Author: Rachel Marsden

Watching the Olympic Games, I find one phenomenon particularly striking. After an event, athletes who literally seconds before had been attempting to trounce one another in competition suddenly start hugging each other. An outsider might wonder about this coexistence of competition and affection. As a former elite-level swimmer, I can tell you: While it’s every […]

Mitt Romney and I are competing in a new Olympic event that involves proffering unvarnished criticism of the Olympics themselves. We’re the Lochte and Phelps of this event — appearing united when necessary and when it serves us both, and appearing divided when Mitt says something really stupid. Last week, I blamed cronyism for the […]

It’s hip these days for everyone from world leaders to the Occupy Wall Street crowd to attack free-market, limited-government capitalism as wild and in need of control because it’s supposedly the cause of the world economic collapse. This is a myth. It’s too much government-facilitated cronyism that’s causing the mayhem wrongfully attributed to capitalism. This […]

When I was a little kid, there was a game I used to play while out and about with my family. Every time we came upon an escalator, I’d run ahead and charge up it as fast as I could, just so I could then stand at the top and “pull” everyone else up by […]

Testifying before a Senate committee a few months ago, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lamented that America was “in an information war, and we are losing that war.” This week, she blew a fuse at the “Friends of Syria” meeting in Paris, saying that Russia and China should “pay a price” for not supporting […]

As European leaders meet this week in an attempt to once again shoo reality away from the continent’s respirator, countries outside the European Union are making it increasingly clear that they’ll have no role in prolonging the charade. Cyprus has just asked for a bailout from the EU’s ATM, joining Greece, Ireland, Portugal and, most […]

Hey, did you hear the joke about the world leader who had the answer to the global economic crisis? Well, there you go — now you have. Remember the old days when leaders of developed nations would hold summits to decide how to solve the plight of the world’s poor? Now they ARE the world’s […]

The English-teacher son of a Pulitzer Prize winner gave a much-ballyhooed commencement speech recently to students graduating from an American high school that one might categorize as privileged. David McCullough Jr., a teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts and the son of the Pulitzer-winning historian David McCullough, began by comparing the “great forward-looking ceremony” […]

What happens when a brutal regime gets replaced by an alternative and largely unknown entity? Exhibit A: Libya. Shortly after Muammar Gaddafi bumped his head on a bullet, the “rebels” took over and promptly declared Sharia law. It’s a start — I guess. Though a start of what, no one’s really quite sure. This week, […]

Now that it’s a virtual certainty Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee, and all the other candidates have likely dozed off with the rest of us during this preliminary series of political skirmishes, it’s time to wipe the sleep from our eyes and get ready for presidential playoffs. What should be included in […]

Did you hear about the new bill that would allow the U.S. government’s official overseas information agency to rebroadcast its content onto American TV and radio? The bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 was introduced in Congress last week by Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.), both of whom are presumably dissatisfied with […]

While your co-workers hover around the water cooler debating whether it matters if Mitt Romney bullied some kid in his youth, a formerly First World nation called Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, you might ask, should Middle America pry its overworked eyes away from Jennifer Lopez gyrating around in a bodysuit […]

France has elected only the second Socialist president in its history — the first being Francois Mitterrand, who spent 14 years in the driver’s seat back when French presidential terms lasted seven years rather than five, and who made a hard-right turn away from economic socialism and toward spending cuts after his first two years […]

A Russian source recently brought an obscure but disturbing article to my attention. Published last month by a little-known online journal called the Oriental Review, the piece, “Active Endeavour And Drug Trafficking,” proposed that not a single gram of heroin has been confiscated on the Mediterranean Sea since the inception of NATO’s Operation Active Endeavour, […]

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That’s what an outsider looking at the country’s first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée. The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May […]

There’s a scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” where the kindhearted hooker played by Julia Roberts asks her client, portrayed by Richard Gere: “Who do you want me to be?” Regardless of who she might really be, she realizes that it’s far less attractive than a tabula rasa onto which her client can project his […]

By now you’ve likely heard about the infamous Las Vegas convention bash during which federal civil servants at the General Services Administration indulged in various frivolities to the tune of $823,000 of your money. That conference featured, among other things, a hired professional clown — which is like Picasso hiring some guy from out of […]

Last week, Mitt Romney described Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” prompting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to respond: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards instead of being realistic about where we agree, where we don’t agree.” While Romney’s basic sentiment is correct, Clinton is also right in suggesting that Romney’s […]

In France, an Islamic terrorist has likely hijacked the agenda for the remainder of the French presidential race. That terrorist is 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, a Franco-Algerian from Toulouse who was fatally riddled with bullets by French forces last week after a 30-hour standoff and took the television remotes of an entire nation with him. Because […]

After being bombarded with news of Third World problems for so long, I figured it was time to give a bit of equal time to First World suffering. Every so often I reach a boiling point with modern Western culture and feel the need to rant — so I’m going to bleed it out through […]

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected five years ago by promising to modernize France’s societal infrastructure and bring it more into line with America’s: less government reliance, more freedom in life and work. It was a tall order, but his mandate was overwhelming, with a six-percentage-point win over Socialist rival Segolene Royal. Sarkozy was full […]

So Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just been re-presidented for at least another six years, during which we can all watch his newly tucked eyes migrate back to where they used to be. And as surely as a pound dog comes with fleas, this election came with “irregularities” — cloaked in “democracy,” as Russian […]

As promised in December, WikiLeaks has begun to release a stash of documents related to the modus operandi of the “private intelligence” sector, using Texas-based Stratfor as a case study. Claiming to have hacked Stratfor’s system to obtain millions of private emails, WikiLeaks has just released the first batch — and what it suggests about […]

In less than two weeks, Russians go to the polls for a presidential election exercise. The overwhelmingly likely outcome: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will dust off the old stationery from his first two terms as president. In the final run-up, Putin is publishing a series of position papers, the latest one focusing on reloading and […]

I can’t believe that I actually agree with something President Obama has done. Granted, I’m one of those conservatives who has never subscribed to the full-meal-deal checklist, preferring to critically consider whether each of my positions is the most logical and sensible given the available information and my own values. Usually that process results in […]

Mitt Romney appears to have all the foreign-policy savvy of someone who once visited Euro Disney, and it’s freaking me out. Not to say that President Obama is any more knowledgeable on that front, but at least he seems aware of his limitations, outsourcing foreign leadership to the French, the Brits, Hillary Clinton and private […]

The Fitch Ratings agency has downgraded the credit of another five European countries — Belgium, Cyprus, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain — citing “the financing risks faced by eurozone sovereign governments in the absence of a credible financial firewall against contagion and self-fulfilling liquidity crises.” In other words, these self-styled fiscal medics plunged headfirst into deadly […]

As increased globalization forces countries to pretend that they like playing with all the other kids in the playground despite fearing they’ll have their toys stolen, never has there been more blatant self-interest cloaked in the phony pretext of outreach or do-goodery. Nowadays, a country is expected to appear both broke and overtly generous — […]

Once again, socialism has put a silver fork in itself. Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s AAA credit rating, giving the country the side-eye on its claims to have its debt under control. This means the country will now have to pay it all back at an even higher interest rate. Who are we kidding? […]

Two items have burst onto the media stage this week: A movie called The Iron Lady about one of the greatest women in history — former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — and a growing European recall of breast implants in danger of exploding. I wonder what the former would say about the latter. Did […]