THE WASHINGTON TIMES

EDITORIAL: Obama’s quickie

Counterinsurgency is a marathon, but President Obama wants to sprint. The most troubling aspect of Mr. Obama's strategy for Afghanistan is the cramped timeline for his surge. He wants a quick in and out. The 30,000 new troops he is sending as reinforcements will be rushed into theater in the spring of 2010, and the drawdown will commence in July 2011. The message to Afghans is that this president lacks the will to sustain the fight.

December 3, 2009

EDITORIAL: Vindicating White House gate-crashers

Michaele and Tareq Salahi don't deserve the scorn that has been heaped upon them for crashing President Obama's first state dinner. Their reality-show-fueled and Facebook-promoted life of social climbing isn't some twisted celebrity-seeking aberration. Rather, it is a reflection of the aspiration for equality held dear by all Americans and represents all that is best about the Democratic Party populism that brought Mr. Obama to power in the first place.

December 2, 2009

EDITORIAL: Obama in handcuffs

Imagine if President Obama went to Oslo next week to receive his Nobel Peace Prize and was arrested for purported war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This bit of historical irony would be possible under an argument being made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Mr. Ocampo claims jurisdiction over actions of U.S. troops in Afghanistan because Kabul in 2003 acceded to the Rome Statute, which established the court. He said a preliminary examination already is under way regarding possible American culpability in crimes against humanity.

December 2, 2009

EDITORIAL: Universities take action on Climategate

The Obama administration might think Climategate is a nonevent, but on Monday, Pennsylvania State University announced it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, director of the school's Earth System Science Center. Yesterday, it was announced that Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, would step aside while his university conducts an investigation. With so much fraud being exposed in the academic community that studies and promotes global-warming theories, an example has to be made of someone.

December 2, 2009

EDITORIAL: Save the SEALs

In the latest absurdity in the war on terrorism, Petty Officers Matthew McCabe, Jonathan Keefe and Julio Huertas face charges related to the apprehension of Ahmed Hashim Abed, alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four American security contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. The "war crime" at issue is a punch in the gut.

December 1, 2009

EDITORIAL: Denying the global-cooling cover-up

President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, claims that Climategate is not important and that global warming is settled science. "[The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has] been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," she said last week, six days after the scandal first broke about fudged global-warming research.

December 1, 2009

EDITORIAL: Huck’s sin

The tragic news of the murder of four police officers in Washington state Sunday morning is worse because the deaths were preventable. The suspected murderer was walking free despite a long history of violent crimes.

December 1, 2009

America’s Morning News

In case you didn't tune into The Washington Times' nationally syndicated radio show, "America's Morning News" - heard in Washington on WTNT-AM 570 and coast-to-coast via the Talk Radio Network - find out what two of Monday's guests told co-hosts Melanie Morgan and John McCaslin.

December 1, 2009

EDITORIAL: Schoolyard bullies

Imagine what the outcry would be if the House of Representatives somehow passed a bill outlawing charter schools nationwide and, before the Senate had even considered the bill, officials throughout government began writing to school districts telling them to start planning to eliminate charters. The backlash would be enormous. How dare they pressure school districts to kill charter schools before the law actually has changed?

November 30, 2009

EDITORIAL: The $300 million Louisiana purchase

Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, Louisiana Democrat, provided one of the last two votes needed to bring the government health care takeover to the Senate. She didn't even blush about selling her vote. "I am not going to be defensive. And it's not a $100 million fix. It's a $300 million fix," Mrs. Landrieu bragged on Nov. 21. This gross windfall will flood into her state through added benefits in the health care bill. This is government at its worst.

November 30, 2009

EDITORIAL: Rationing grandma’s health care

President Obama has angrily denounced those who warned that Democratic health care proposals will reduce Medicare benefits. "Medicare is another issue that's been subjected to demagoguery and distortion during the course of this debate," he said during the course of his Sept. 9 address to Congress. After all, he promised that if people liked their Medicare and Medicaid coverage, "nothing" will "change the coverage or the doctor you have" and "the only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud." That simply is not the case.

November 30, 2009

EDITORIAL: Death tax redux

The Obama administration and its congressional allies have a pretty straightforward choice when it comes to the death tax, which Democrats like to call the estate tax. They can set aside their ideological fixation, kill off the counterproductive death tax and reap a harvest of jobs before the 2010 elections, or they can stick to their fixation on robbing the productive rich at the cost of a bigger political bloodbath in 11 months.

November 29, 2009

EDITORIAL: Barbie converts to Islam

Western culture has lost another battle in the clash of civilizations as Barbie dons the burqa. Burkha Barbie, by Italian designer Eliana Lorena, will be among the dolls auctioned by Sotheby's in a benefit for the nongovernment charity Save the Children. The message to little girls worldwide: Abandon all hope.

November 29, 2009

EDITORIAL: Terrorist conflicts at Justice Department

When considering how to handle captured terrorist suspects who represent an existential threat to America, the U.S. government owes the American people the fullest measure of reassurance that decisions are made by people without any conflicts of interest. In that light, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are right to demand that the Justice Department fully disclose the backgrounds of the lawyers making the decisions in these cases.

November 29, 2009

EDITORIAL: The true meaning of Xmas

Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday has arrived. With the Christmas season now semiofficially upon us, tradition dictates that consumers flood shopping malls and online marketplaces to buy everything in sight. At the same time, politically motivated busybodies stop at nothing to distract from, deny or delete any references to that Jesus guy who may or may not have inspired the holiday known as Xmas. The "X" stands for we can't remember what.

November 27, 2009

EDITORIAL: The global-cooling cover-up

The climate-gate revelations have exposed an unprecedented coordinated attempt by academics to distort research for political ends. Anyone interested in accurate science should be appalled at the manipulation of data "to hide the decline [in temperature]" and deletion of e-mail exchanges and data so as not to reveal information that would support global-warming skeptics. These hacks are not just guilty of bad science. In the United Kingdom, deleting e-mail messages to prevent their disclosure from a Freedom of Information Act request is a crime.

November 27, 2009

EDITORIAL: Thanks for our abundance

Since when did Thanksgiving become a time for suffering limitations? Coming hard on the heels of NBC's annual Green Week, we are hearing the now commonplace annual buzz about making this year's Thanksgiving eco-friendly and sustainable. It is another liberal plot to suck the joy out of life.

November 26, 2009

EDITORIAL: A call to prayer and repentance

As the safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety without which social happiness can not exist nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed; and as this duty, at all times incumbent, is so especially in seasons of difficulty or of danger, when existing or threatening calamities, the just judgments of God against prevalent iniquity, are a loud call to repentance and reformation; and as the United States of America are at present placed in a hazardous and afflictive situation by the unfriendly disposition, conduct, and demands of a foreign power, evinced by repeated refusals to receive our messengers of reconciliation and peace, by depredations on our commerce, and the infliction of injuries on very many of our fellow-citizens while engaged in their lawful business on the seas - under these considerations it has appeared to me that the duty of imploring the mercy and benediction of Heaven on our country demands at this time a special attention from its inhabitants.

November 26, 2009

EDITORIAL: The duty of a nation to obey God

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor - and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

November 26, 2009

EDITORIAL: Obama’s sacked inspector general

Even as congressional investigators demolish White House explanations for its firing last summer of a key inspector general, new documents show that an entire second area of misleading administration statements has gone largely unexplored. Each new revelation in the case suggests that Gerald Walpin, the fired IG for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), ought to be reinstated to his job.

November 25, 2009