, 2019

The Gray Lady calls an end to the ‘free speech movement’

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.

March 26, 2019

The kids cut class to take aim at global warming, but who believes it was their idea?

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.

March 19, 2019

The left-wing crack-up

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.

March 12, 2019

After Michael Cohen serves his time, he can have a book contract and set off on the lecture circuit

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.

March 5, 2019

A job opening for Jussie Smollett

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.

February 26, 2019

What is in the pope’s hand?

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.

February 19, 2019