January 29, 2020 – 8:03 pm
I haven’t commented on this impeachment show — in part because I have nothing original to say about it, but also because I don’t want to dignify it with serious commentary. Eventually it will come to an end; Mr. Trump will not be removed from office, and then we can all wait a few days […]
December 11, 2019 – 12:02 am
Here’s an interview given Tuesday by Attorney General Barr. He discusses the Inspector General’s report, and reminds us that it was limited in scope and power, and that the full investigation is the one being conducted by John Durham. (Mr. Barr tells us not to expect anything from that until mid-2020.) Eighteen minutes in, Mr. […]
December 4, 2019 – 1:37 pm
In a recent item at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla acknowledges that America is divided beyond the possibility of reconciliation. [R]estoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition […]
December 1, 2019 – 9:11 pm
With the Democratic slate of candidates looking weaker by the day, a lot of people are whispering about Michelle Obama entering the race. She would be a much stronger opponent, I think, than any of the current crop of hopefuls, and the idea of her getting in has some on the Right worried. I don’t […]
November 14, 2019 – 11:23 pm
I see that Pete Buttigieg is now leading the pack of Democratic candidates in polls for the Iowa caucus. I don’t think Mr. Buttigieg, should he win the nomination, will do very well at all against Donald Trump in the general election. It should go without saying that we would not even know his name […]
November 5, 2019 – 7:06 pm
Michael Vlahos, who for years now has been discussing with John Batchelor the possibility and growing likelihood of a third American civil war, now has a new article up at The American Conservative. He writes about the steps that lead to a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, at which point the outcome is determined by a […]
October 27, 2019 – 3:24 pm
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable “JK”: Michael Flynn’s new attorney, the formidable Sidney Powell, has filed a devastating motion-to-dismiss in the distinguished general’s defense. It lays bare the disgraceful chicanery that the government engaged in to set him up — a sickening and abusive conspiracy, for political ends, by rogue agents in the Justice […]
October 25, 2019 – 11:36 am
Last night I noted that the DOJ’s investigation of the Russian-collusion hit-job had become a criminal investigation. The story was originally reported by the New York Times, which still pretends to be a “news” outlet. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. Were the Times in the business of impartial reporting, it would have […]
October 24, 2019 – 9:31 pm
It appears that the DOJ’s investigation of the origins of the Russia hoax has now become a criminal investigation. Thank you, AG Barr. And about bloody time.
October 21, 2019 – 3:58 pm
Back in June, after one of the Democratic debates, I mentioned Tulsi Gabbard in generally approving terms. It was the first time I’d ever seen here, and she made a favorable impression on me — especially in comparison to the gibbering lunatics occupying the rest of the stage. A commenter suggested that she had some […]
September 27, 2019 – 11:15 pm
From Sean Davis, reporting at The Federalist: Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer […]
September 26, 2019 – 2:06 pm
Given the accusations leveled against Donald Trump for asking Ukraine to assist in corruption investigations, readers might like to have a look at this: The White House, November 10, 1999. To the Senate of the United States: With a view to receiving the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, I transmit herewith the […]
September 20, 2019 – 11:37 pm
So: In 2014, the Obama administration backs a revolution in Ukraine, intended to turn that nation away from Russia. Joe Biden, then vice-president, becomes the administration’s go-between with Ukraine. That makes Biden a powerful guy, as far as Ukraine is concerned. Biden’s kid Hunter ends up being on the board of a corporation over there, […]
August 31, 2019 – 3:44 pm
We hear all the time — it’s a favorite trope of our current crop of Democratic candidates — that the United States has a shamefully high percentage of people living in poverty. Not so fast, say the authors of a new study. Where these accusations go wrong is that they measure only paychecks, and not […]
August 22, 2019 – 8:37 pm
The New York Times has a spot of bother in the PR department today: its chief political editor is in hot water for blatant anti-Semitism. There isn’t a peep about this at the paper’s website (not surprising, I suppose, given that this is the same rag that bent over backwards to cover up the Holocaust) […]
August 22, 2019 – 12:36 pm
President Trump made an encouraging remark yesterday about the possibility of ending the nation’s lunatic policy of granting U.S. citizenship to any child whose mother managed to get her uterus onto American soil, by any means whatever, before giving birth. “We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship,” the president said. It seems he is […]
August 21, 2019 – 8:19 pm
A young man by the name of Joshua Lawson, who is a graduate student at Hillsdale College, has written a vigorous response to the New York Times’s Orwellian project of “reframing” all of American history as a Marxist narrative of racial oppression. The essay is published at The Federalist. Mr. Lawson provides moral and historical […]
In last night’s post, I wrote that, based on what I’d just seen, I believed that Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020. The impression, however, that the ten people on stage last night had made on me was so strong — the craziness so palpable — that I had, in the moment, forgotten to […]
Just watched the first hour or so of the second round of the Democrats’ debates. Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020.
The New York Times has published an article, with lovely graphics, explaining that the GOP is now an extreme right-wing party, while the Democrats — whose presidential candidates were on stage tonight calling for, among other things, abolishing private healthcare, stripping and redistributing legally earned wealth that they believe to be “in the wrong hands”, […]
In David Armistead’s fascinating and insightful book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the author distinguishes three kinds of civil war: “successionist”, “supersessionist”, and “secessionist”. Successionist civil wars are those that are fought over which individual shall sit atop a nation’s institutional hierarchy. The king dies. Who will succeed him? In this sort of war […]
Here’s a scathing summary, by the indispensable Kimberly Strassel, of the government’s abuse of power in what has come to be known as Spygate. Please watch. It would be all too easy for an increasingly childlike and easily distracted polis to let all of this slip out of mind. (I’ve started the embedded video about […]
Attorney General William Barr sat down for an interview on CBS a couple of days ago. Mr. Barr was, as usual, sensible and forthright, and made clear once again that he is interested in the truth about the Russia investigation, and that what he’s seen so far gives him reason to have serious concerns about […]
In a brief, fork-tongued statement yesterday, the august Robert Mueller got a lot done: he let slip his naked partisanship, jettisoned the bedrock principle of American jurisprudence, ensured that the U.S. government will for the rest of Donald Trump’s first term be paralyzed by bitter factional conflict, and fanned the coals of a smoldering civil […]
Yesterday our friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, commented on a 2018 column by Mackubin Thomas Owens about kinds of nationalism. Mr. Owens says that American nationalism is good and necessary because it is of the right sort: an allegiance only to a set of philosophical principles. Bill singled out this passage: Much of today’s […]
In the news today is a scathing letter from Emmett Flood, the Special Counsel to the President, to Attorney General William Barr. It was written on April 19th, shortly after the lightly redacted Mueller Report was released to the public. The Mueller Report may have produced no indictments, but this letter charges the Mueller team […]
April 29, 2019 – 11:23 pm
In his Notes On Democracy, H. L. Mencken said of the American politician the following thing: He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in […]
April 25, 2019 – 10:53 pm
Michael Anton, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute who is currently a lecturer and researcher at Hillsdale College, wrote what became the most influential political essay of the 2016 presidential campaign: The Flight 93 Election. (If you haven’t read it, I’m surprised — but you can do so here. Readers may also recall our […]
The House held a hearing on “white nationalism” today. One of the speakers was the conservative black woman Candace Owens, who gave a rousing opening statement. You can watch it here. The focus on “white nationalism” by the Left has been a clever and effective tactic, one that exploits the essence of the conservative disposition. […]
Here’s the distinguished Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen on what he calls the “myth” behind Russiagate: the idea that Russia “attacked” the United States during the last presidential election.
A friend of mine wrote me yesterday to send me an item linked by Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge. The original is a post by one James Howard Kunstler, and it begins as follows: The tides are shifting. Something’s in the wind. And it’s not just the fecund vapors of spring. The political soap […]
March 28, 2019 – 12:15 am
In yesterday’s post I quibbled with Andrew McCarthy’s call, in an article he’d published at Fox News, for full disclosure of the Mueller report and everything else associated with the Russiagate witch-hunt. Today I listened to an interview he gave with John Batchelor on Tuesday, and I see that I had missed his point. As […]
March 26, 2019 – 12:28 am
Podcast here. Article here. One quibble: the Democrats and the media are bawling for the public release of the full text of the report, and Mr. McCarthy seems to think that would be OK — as long as we get everything else as well: You want disclosure? Me too. But let’s see all of it. […]
March 25, 2019 – 12:26 am
Well! The Mueller report’s in, and has confirmed that this whole Russia business was nothing but a frame-up all along. Thanks so very much, news media and Democrat saboteurs (but I repeat myself) for hijacking the nation’s public affairs for two long years of round-the-clock bile, slander, and lies. This will end nothing, of course: […]
March 12, 2019 – 12:10 am
So good to see someone refusing to grovel for once. Give ’em hell, Tucker.
Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those […]
February 10, 2019 – 1:27 pm
Having pushed their doddering elders down the stairs, and finding among the corpses’ effects the keys to the family car, our newly crowned juvenocracy is wasting no time in taking it for a joyride. The leader pro tempore of this posse of hopped-up teens is a yakkity Chavista bird-brain by the name of Ocasio-Cortez — […]
February 8, 2019 – 9:52 pm
In my previous post I expressed qualified approval for Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Some commenters took me to task for this, because hey, we’re still doomed. They’re right, we probably are. And make no mistake, there’s plenty for a conservative, let alone a reactionary, not to like about Donald Trump, and about the […]
February 6, 2019 – 2:21 pm
I watched the speech last night. It was awfully good. Even for a cynic like me — who believes that this Republic, due to the inherent liabilities of democracy itself, is in the late stages of necrosis, and perhaps an early stage of civil war — Mr. Trump’s message of unity and greatness was rousing. […]
February 3, 2019 – 11:47 pm
There was a horrible story in the local news today: A young woman, pregnant, was stabbed to death in an apartment-building lobby. We read: The killer targeted the 35-year-old woman’s stomach, according to the building super, who said she watched surveillance-video footage that captured the murder. “He’s got a knife! He’s going to kill the […]
February 1, 2019 – 11:54 pm
Abortion’s been in the public eye lately: with the Democratic Party red-shifting leftward, legislators are seizing the opportunity to push the limits — both legal and moral — of the un-personing of the unborn. New York State just celebrated, with standing ovations and a festive light-show, a ghoulish dismantling of its moral obligations to its […]
January 26, 2019 – 11:56 pm
Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has a new item at NRO on the Roger Stone indictment. He makes an obvious but worth-repeating point about the “process crimes” Stone is charged with, which have to to an investigation into his efforts to find out what Wikileaks might have on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Mr. […]
January 24, 2019 – 4:00 pm
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has just signed into law a bill called the Reproductive Health Act. (You can read it here.) The principal effects of the bill are a) to remove all mention of abortion from the New York State penal code; b) to permit licensed heath-care practitioners to conduct abortions; and c) to […]
January 17, 2019 – 9:54 pm
Magnificent. (Thanks to the indefatigable JK for the link.)
January 13, 2019 – 11:32 pm
Please forgive me for the scanty output here of late — I am deeply distracted with work and family matters, so much so that I have had very little to say. But I will direct you to two sharp posts at The Orthosphere, by J.M. Smith and Thomas Bertonneau, on the nature of the frustrated […]
January 9, 2019 – 7:11 pm
I’m back in the States now, and catching up on backlogs of both news and work. (The latter isn’t going to leave me much opportunity for brooding and writing for a while, I’m afraid.) The new Democrat House is in charge. Among the most depressing consequences of that gloomy fact is that the ongoing investigations […]
December 24, 2018 – 8:09 am
I’ve been out of the country, and not paying much attention to the news, but I did hear about Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing last week. And what did I hear? I heard what the mainstream media wanted me to hear: that the judge at the hearing, Emmet Sullivan, had rebuked General Flynn — whom I […]
December 2, 2018 – 2:08 pm
While all the attention has been on Robert Mueller’s abusive inquisition into factitious allegations about Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia, there’s been another, far more serious, investigation moling away in the background: DOJ Inspector General Horowitz’s inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and Obama administration’s shady dealings with Rosatom and Uranium One. Wiring at National Review, […]
November 7, 2018 – 6:21 pm
Well, here we are, on the morrow of the midterms. We’ve picked up seats in the Senate and narrowly lost the House. The unspeakably loathsome Andrew Cuomo will harass and insult conservative New Yorkers for another four years, while Elizabeth Warren today is heap happy squaw. Bug-eyed Communist ignoramus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will have her chance […]
November 6, 2018 – 10:28 am
OK – it’s Election Day. Republicans: the polls are open. You know what to do. Democrats: it looks like rain, and your guys are probably going to win anyway. I think you’re off the hook.