Author: Jonah Goldberg

Surely this wasn’t what Barack Obama had in mind. One need not revisit the mountains of purple prose that greeted Obama’s ascent to the White House (or his descent, given the Olympian esteem many held for him). We all remember it well enough. He was a redeemer, a healer, the prophet who vowed to close […]

For those of us who predicted the inevitable, watching Donald Trump verbally wander into a field of face-whacking garden rakes like Sideshow Bob fills one with a mixture of schadenfreude and affirmation. We knew it was coming, but it still feels good to be proven right. Of course Trump wouldn’t hesitate to attack John McCain’s […]

MONTPELIER, Vt. — “Nice flag!” the woman shouted sarcastically, adding: “F— you!” The woman was seated on the patio of a restaurant overlooking Main Street in this famously liberal capital of this famously liberal state when a truck sporting the Confederate emblem passed by. I could understand the sentiment (particularly given the fact that her […]

Hillary Clinton lies. This is a widely acknowledged fact among people who pay attention and aren’t on her payroll. Nearly 20 years ago, New York Times columnist William Safire wrote: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role […]

Poor Donald Trump. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. For years, wherever The Donald went, he met people who told him he should run for president. His retinue of sycophants surely saw little to gain from explaining that “birthers,” celebrity worshippers and devotees of “The Apprentice” are not a statistically meaningful sample of the […]

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) […]

Let me get this straight. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is something of a dashboard saint to American liberals, principally for her retrograde leftism on economics. It was alleged a few years ago that she spent much of her professional career lying about her fictitious Native American roots. Warren listed herself as a minority in a […]

“Lots of folks expected us to do something strange and break out in a riot. Well, they just don’t know us,” the Rev. Norvel Goff told the packed, multiracial congregation of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on Sunday. It was the first service since the horrific slaughter of nine innocent souls by […]

What if a team of Chinese agents had broken into the Pentagon or — less box office but just as bad — the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and carted out classified documents? The next day, the newspapers and morning TV shows would show pictures of the broken locks and rummaged filing cabinets. And if […]

“God,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, “is dead.” God, it has been noted, made a similar yet more lasting pronouncement about Nietzsche. But before the German philosopher departed this mortal coil, he had some interesting things to say. Nietzsche argued that one of the most powerful forces in society was “ressentiment.” Similar to the everyday word […]

First, the good news: It turns out President Obama was right. Al-Qaida is being destroyed. One could even say he deserves some credit for this happy turn of events. Which brings us to the bad news: Al-Qaida is dying out because it’s being replaced by something far worse. According to a fascinating report in the […]

Almost exactly two months after Hillary Rodham Clinton’s official announcement that she’s running for president, she will give her first “official campaign announcement speech,” on June 13, according to her Twitter account. In other words, the Clinton campaign wants a do-over. Her first rollout was the most disastrous nonfatal presidential campaign debut in modern memory, […]

At a moment when many on the left are desperately trying to conjure up enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president, others on the left want to turn the word “woman” into a term of exclusion and oppression. This is just one of the more amusing ironies on display as what […]

Last week, the Nebraska legislature voted to do away with the death penalty. I think that was a mistake. But that’s a conversation for another day. Instead, I want to talk about a lesson we might take from the decision. Charles Murray (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) has written a book, “By The […]

I keep thinking we’re done with George Pataki — but like an order of bad clams, he keeps coming back up on me. The three-term Republican governor of a famously blue state seems like a serious 2016 presidential contender on paper — until you read the fine print. Pataki had a promising start. He beat […]

Let’s say, just for kicks, you murdered your husband (or wife). Your neighbors have been suspicious ever since your nightly arguments suddenly stopped, right around the time you put something large in your trunk and drove off in the middle of the night. Now they see you driving his car and putting his suits and […]

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans […]

There are plenty of reasons to believe 2016 will be a very ugly election year. Here’s one more. Bloomberg Politics convened a focus group of Iowa Democrats. Nearly all loved Hillary. “She’s a bad mama-jama,” said one female participant. Bad mama-jama is good, by the way. The woman explained that Clinton is “not afraid to […]

By now everyone has had their say about Jeb Bush’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. The consensus is that Bush misheard Megyn Kelly’s “knowing what we know now” question about the Iraq war. I’m not convinced. Politicians routinely answer the question they wish they were asked rather than the question they were actually […]

These are not good times for the Republic (and if you laughed or scratched your head at me calling America a republic, I rest my case). But they are amusing times, at least for those of us capable of extracting some measure of mirth and schadenfreude from the president’s predicament. With the sand running out […]

Imagine it’s 2007 and a prominent journalist is interviewing then-Sen. Barack Obama. “Senator, people are really interested in you and your identity. I just wanted to ask you as a historical matter, when you filled out your application to Columbia, to Harvard Law School, did you list yourself as an African-American?” Imagine he pressed further. […]

“If absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the actor Harry Shearer once asked, “does absolute powerlessness make you pure?” The answer, according to a lot of people, is yes. Upon receiving the George Polk Career Award last month, Gary Trudeau, the creator of the satirical comic strip Doonesbury, attacked the staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo: […]

Neighborhoods matter. That’s the upshot of two fascinating new studies from Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues. In the 1990s, the federal government launched an experiment, called the Moving to Opportunity project. It created a lottery for housing vouchers that would allow the winners to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones. The […]

For the last 20 years, give or take another 50, one of the most cherished baubles of Beltway conventional wisdom has been that the Republican Party has moved too far to the right. We’ll come back to that in a moment. Another beloved trinket in the nest of notions that make up elite groupthink is […]

I once had a boss who gave me some great advice, not just for managing people but for judging politicians: You forgive mistakes; you punish patterns. Everybody screws up. But if someone won’t learn from his mistakes and try to correct his behavior, then he either doesn’t think it was a mistake, he just doesn’t […]

How should one think about the unfolding allegations rocking the Clinton Industrial Complex (which includes both her campaign and her foundation)? By now, you may have heard about Peter Schweizer’s book, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” The book isn’t even out […]

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is thinking about running for president on the Democratic ticket by appealing to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s populist fans. Warren is a very bright former Harvard law professor. So it is interesting that O’Malley thinks the best way to reach out to her fans is to say remarkably stupid things. […]

So far, of the declared candidates for president, the only one who voted for the Iraq War is the Democrat. I recently made that observation on Twitter and the response was instructive. I will refrain from reprinting the more piquant language from Hillary Clinton’s supporters, but one common theme was that I am a fool. […]