Chemical weapons are evil, but you could also say they’re a curse. They have a talismanic power to bend and distort U.S. foreign policy. You can ask George W. Bush or Barack Obama. In 2003, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz gave a lengthy interview to Vanity Fair that caused a huge uproar, largely because the […]

The fascinating issue of America’s character arose in a “Ricochet Podcast” featuring the sagacious Norman Podhoretz. Hosts Peter Robinson, Rob Long and James Lileks interviewed Podhoretz on a range of issues, but primarily American foreign policy. Long lamented that President Obama has been making a consummate mess of America’s foreign policy, most recently in Syria, […]

After every mass shooting, I write a variant of the same column. Perhaps I’ll republish this one when the next attack happens. The increase in mass shootings over the course of the past several decades is not imaginary. In 2000, The New York Times analyzed 100 mass shootings between 1949 and 1999 and found that […]

It’s become common over the past year or two to note how well Wall Street is doing while Main Street is still struggling. Sadly, that tale of two economies has resulted from a conscious choice by those at the very top levels of our nation’s financial and political elites. The choice was inadvertently highlighted in […]

In a major foreign policy speech, Barack Obama called for Israel to return to its former borders prior to the 1967 “Six Day War” with Egypt, Syria and Jordan.:  In some places, those borders leave Israel less than nine miles wide.: As a result of that war — and in order to better defend itself — […]

For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically. The result was a more skilled […]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., after another mass shooting, predictably wasted no time in demanding still more gun control legislation. This week, a killer with a valid ID entered the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C., a military facility where 16,000 people — mostly civilians — work. He killed 12 people and wounded several others at […]

Next week, “The Book of Matt” by famed investigative journalist Stephen Jiminez, is slotted for release. The book tells the true story behind the murder of Matthew Shepard, who has become the angelic face of victimhood in the gay rights movement. Shepard’s murder in 1998 launched a national effort, spearheaded by President Clinton, to push […]

The Republican Party has it backwards: Don’t threaten to close the government down over Obamacare. But do threaten not to raise the debt limit unless welfare entitlements are ratcheted back. The debt limit fight is the right place to make a stand. The public does not like debt or borrowing and realizes that excessive debt […]

There is a tradition in politics that is similar to one in the legal profession: When evidence supports your position, make your argument based on the evidence, but when it argues against your position, ignore the evidence and appeal to emotion. The evidence is piling up that “climate change,” formerly known as “global warming,” is […]

Republicans have been getting a lot of advice on how they should change their party ever since Mitt Romney’s defeat in November 2012. They need it. They are in more than the usual disarray that afflicts parties out of the White House. Many members of their majority in the House of Representatives are out of […]