R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

TYRRELL: Nat Gas Act is no boondoggle

The other day, the estimable Wall Street Journal editorial board took issue with the equally estimable T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oilman, over the Nat Gas Act. The Journal argued with its customary lucidity that Mr. Pickens' idea of subsidizing natural gas, even for a short period, was ill-advised. To my mind, the Journal left one argument out, to wit: national security.

February 29, 2012

TYRRELL: Foster Friess’ joke

There is another horripilation on the campaign trail. Someone has told a joke that has roused the virtue police. I am speaking of the virtue police who are working for the grim forces of political correctitude. They do not find the joke very funny. The jokester is a supporter of Rick Santorum's, and now he, too, is on the hot seat for it. Late last week, his supporter, the amiable Foster Friess, perpetrated the joke.

February 22, 2012

TYRRELL: Time for Newt to go

There is a grisly pallor that has beset former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. When he walks into a room, I feel rather sorry for him, but then I feel rather sorry for Bill Clinton, too, and for Hillary. No longer do I call her "Bill's lovely wife, Bruno." She looks grandmotherly rather than tough.

February 15, 2012

TYRRELL: Delousing of a movement

As the tents were coming down at McPherson Square, the dead rats and mice being retrieved, the urine and feces and filthy bedding disposed of by D.C. employees dressed in hazardous-materials suits like their contemporaries at Fukushima, Japan, I thought of the left-wing press. You see, I read the left-wing press.

February 8, 2012

TYRRELL: Exit Newt

Ah, yes, Newt Gingrich did in the last days before the Florida primary precisely what I predicted he would do. He hurled wild charges at Mitt Romney that suggested Newt was losing his grip. He charged Mr. Romney with lying and falling into the hands of George Soros and Goldman Sachs, and he did this while seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

February 1, 2012

TYRRELL: Our Bill Clinton

How long have I been saying it? At least for 15 years, but in private I have been aware of it longer. Newt Gingrich is conservatism's Bill Clinton, but without the charm. He has acquired wit, but he has all the charm of barbed wire.

January 25, 2012

TYRRELL: Obama vs. Christie and the future

Whose job would you want to have? Would it be President Obama's or Gov. Chris Christie's in the great state of New Jersey? Would it be President Obama's, whose budget woes are getting graver, or would it be Mr. Christie's, whose budget is at least looking to be survivable?

January 19, 2012

TYRRELL: Taking a knee with Tebow

I have officially called off my boycott of the National Football League (NFL). I do not care how many felons or frotteurs play the game. Now there is Tim Tebow to redeem it. He can pass and run. He inspires his teammates. He inspires many returning fans like me. I shall follow him through the playoffs and maybe even next year as the season resumes anew. He is an American original - and he is controversial. I am for him.

January 10, 2012

TYRRELL: Progressive prance of the fat cats

An underlying theme of our times that has gone unperceived by the high and mighty in media, government and other locales where the politically alive come to roost is the thumping failure of an increasing number of counterproductive old progressive reforms.

January 4, 2012

TYRRELL: Right on Obama’s demise, wrong on Perry’s rise

The year 2011 has drawn to an end, and as I look back, I see several of my predictions that appear pretty sound. President Obama is dead in the water and will be beaten in 2012. I have made that prediction over and again this year, and I think it will be borne out. Another observation that I have made is that liberalism is dead.

December 28, 2011

TYRRELL: Return of the Episodic Apologists

They're back. I speak of the Episodic Apologists, who have been a phenomenon of the Clinton saga since its earliest days, back when the Clintons were flipping real estate and exchanging bad checks in Arkansas. The Episodic Apologists, like the legendary "court historians" of Franklin D. Roosevelt's time, are an essential ingredient of the era in which they labor.

December 21, 2011

TYRRELL: Wonks in the White House

Do you recall in reading President Truman's very good memoir, "Years of Trial and Hope: 1946-1952," his scholarly dissection of the Federal Reserve System and discussion of low inflation's influence on relatively unstable growth? Actually, I do not, either, and I read the book from cover to cover. Or how about Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who led our forces in vanquishing Hitler's war machine, became the first supreme commander of NATO and eventually president, serving until 1960?

December 14, 2011

TYRRELL: Republicans losing the tax debate

Do my eyes deceive me? It seems that the Republicans are in danger of losing the debate on cutting taxes. Some 30 years after President Reagan proved that tax cuts encourage economic growth, which enriches us all, glum figures like President Obama are roaming the land talking about the apolaustic lives of the very rich and the need to take their loot so we can all live better. Facts are facts: If you expropriated all the wealth from the top 1 percent, you would but dent our national debt, and then where would you get the money for next year and the year after that? Class warfare is not the answer.

December 7, 2011

TYRRELL: Bye-bye, Barney Rep. Frank shuffles off

When Barney Frank announced Monday that he was shuffling offstage after three decades in the congressional limelight, I was brought back to 1980, when some very thoughtful friends from Harvard told me to watch him. Paul H. Weaver had been an aide to Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, which was lustrous in those days, and rightly so. Paul was one of the brightest young neocons of his generation. I always took him seriously. He thought Rep. Frank was principled, stupendously intelligent and of good cheer - a wit. It seemed Mr. Frank was going to be another Daniel Patrick Moynihan or at least an Allard Lowenstein, the former congressman and principled liberal activist who had been murdered recently.

November 30, 2011

TYRRELL: Teddy Forstmann, a big-hearted prodigy

We lost a big-hearted prodigy on Sunday morning: Teddy Forstmann, financier, political player, philanthropist (especially for the young and in education) and a bit of an adventurer. I know. I accompanied him on some of his adventures and feared for my life. He was a member of the board of directors of the American Spectator in the 1980s and early 1990. He died of brain cancer, and we shall miss him.

November 23, 2011

TYRRELL: A foreign-born American patriot

The death of Fred Ikle last week inspires me to prophesy. Thus far, only the redoubtable Wall Street Journal has remarked on his passing. That he was a formidable mind during the Cold War and important to the peaceful settlement of that decades-long struggle is remembered thanks to the Journal. Yet to much of the rest of the media, he is a minor figure, perhaps a menacing figure. We shall see what they say, but I am not holding my breath. This is the way liberalism creates the Kultursmog, which is to say, the politicized culture that surrounds us.

November 16, 2011

TYRRELL: William F. Buckley Jr., still at Yale

Last weekend, I was given a hint as to how an erroneous idea is born and how it takes on a life of its own. I was at Yale University, as a guest of "The William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale." It is run by a group of extremely winning young Yale students who are all admirably conservative. Bill would approve. They all carried themselves like young ladies and young gentlemen. They were confident of their ideas and amused. One of their goals is to keep the name of William F. Buckley Jr. alive and a thorn in the side of Yale's smug liberal establishment.

November 9, 2011

TYRRELL: White House scandals in times past

A presidential election looms on the horizon and already the nation's great organs of opinion - and occasionally of fact - are gearing up to serve the commonweal and ever so quietly, their own biases.

November 1, 2011

TYRRELL: Those demonstrators in the park

It is called the Taranto Principle, and it is being employed by the Kultursmogists to blanket the country in a preposterosity: namely, that the Tea Partyers and the Occupy Wall Street crowd have much in common. So go ahead, loyal Democrats, and take up the occupiers' anger. Giving presidential voice to the occupiers' complaints will be a sure winner for President Obama in 2012.

October 26, 2011

TYRRELL: Cain blows up liberal creed on race

As an observer on the national scene lo these many years, I have noted time and again that in a discussion of politics, the first person to inject the topic of race into the discussion is often the racist. Though that person almost always affects to be without bigotry, in fact, he invariably is a racist and hopes to emerge from the fracas as the moral colossus. Those who have followed the careers of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Holiness Al Sharpton will get my drift. These frauds would have to be debating George Wallace to be the lesser racists and, frankly, I think the contests would be too close to call.

October 12, 2011