President-elect Donald Trump is already getting so much done so seamlessly that he’s conveying the attitude of Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde,” when she informs a skeptic that she’s been admitted to Harvard Law School: “What, like it’s hard?”
President-elect Donald Trump is already getting so much done so seamlessly that he’s conveying the attitude of Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde,” when she informs a skeptic that she’s been admitted to Harvard Law School: “What, like it’s hard?”
The election of Donald Trump as president has been regarded by some as a black swan event: an extremely rare occurrence so unexpected and consequential that it generates stunning changes in the existing order.
Eight years ago, the Democratic Party gambled that a young, inexperienced but charismatic senator could deliver the presidency and with it, sustained national electoral success. They were half-right: They got the presidency but lost the country.
One of the biggest ironies of the first presidential debate is that Donald Trump’s reluctance to aggressively attack Hillary Clinton has now given him the license to fully do so.
Four years ago, you could have almost seen Bill Clinton’s thought bubble as he watched Barack Obama’s weak and listless performance against Mitt Romney during the first presidential debate: “I can’t believe we lost to this guy.”
It promises to be the greatest show on earth: the first presidential debate to be held Monday night at Hofstra University in New York. Rarely has a political event attracted this kind of Super Bowl-level excitement, curiosity and anticipation. Then again, rarely have we had two presidential candidates who light up the political sky like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Fifteen years ago, 19 men boarded four aircraft in the United States. A few hours later, thousands of people were dead — and the country and the world were changed forever.
That principled position gave him the unimpeachable credibility to visit communist China as president in 1972, which led to the famous rapprochement with the United States that changed the world.
The guns of August — a phrase first used to describe the outbreak of World War I — is a real phenomenon. Maybe it’s the heat, but there’s something about the eighth month that seems to inspire armed conflict. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The collapse of the Soviet Union began with a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. Reports of North Vietnamese attacks against U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 gave President Lyndon Johnson the pretext to win broad congressional approval for an expansion of the war. Adolf Hitler readied the invasion of Poland in August 1939 and attacked on Sept. 1.
Republican nominee Donald Trump’s recently unveiled economic plan was roundly praised for its aggressive pro-growth, job-creating proposals. He would cut income tax rates; increase exemptions for individuals; reduce the number of personal income tax brackets from seven to three; slash the corporate tax to 15 percent, taking it from the highest in the developed world to nearly the lowest; and eliminate the death tax and the destructive alternative minimum tax. Dramatic tax reform is a political winner given the oppressive burdens imposed by the current Byzantine tax code.
Every four years like clockwork, the two major presidential nominees present their competing visions for the future of the country. This year, however, those visions are so starkly different as to be nearly irreconcilable. They may, in fact, indicate a breach far deeper and more searing than previously thought.
According to the media, not all grieving parents of fallen servicemen are created equal. Whether those parents are protected, defended and respected or ignored, dismissed and smeared depends on their political affiliation — and how useful they are to the “right” side.
>As he methodically laid out the case against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private, unsecure server and email accounts to carry out all of her official government business as secretary of state before declining to recommend criminal charges, FBI Director James B. Comey left out one major piece of evidence. It’s the one piece of the puzzle that truly nails her, since it demonstrates consciousness of guilt.
Members of the Obama administration and their wingmen in the press have been busy conjuring up ways to change the narrative from the truth — that this was an act of war against the United States — to lies necessitated by their ideological agenda. The carnage had barely stopped before they reached for the terminology of “hate crime,” because that’s something they think they know how to manage: define it, prosecute it, exploit it for political purposes.
The most recent Islamic act of war, in which self-professed Islamic State jihadi Omar Mir Seddique Mateen slaughtered 49 people and injured scores of others at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., should be a game changer. The deadliest attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, should finally convince our leadership that dealing with the Islamic threat must no longer be business as usual.
In late October 1969, Richard Nixon took out one of his famous yellow legal pads to jot down some thoughts. The new president was faced with serious global and domestic turmoil. The Soviet Union had initiated a nuclear buildup, the Middle East was aflame (some things never change), and the war in Vietnam raged on. At home, the war drove hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, convulsing a nation already seething from the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and a growing countercultural movement.
This election year, major cross-currents are moving within both political parties and across party lines. And no one yet has a handle on how they are reshaping the race.
With its shattering of old-school political rules, the dominance of colorful personalities and the raging desire to smash the establishment status quo, the 2016 campaign has been wild. And yet, not everyone is paying as close attention to the race as might be expected. Women, in particular, apparently have better things to do.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a column questioning if Bill Clinton is in the FBI crosshairs. That question appears to be increasingly relevant because of the emergence of another, more central one:
Although climate change ranks at or near the bottom of issues most important to the American people, the Obama administration continues to push it like its agenda on radical wealth redistribution depends on it. Because in many ways, it does.
In its war for America, the left never rests, sometimes falters but rarely allows itself to fail. It works tirelessly to “fundamentally transform the nation” and smashes anyone and anything that gets in its way.
Two weeks ago, President Obama took time out of his busy schedule of “fundamentally transforming the nation” to do the wave with the Reds at a baseball game in Cuba. This week, socialist Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary resoundingly in Wisconsin, the birthplace of progressivism. Not a coincidence.
Do Bill and Hillary Clinton sense a breakdown in whatever deal they may have struck with President Obama to protect her presidential ambitions? Is whatever negotiation they may have been conducting over her email server problem and any inside information she may have on him now imploding? Or have the Clintons “won” the negotiation with Mr. Obama, freeing them to hit him publicly to get her elected?
The radical left will never tolerate a disruption to its revolution to “fundamentally transform the nation.” When leftists detect pushback that threatens its grand project, they attack. And now, following their successfully orchestrated assaults on the Tea Party movement, Mitt Romney’s 2012 candidacy and conservative principles more generally, they are putting the band back together for another national tour.
The day before his victory in his home state of Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz invoked the Alamo, the definitive symbol of fierce Texan independence and defiance.
No one becomes fully delusional overnight. It usually begins with a small, manageable delusion that then mushrooms into bigger ones, resulting in a chain-reaction escalation of self-deception. In the worst cases, it ends in institutionalization.
There are certain people so deeply entrenched in the national consciousness that their immortality is sort of assumed. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was one of those figures. He was a larger-than-life man of such towering intellect and commanding influence that it never really registered that he might, someday, pass from the scene.