Throughout her political career, Hillary Clinton has used her gender and the still-novel specter of a woman running for president to cloak her advances and shield her from losses. It is never about her. Her own merits, qualifications, defects, failures or shortcomings are never the issue. The question is always: How are we to treat […]

Few Americans have ever met their Congresspeople. They don’t see them at the grocery store; they don’t meet them at the bowling alley. They’re more likely to see their representatives in photographs from the Daily Grill in Washington, D.C., than at a local town hall. Constituents’ closest contact with those they elect comes on Election […]

PARIS — There’s no faster or easier way to shut down legitimate debate than to slap an undesirable label on someone based on their views. Criticize same-sex marriage and you’re a bigot. Take issue with immigration policy and you’re dismissed as a racist. In the latest incarnation of this phenomenon, any conservative who dares to […]

Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to those who have long been urging the Republican Party to reach out to black voters. Not only is that long overdue, what is also long overdue is putting some time — and, above all, some serious thought — into how to go about doing […]

With Obamacare’s March 31 sign-up deadline and subsequent penalties looming over the heads of young and old Americans, citizens are wondering more than ever — and with good reason, I might add — whether Washington has dished out another bill of bad goods. And here are a few more solid reasons our skepticism about socialist […]

It’s fitting that the pro-abortion crowd dominating the Obama executive branch is not about to adopt a “live and let live” attitude toward its opponents in litigation concerning the government’s effort to force corporations to subsidize the killing of human beings. The Affordable Care Act, an Orwellian title for a statute if there ever was […]

Actor-turned-producer Robert Redford boasts that his new CNN series, “Death Row Stories,” is “about the search for justice and truth.” That’s odd, because the series has aired three episodes and they’re all about victims of prosecutorial abuse. So far, nobody’s really guilty. The second episode features a woman who never spent a night on death […]

The defamation of Paul Ryan as a racist for noting the multigenerational persistence of joblessness in troubled neighborhoods is more than just another episode of hysterical name-calling by the left. The episode represents, in microcosm, the left’s intellectual bankruptcy. Ryan’s comments were not just true and well-intentioned; they were obviously so. Even if Ryan were […]

Last week, Pope Francis warned Italy’s Mafia leaders that if they continue their evil ways, they will go to hell. Hooray for the pope. More power to him for threatening evil people with hell. I had begun to despair that in my lifetime I would hear such talk from mainstream Christian or Jewish leaders. For […]

Will Hillary Clinton be elected America’s next president? The polls suggest she will. Recent polls compiled by Real Clear Politics show her winning 67 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries, with no other candidate above 11 percent. General election polling shows Clinton with an average lead over various possible Republican nominees of 51 to […]

My parents taught me never to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Fred Phelps, who died last week at the age of 84, I think they would have made an exception. The man, who will be referred to in this column without the modifier “reverend,” because there was nothing reverent about […]