R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

TYRRELL: Sex in the city

The facts keep changing. Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK to the cognoscenti), the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is nabbed by New York police on Saturday, having just boarded an Air France flight to Paris. Accused of sexually assaulting a maid at the Sofitel hotel back in Manhattan hours earlier, he is hustled off the plane. DSK, also the leading candidate against French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is taken into custody, is identified by his alleged victim in a police lineup, and lingers in a Manhattan holding cell. He undergoes some sorts of tests wherein DNA samples are taken from his fingernails and skin - he volunteers for this.

May 18, 2011

TYRRELL: Bin Laden’s last daze

It seems to me that our government had vastly more intelligence on what was going on in Obama bin Laden's ghastly hide-out before sending in SEAL Team 6 last week than they are telling us. President Obama told CBS that the odds in favor of Osama being in the compound were "at best" 55 percent. My guess is that they were closer to 100 percent.

May 10, 2011

TYRRELL: Papering over credit for bin Laden kill

I, in my innocence, was, in the aftermath of SEAL Team 6's disruption of Osama bin Laden's bucolic life in posh Abbottabad, reading editorial comment by the great newspapers of this republic. As always, the Wall Street Journal was superb, pausing to congratulate President Obama for "ordering a special forces mission rather than settling for another attack with drones or standoff weapons from afar." The Washington Post was, likewise, informative and appreciative of the president's prudent decision to let SEAL Team 6 do its thing, skirting the laws of a sovereign nation and acting unilaterally to put a bullet hole in bin Laden's head.

May 5, 2011

TYRRELL: Liberalism’s death croak

While inspecting the body politic, one encounters one clear sign that liberalism is dead. It is the condition of our political discourse. Polite commentators note that the dialogue is "rancorous." Some say toxic. Actually, it is worse than that. It is nonexistent. From the right, from the sophisticated right, there is an attempt to engage the liberals. Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, just did it by presenting a budget that cried out for intelligent response. President Obama's response was to invite Mr. Ryan to sit in the front row for Mr. Obama's "fiscal policy" speech at George Washington University. There, Mr. Obama heaped scorn on an astonished Mr. Ryan and his work. He did not even mention Mr. Ryan's name. This is what Mr. Obama calls an "adult" debate?

April 27, 2011

TYRRELL: Ryan to the rescue?

Why is it that Donald Trump is a creditable candidate with a significant segment of Republican voters? In some polls, he runs ahead of all Republicans save Mitt Romney, and all I have heard him say is that he wants to see our president's birth certificate. Imagine if he would ask to see budget cuts from the president or revenue enhancements.

April 20, 2011

TYRRELL: The Boone Pickens Bill

Last week was the culmination of a process begun years ago. A bill was introduced in Congress that can end American dependence on foreign oil. What is called the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act - more simply put, the Nat Gas Act - came to Congress on April 6. It had bipartisan support. It ought to pass and pass promptly. It could be called the Boone Pickens Bill.

April 13, 2011

TYRRELL: The race is on

I see that President Obama has filed as a candidate for re-election in 2012. I had suggested that he get to work early on his presidential library and forgo the race, but he is insistent. Well, I tried.

April 6, 2011

TYRRELL: Asserting the nonexistent

Monday night I attended a public policy discussion sponsored, not surprisingly, by the American Spectator - I say not surprisingly because I have been attending these meetings for roughly 30 years and always come away with fresh ideas. They are meant to ventilate ideas, and now that a presidential election is drawing near, we are inviting presidential candidates as our special guests to float their ideas by our assembled luminaries.

March 30, 2011

TYRRELL: Obama gives war a go

Well, it's official. The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has asked the Nobel Prize Committee to take back President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize owing to Mr. Obama's missile strikes in Libya. The head of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, also has weighed in, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is really in a snit. This is the best news Col. Moammar Gadhafi has had in weeks.

March 23, 2011

TYRRELL: Barbour out on the hustings

There finally are some rustlings on the hustings - you will pardon my attempt at poetry. Republican presidential hopefuls are moving about in places like Iowa and New Hampshire - does that clarify my admittedly amateur attempt at rhyme? I simply could not resist.

March 16, 2011

TYRRELL: National Public Radical

It is a bloodbath over at NPR. First this pinhead, Ron Schiller, resigns after initially being defended by NPR, then by the end of the day Tuesday, he's given the shuffalo to Buffalo. Then Vivian Schiller, no relation to Ron Schiller, resigns the next day as chief executive officer and president of NPR. Ron Schiller was caught on tape saying NPR did not need its subsidy from the federal government to survive, but I guess the board of directors of NPR is taking no chances. Off with both of the Schillers' heads.

March 10, 2011

TYRRELL: She touched you where?

A frotteur is someone - usually male - who takes aberrant pleasure in rubbing his fully clothed groin area against someone else - usually female - generally in a public place, say a subway, perhaps a funeral parlor. The frotteur is a pretty weird duck. The word is obviously French in derivation, and it unsurprisingly has an arty origin. Frottage is "the technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface" according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "as a point of departure for a work of art."

March 2, 2011

TYRRELL: Clinton and the episodic apologists

Frankly, I did not think of Chris Matthews as an episodic apologist until I watched his MSNBC documentary, "President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon," this week. The episodic apologists were a familiar fixture of the Clinton administration, much as the court historians were a fixture of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whereas the court historians could always be relied upon to spin history FDR's heroic way, the episodic apologists always end up slobbering all over the Clintons - albeit with a twist.

February 23, 2011

TYRRELL: Multiculturalism has failed

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has joined the chorus. The other day, he said, "My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure." The "it" was multiculturalism, and he was on French national television. In pronouncing multiculturalism defunct, the French president joins German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Spain's former Premier Jose Maria Aznar and, most recently, British Prime Minister David Cameron in heaving a failed policy into history's dustbin. The question is: What will replace it? Or actually, another question arises: How did multiculturalism ever become a policy of these European countries anyway?

February 16, 2011

TYRRELL: Super Bowl sucker punch

The other night while watching the Super Bowl, I became increasingly aware that the angry left might have a point about the giant corporations. Not that the game wasn't exciting. It was. Those quarterbacks can really heave the ball. Suddenly it is in their hands, and suddenly it is in a receiver's outreached arms, having passed through a forest of opposing players' arms.

February 8, 2011

TYRRELL: Obamacare’s creators sent slithering

My guess is that Judge Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Fla., is an amateur zoologist. Judge Vinson is the federal judge who ruled Monday that those who confected Obamacare cannot compel the citizenry to buy health insurance. Moreover, he found that the way the 2,700-page law was created, without any "severability clause," makes the entire law unconstitutional. The authors of Obamacare declared that without mandatory insurance, the whole bill was unworkable. Mandatory insurance is not severable from the law. Hence, Judge Vinson threw out the whole law because of the way it was constructed. Now it is up to the Supreme Court to breathe life into this legislation or bury it. I say RIP.

February 2, 2011

TYRRELL: Rahm’s Chicago-style politics

Every day, in every way, it becomes ever clearer that Rahm Emanuel's campaign for mayor of Chicago and mine have striking similarities. Rahm went off to Washington two years ago to pursue politics on the national stage. I left Chicago about 40 years ago to pursue politicians on the national stage, particularly huckster politicians. Two of my targets were Rahm's old boss Bill Clinton and his boss, Hillary.

January 27, 2011

TYRRELL: Books for the winter blues

I received a call the other day from an agreeable lady at C-SPAN, asking me to do a show with the network called "In Depth." It will take a lot of time, as C-SPAN wants to interview me on all the books I have written. Also, it will last three hours. That is a marathon. I can hardly listen for three hours, much less talk. Yet I have been a fan of C-SPAN for years, so I could hardly say no. Also, I am an advocate of the printed word. I want it to survive.

January 19, 2011

TYRRELL: Liberalism’s death knell keeps tolling

The evidence mounts that liberalism is dead. The liberal wizards, working their wonders at the New York Times and its clearinghouses in the major networks, cannot even dupe the American people with an absurd conspiracy theory anymore. In Dallas back in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, a pious communist awash in the Marxist-Leninist bilge, shot President John F. Kennedy. In no time, the liberals had the nation focused on the "dangerous right-wing atmosphere" supposedly pervading Dallas.

January 12, 2011

TYRRELL: Reinforcements are here

New Year's Day in Washington dawned gray, wet and cold. It was a perfect day for sightseeing, and so my wife and I decided to sightsee. We went to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home, named, incidentally, after a British admiral, Edward Vernon, by George's older half-brother. Upon inheriting the mansion, George never saw any reason to change the name, despite the British army's many acts of rudeness to him. George was a big enough guy not to bear a grudge.

January 5, 2011