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Wesley Pruden

Wesley Pruden

wpruden@washingtontimes.com

Wesley Pruden would have wanted to spend his final hours at his keyboard, deftly deflating the pompous, entitled and arrogant of the political establishment, and he came awfully close. The venerable Washington Times editor, columnist and journalism institution was found dead July 17, 2019, at his home, after putting in a full day at the newsroom on New York Avenue in Northeast D.C., where he had worked since 1982, four months after the newspaper's founding. He was 83.
His remarkable career began 67 years ago as a teenage copy boy in Arkansas, making him among the few old-school newsmen whose sharp political acumen, elegant writing style, and keen sense of the absurd allowed him to remain as relevant in the digital age as he was in the days when the rumpled shirts of reporters were splattered with ink.
To read his obituary, please CLICK HERE

Articles by Wesley Pruden

Antonin Scalia

PRUDEN: Figuring the odds on Obamacare

Guessing how the Supreme Court will decide a case, based on the questions the justices ask of the lawyers, is a fool's game. That's why pundits can't resist playing it.

March 30, 2012
Vladimir Putin

PRUDEN: Spins and needles for Barack Obama

Spinning is a deceiver's art, the craft of persuading suckers they didn't really hear what they just heard. It's what modern politics is all about. President Obama has put his best spinners to work to "clarify" what he meant with his remarks in confidence to the Russians that once past November he'll have the "flexibility" to alter the American missile-defense system in a way that will please Moscow.

March 27, 2012
Mitt Romney

PRUDEN: An attack of the fruit fly at Romney’s campaign

It's not the wasps, bees and mosquitos, though stingers all, that bedevil presidential candidates. It's the fruit flies. Insignificant in their own right, they nevertheless have the ability to damage and even sink a campaign. That's the lesson for Mitt Romney, as taught by Eric Fehrnstrom, his once-anonymous "top aide," who confided to a CNN interviewer that Mr. Romney is not really a born-again conservative, that he's only pandering to the unwashed crazies on the right.

March 23, 2012
Benjamin Franklin

PRUDEN: A modest proposal for Barack Obama

Barack Obama is in trouble. Even The Washington Post says so. The Post's pollsters find that a record number of Americans now give the president "strongly negative" reviews of his first three years, and nearly 7 of every 10 Americans blame the president for the acute heartburn that strikes every American motorist when they pull up to the pump. Barely 1 in 4 approve of his handling of the issue. (Most of the naive ride bicycles and the rest ride skateboards.)

March 13, 2012
Calvin Coolidge

PRUDEN: A discount on the 2-cent endorsement

In the age of the Internet, when everybody wants to get his two cents into the debate and anybody can invent his own facts and rant in a blog or sometimes even a newspaper column, endorsements don't mean much. They particularly don't mean much coming from a congressman.

March 9, 2012
Benjamin Netanyahu

PRUDEN: The romance of Obama’s empty rhetoric

Barack Obama is obsessed with words, and he never learned to make a short speech. The Israelis understand that, however well-meaning he may be. The president may even believe most of the stuff he hears himself say.

March 6, 2012
President Obama

PRUDEN: Obama is doing what comes naturally

Barack Obama just can't help himself. Bowing to rogues and rascals, stooping low enough to bang his head on the sidewalk, comes naturally to him. He learned to talk by apologizing to everyone in the nursery. He was the prince of all he surveyed, and learned early that slick talk could take him almost anywhere.

March 2, 2012
Kennedy

PRUDEN: The ignorance of Rick Santorum

There's a tiny priest living in Rick Santorum's trim, toned body, struggling to get out. The rogue priest escaped Sunday and said foolish things. The candidate most admired for plain speech made it plain and clear that he doesn't believe in the wall between church and state and doesn't think much of John F. Kennedy for saying he did.

February 28, 2012
Sarah Palin

PRUDEN: Old Scratch riles the unschooled

Old Scratch has had a really good week. The Prince of Darkness has everybody talking about him. The Satanic force may not be driving the Republican primary campaign, but old Beelzebub is having a high old time confusing the natives.

February 24, 2012
Rick Santorum

PRUDEN: Santorum’s hyperbole: Over the top to the guillotine

Rick Santorum is breaking out of the trenches for a leap at the top, emboldened by winning semi-important caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and a more or less meaningless primary in Missouri. He recognizes how President Obama put the First Amendment in mortal peril with his order to religious institutions to put conscience aside and obey secular gospel under pain of law, like it or not. Then it was "over the top" in pursuit of principle.

February 14, 2012
Sen. Patty Murray, Washington Democrat

PRUDEN: Condoms are only part of it

Barack Obama thought he was only picking a fight with the Roman Catholic bishops. He thought he could limit the argument over his health care mandate to a controversy over condoms. He's getting a bigger fight than he imagined.

February 10, 2012
Romney

PRUDEN: Romney waiting for the big cupcake

Mitt Romney is dispatching a gallery of rivals, none of whom has ever looked particularly presidential. Can anyone actually say out loud, without a wince, "President Gingrich"? Or "President Paul" (who sounds more like a pope than a president), or "President Santorum"? Nice guys, maybe, but we know where nice guys finish.

February 7, 2012

PRUDEN: The Gaffe Patrol abandons Newt Gingrich

Mitt Romney seemed to be asking for a visit from the Gaffe Patrol this week when he told a cable-TV interviewer that he "wasn't concerned about the very poor" because they have "the safety net," the middle class doesn't, and the rich don't need one. Taken in the context of the interview this was unremarkable stuff.

February 3, 2012

PRUDEN: When the Earth refuses to warm

Global warming: Been there, done that. Forward-looking folks are adjusting their fretting machinery now to something called Cycle 25. Button up your overcoats. Ice is on the way.

January 31, 2012
Bob Dole

PRUDEN: Off to the moon with randy Newt Gingrich

The great entertainers of our time turn out to be presidents and the men who would be president, and this week most of them are in Florida. This is as good as vaudeville ever was. Newt Gingrich, under siege by ex-wives and trying hard to keep track of the various versions of an autobiography-in-progress, nevertheless soldiers on in his mission to restore family values and "morality" to the nation.

January 27, 2012
Nelson Rockefeller

PRUDEN: Newt Gingrich and the ‘moral thing’

Politicians can't any longer talk about "moral character" without sounding like a stuffy Baptist deacon or a stiff Presbyterian elder. "Moral character" is no longer important in a presidential campaign, even to many conservatives and evangelicals. If it is important anymore, it is only as a talking point.

January 24, 2012