Author: David Harsanyi

Marco Rubio bought a bunch of stuff he probably couldn’t afford. Welcome to America. So The New York Times has pulled together another hit piece — this one insinuating that Rubio, who the newspaper evidently believes is the GOP front-runner, is both a reckless spendthrift and a financial failure. The story — either clumsily or, […]

If the Supreme Court were to decide not to allow retroactive legislating and uphold Obamacare as written, terrible things would happen to America. We might, for instance, find out what health insurance in fabricated, state-run “marketplaces” actually costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the 37 states that have declined to set up exchanges would […]

If you’re an intellectually curious person — and if you’re a journalist, let’s assume that you are — you are likely to have embraced a number of notions about how the world works, how it should work and who should be running it. This is natural. It’s inevitable, then, that most journalists have formed some […]

You can’t be more straightforward: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked presumptive GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush about the Iraq War. Without hesitation, Bush replied: “I would have.” Bush went on to qualify his answer, adding that “so would have Hillary Clinton, just to […]

Sometimes, probably because he’s such an affable media presence, I forget why I dislike the political version of Mike Huckabee so much. Maybe it’s the aw-shucks populism, which isn’t substantively very different from the class conflict rhetoric we hear from so many on the left these days. Or maybe it’s that Everyman Huckabee has been […]

If a person happens to point out that Baltimore’s criminally inept government has been run exclusively by Democrats since 1967 (with one Republican mayor since 1947) and features not a single city councilor who isn’t a liberal, he may be called a lazy apparatchik. Because not everything, you see, is reducible to mere party politics. […]

Near the end of a recent New York Times article detailing the imaginary populist roots of Hillary Clinton — the original Elizabeth Warren, her people would have you believe — the reader crashes into this implausible scene: “In a meeting with economists this year, Mrs. Clinton intensely studied a chart that showed income inequality in […]

Sen. Marco Rubio announced his candidacy for president of the United States at the Freedom Tower in Miami on Monday, highlighting his family’s hardscrabble immigrant roots and embracing traditional values but also vowing to usher in a “new American century.” As a matter of political pragmatism, is there any convincing reason Rubio shouldn’t be the […]

Lena Dunham received plenty of criticism for her insufferable New Yorker piece titled “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz.” In it, the creator of “Girls” weighs the pros and cons of getting a pet or keeping her Jewish boyfriend: “He doesn’t tip,” and “he never brings his wallet anywhere,” and so on. The jokes may […]

As an atheist, I suppose I should be deeply troubled by Ted Cruz’s God-heavy presidential announcement. Although the Texas senator’s blast of old-fashioned American exceptionalism garnered most of the chortling media’s attention, it’s what troubles me the least about his aspirations. If the politicians treated the ideals of the Enlightenment as if they were handed […]

Though it’s unsettling to imagine such a scenario, both the republic and the Democratic Party would likely survive if Hillary Clinton were not to become president. Now, if the Clintons have proved anything over the years, it’s that they are resilient in the face of scandal. So in all likelihood, Hillary hangs tight on the […]

One aspect of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress that really seemed to get under the skin of many Obama loyalists was his contention that the Jews are facing another 1938. And of course, the historical analogy is imperfect because historical analogies are almost always imperfect. The problem for the Jews is that […]

The Obama administration values a future relationship with Iran more than it values the historic relationship it has with Israel. Unless there’s a reversal in the reported deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all the superficial talk about this extraordinary friendship between Israel and the United States isn’t going to mean much. And the […]

President Barack Obama gave a speech at the White House’s summit on countering violent extremism this week, which was crammed with predictable feel-good ideas for combating the imaginary root causes of Islamic extremism. And in the midst of arguing that radicalism is principally driven by anger over colonialism, illiteracy and unemployment, Obama proposed an idea […]

It’s pretty simple. If you lie, lie about the right things. It’s not difficult to imagine a pro-choice candidate winning the presidency. But imagine, if you can, a president whose position on abortion “evolves” after the election. Imagine this president advocating that all innocent human life is worth protecting. Imagine that she appoints judges to […]

The New York Times claims that the vaccine controversy we’re all talking about raises important questions about “how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives.” Well, here’s another question: How do we deal with the false perception that liberals are more inclined to trust science […]

Evidently, Republicans don’t feel competent enough to make a case against infanticide. Why else would the GOP pull its 20-week abortion limit bill? Here’s a short list of things that are less popular than banning late-term abortions: “Acting” on climate change. “Free” community college. Taxing the wealthy. Building the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama. […]

We heathens can leave the theological debate to others. But Pope Francis, the bishop of Rome and world leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has some ideas about laws governing the secular world. We expect Francis to defend the dignity of faith, to bring clarity to the Catholic position. Yet instead, the pope, while en […]

If the Supreme Court dismantles a core provision in Obamacare, America will be plunged into a pre-2010 level of dystopia — or worse. If Democrats were to be forced by the court to follow the law they wrote, then 36 states that aren’t interested in hosting federal “exchanges” would no longer be forced to do […]

The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we’ve seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks as if it’s going to be strong in 2015. Unemployment numbers have looked good. Buying power is up. And the stock market closed at 18,000 for […]

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a bad thing. As […]

Although the specifics are still hazy, The New York Times reports that a group of deep-pocketed Republican donors and bundlers has hatched a plan to clear the GOP field of all insurgents to make room for a favored “establishment” candidate — preferably Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or Mitt Romney. But there can only be one. […]

After news of the baffling decision by the New York grand jury not to indict a police officer in the killing of Eric Garner, I sent out a (slightly) hyperbolic tweet that wondered why Americans would want to entrust their free speech and health care to an institution that will kill you over failure to […]

For many in the media, the St. Louis County grand jury’s decision was going to confirm the existence of deep American injustice one way or another. If it found there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Darren Wilson — the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, in August […]

Nothing in history or current reality could possibly lead an honest observer to conclude that there’s a viable path to peace between Palestinians and Israel. Barring some dramatic exogenous event, this isn’t about to change. Give it up. After the murder of five Israelis (three of them American citizens and one of them a Druze) […]

At a Beijing news conference, President Barack Obama called a new China-United States climate deal a “historic agreement.” Grist assures us that the “new U.S.-China climate deal is a game changer.” Bloomberg Businessweek concurred, explaining “why the U.S.-China emissions pact could be a climate change breakthrough.” Vox took it even further and declared, “Obama’s climate […]

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written a piece detailing the deteriorating relationship between Israel and the Obama administration. The chief purpose of Goldberg’s piece is to humiliate Benjamin Netanyahu. None of this is especially shocking, considering the antagonism the administration has shown toward the Jewish state from the start. Most people have focused on the […]

We are, as it always seems, “at a pivotal moment in American history.” At least that’s what Sens. Tom Udall and Bernie Sanders maintained in a melodramatic Politico op-ed last week as they explained their efforts to repeal the First Amendment. Let me retort in their language: It’s true that building the United States has […]

Burger King plans to merge with Canuck coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons and base the company’s headquarters in Canada, where it will enjoy the kind of reasonable corporate tax structure that Democrats continue to obstruct here in the United States. And the move has provoked a fresh round of moral panic, faux patriotism and confusion. It’s […]

In a bit of dubious cherry-picking, a new Bloomberg article concludes that the Affordable Care Act is losing its effectiveness as a political issue for Republicans and is diminishing as a major issue. How do we know the end is near-ish? Well, so many Americans are “benefiting from the law,” theorizes Heidi Przybyla, that political […]