R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

TYRRELL: Return of a Weiner?

I see that the stalwarts of reform politics throughout the city of New York have been given reason for hope and change. It is reported that former Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (pronounced as you might expect) is testing the waters for a return to public life.

July 18, 2012

TYRRELL: Lifelines and life jackets

WHITEFISH POINT, MICH.

July 11, 2012

TYRRELL: Roberts’ foxy rule

I have a headache. I imagine you do too, if you have been trying to interpret the legalese employed by those sages who have pronounced on Thursday's Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. I would rather read the lyrics of a thousand rap composers than the anfractuous language of one legal sage.

July 4, 2012

TYRRELL: Another Olympic bellyflop

The Summer Olympic are upon us, and already they are spoiling things for those of us who like our summers restful and given over to reasonable pageantry, particularly pageantry in London.

June 27, 2012

TYRRELL: God and FDR at war

Warren Kozak, the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay," wrote a memorable piece in the Wall Street Journal on June 6 that cries out for comment.

June 20, 2012

TYRRELL: Taking the measure of Lyndon Johnson

One of my favorite controversialists is back - Bob Woodward - with his sidekick, Carl Bernstein. Sunday in The Washington Post, they wrote that Richard Nixon was more hideous than we have heretofore known.

June 13, 2012

TYRRELL: No hope in political no man’s land

Frankly, I wish the Pew Research Center would occasionally keep its thoughts to itself. Sometimes those thoughts are merely insipid and beneath the attention of serious minds. Sometimes they are alarming and capable of stirring up an already excitable populace.

June 6, 2012

TYRRELL: All the Romney trivia that’s fit to print

Did I waste my time last Sunday? In the morning, I was reading the New York Times, acquainting myself with precisely how the rich and famous live. The editors of the New York Times chose this story for its front page so I figured they thought it important.

May 30, 2012

TYRRELL: Not debating liberalism

Here I am on the campaign trail, frenetically promoting my book, "The Death of Liberalism." I appear on scores of radio interviews, in and out of the studio. I appear on Fox News and C-SPAN.

May 23, 2012

TYRRELL: Dirty days ahead

I first heard it two, perhaps 2 1/2 years ago. A sage sitting in his New York City office pronounced it. Said the sage to me: "This is going to be the dirtiest presidential campaign in history."

May 15, 2012

TYRRELL: Conrad Black’s example

Conrad Black is back in Canada. He controlled the third-largest string of English-language newspapers in the world before he became embroiled with the U.S. Justice Department. For his friends, it was a terrible loss. We missed him, and we have missed his newspapers.

May 8, 2012

TYRRELL: Osama bin Laden, one year later

It has been a year since Osama bin Laden became a ghost courtesy of U.S. Navy SEALs. I had long since come to the conclusion that Osama had become crepes suzette for the worms back in Tora Bora in December 2001, and I was somewhat stubborn in my belief.

May 1, 2012

TYRRELL: Taking the Secret Service scandal personally

When you have a young woman screaming in a hallway about some sort of grievance she has with you, you have a problem. Even a Secret Service agent, surrounded by his buddies, has a problem. I know about this sort of thing from my work in the archives pursuant to my researches as a presidential historian.

April 25, 2012

TYRRELL: All the angry liberals

I was innocently making my way through the weekend newspapers when I came upon a "think" piece in The Washington Post by a dreamer named Chris Mooney, a self-confessed "liberal." Yes, he actually admitted to it.

April 18, 2012

TYRRELL: Whither the Tea Party?

All is bleak. All is woe. I speak of the Tea Party movement, the movement of 2009 and 2010 that was the hot news story of those years and led to the Republican rout of the Democrats in 2010. Now the Tea Party movement is, according to media reports, in decline.

April 11, 2012

TYRRELL: Mitt, the normal guy

There are some campaign advisers who would counsel former Gov. Mitt Romney to jog tirelessly on the campaign trail, probably in short pants and with a catchy T-shirt emblazoned with some memorable phrase, a la Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

April 4, 2012

TYRRELL: Paul Ryan’s budget express

As America rings up another $3 tril- lion-plus budget - almost a historic peacetime 25 percent of gross national product (GDP) - and borrows another $1.3 trillion to pay for it, one should not be surprised that the usual mob of special pleaders is fuming at anyone who has the temerity to suggest a sane alternative. These are the new Democrats, and they do not mind putting us on the road to Greece.

March 28, 2012

TYRRELL: Overextended America

We in America today live in a country circumscribed by entitlement policies devised by an America that has steadily been disappearing. Those policies established more than a generation ago cannot possibly - in mathematical or demographic terms - support the America of the present, much less the America of the future. That is the stark reality.

March 21, 2012

TYRRELL: High cost of free speech

For a couple of years now, I have been talking about the Kultursmog, the utterly polluted state of our political culture. Those who pollute it are liberals. Kultursmog is the only form of pollution they approve of, but they approve of it mightily, and, of course, they are the chief contributors to its noxious fumes. Now they are using it to kill off an American value prized by millions of Americans down through the centuries: free speech. As I say in another context, we are watching the death of liberalism.

March 14, 2012

TYRRELL: Ms. Fluke’s fluke

I like to think of Sandra Fluke's contretemps with the madly admired Rush Limbaugh as, well, a fluke. She objected to his joke about her being "a slut" and "a prostitute," and, hesto presto, the part-time Georgetown University law student struck pay dirt. You object to my characterization of her as "part-time"?

March 7, 2012