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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

PRUDEN: A little stubble hints of trouble

Some of Barack Obama's friends are speculating that the honeymoon is over. We've reached that exquisite point in the marriage when the party of the first part and the party of the second part agree that the evening's honeymoon entertainment will be a movie on DVD and that anything spicy must come from room service.

March 17, 2009

PRUDEN: ‘Blaming the Jews’ doesn’t always work

It's getting crowded under that bus where President Obama throws the discards no longer useful to him. Fortunately, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is there to offer the last rites, this time for Charles W. Freeman Jr., may peace be on him.

March 13, 2009

PRUDEN: Can’t anybody here play this game?

Big mouths and ignoramuses have bedeviled presidents before Barack Obama, but he can actually write and sometimes speak sentences brimming with grammar and syntax. We're told he speaks prose with flawless fluency, particularly with a teleprompter.

March 10, 2009

PRUDEN: Back to a future fit for a serf

Miss Crow only wanted to do something in a modest way to save trees, proposing that everyone get only "four squares" of toilet paper per visit to "the ladies" (and presumably "the gents" as well).

March 3, 2009

PRUDEN: A lively tale revives a capital mystery

History is bunk, old Henry Ford famously said, and it's true that a lot of what we're told is history is certainly bunk. "Movie history" can be bunker than most. The history we think we remember can be the bunkest of all.

February 27, 2009

PRUDEN: A Flying Dutchman in pursuit of speech

Geert Wilders comes to town this week as Exhibit No. 1 of why the Europeans no longer matter. Even our British cousins, who not so long ago bristled at even being called Europeans, have abandoned their ancient traditions of free speech.

February 24, 2009

PRUDEN: Nothing cowardly about good manners

Some nice white folks ought to invite Eric Holder home to supper. He's feeling neglected, though it's not quite clear why he would want to nibble on Russian caviar and sip French champagne, the routine fare of white folks, with "cowards."

February 20, 2009

PRUDEN: The big bureaucratic chill

Buffalo in winter is a city that Al Gore should love. It's cold, dark and adrift in snow. Ice is the default setting. When fresh snow arrives even the television newscasters restrain the hysteria that's the mark of the television news trade. Al's global warming rants that the end is near fall on frozen ears in Buffalo.

February 17, 2009

PRUDEN: Prescription for medical malpractice

Nasty surprises are always nasty. We can expect to see a lot of them as the details of Barack Obama's Big Bopper Bailout unfold over the next several months. Joe Biden reckons the chances of the bailout working, despite the hype and hysteria, to be no better than 30 percent "even if we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty."

February 13, 2009

PRUDEN: The clenching of the Israeli fist

Someone once asked Frank Broyles, the celebrated football coach at Arkansas, the secret of the Razorbacks' remarkable goal-line stands. “Well,” he said, “it's not so hard if you can convince your defensive line that they're backed up against the edge of a cliff, and there's a bunch of hungry alligators down there among the jagged rocks.”

February 10, 2009

PRUDEN: Now for something really different

The messiah of November has disappeared, gone off to winter somewhere in another galaxy and lounge among the stars. Who knows when (or whether) he'll return. He left a gloomy surrogate with a melancholy message.

February 6, 2009

PRUDEN: Looking for change in unlikely places

Change is good. Everyone says so. But easier said than done. Just ask Barack Obama, who sold the prospect of "change" with the fervor of a patent-medicine salesman on the back roads of beyond. Alas, presidents, unlike medicine-show men, can't move on to suckers in the next town.

February 3, 2009

PRUDEN: A Senate gobsmack for the Oracle

Al Gore came to Capitol Hill this week, all decked out in his earth tones, with an old scribe's tale of destruction, doom and disaster. He was rewarded not with questions worthy of the world's greatest deliberate body but with what our English cousins call a "gobsmack." Right on the mouth.

January 30, 2009

PRUDEN: No easy sleep for mitigator in chief

Gone are his airy assurances that the rough places of the planet can be sanded smooth with a soaring speech, that an enemy's guns are no match for warm and fuzzy language. Maybe mere eloquence can't shame the troublemakers to silence after all. Neither will several verses of "Kumbaya." Maybe the world wants more than a Coke.

January 27, 2009

PRUDEN: Making speeches to the Almighty

Some of our preachers are treating God as if He were a little slow. It's a puzzle. The essence of religious faith - all faiths, big and small - is the unshakable belief that the Lord of the Universe is all-knowing, all-caring and all-powerful. Nothing escapes His eye, which is on the sparrow and all other creatures great and small, including us. Surely He knows as much about what's going on in the world as politicians, professors and even pundits.

January 23, 2009

PRUDEN: The honeymoon ends promptly at noon

Now we're about to see who Barack Obama really is. We won't any longer have to rely on parsing his speeches, looking for clues and deciphering the contradictions. We'll still get speeches - he delivers good ones - but presidents don't get to vote "present" when the question on the table is what to do about a collapsing economy or terrorists plotting mayhem on New York City.

January 19, 2009

PRUDEN: Big wet kisses beg questions

The loyal opposition is loyal enough, but it's not much of an opposition. The Republicans in the Senate, with a dwindling number of honorable exceptions, are a soft and squishy lot.

January 16, 2009

PRUDEN: That was then, not now

Barack Obama might take a caution from the story about the man who died and showed up at the Pearly Gates.

January 13, 2009

PRUDEN: A great oak with nowhere to grow

The Terminator is bored and weary of California. California is bored and weary of the Terminator. Real life, it turns out, is more difficult than the movies, though in California it's often difficult to tell the difference.

January 9, 2009