Columns, pieces and posts
The 2016 presidential campaign is here, pushed up prematurely by the Hillary Clinton email controversy. When a major candidate of a major party has major trouble, the election moves more sharply into focus. Apart from Mrs. Clinton, small stories have begun to shoot up like flares. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker shied away from the accomplished […]
Maybe we’re not stuck in Scandal Land. For a while I’ve assumed Hillary Clinton would run for her party’s nomination and be a formidable candidate in the general election. After Tuesday’s news conference I’m not so sure. Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners, and […]
This is fascinating, via the Drudge Report. Look at the kind of questions being asked. It’s pretty clear what some political professionals see, or hope to see, as the potential weak points of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. Who might be behind this polling? What use is being made of the data gathered? Every year political […]
Doesn’t the latest Hillary Clinton scandal make you want to throw up your hands and say: Do we really have to do this again? Do we have to go back there? People assume she is our next president. We are defining political deviancy down. The scandal this week is that we have belatedly found out, […]
On Friday at the winter meeting of the Club for Growth, in Palm Beach, Fla., Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a possible contender for the GOP presidential nomination, was pressed for specifics of his foreign-policy views. Walker referred to policy professionals with whom he’d recently met, and then suggested that what is most important in foreign […]
Thoughts on the 2016 primaries: No one expects anything from the Democrats. They will back, accept or acquiesce in a coronation. This will not be called passive but disciplined. But when you think about it—one of our two major parties, in a time of considerable national peril, will settle its presidential nomination without vigorous debate—it […]
Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS. “What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.) Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, […]
I was at dinner at the home of a friend, a journalist, when the phone rang. I heard her say, “Oh no, no,” and saw her face: Something terrible had happened, not to her personally but in the world. She got off and told us that Bob Simon, the CBS News correspondent, had died. I […]
Everything’s frozen. When you ask, “What is the appropriate U.S. response to ISIS?” half the people in Washington answer: “ George W. Bush broke Iraq and ISIS was born in the rubble. There would be no ISIS if it weren’t for him.” The other half answer: “When Barack Obama withdrew from Iraq, ISIS was born […]
Something is going on here. On Tuesday retired Gen. James Mattis, former head of U.S. Central Command (2010-13) told the Senate Armed Services Committee of his unhappiness at the current conduct of U.S. foreign policy. He said the U.S. is not “adapting to changed circumstances” in the Mideast and must “come out now from our […]