Columnist.
Among the many problems with the Great Gun Debate these days is that the pro-gun crowd wants to make it a culture-war battle and the anti-gun crowd wants to pretend that it isn't.
For all the obvious reasons, the Republican Party gets most of the attention these days. For starters, it controls the White House, the Senate and the House, and the party in power always warrants more scrutiny, even when it's operating smoothly.
One painful aspect of the public debates over the opioid-addiction crisis is how much they mirror the arguments that arise from personal addiction crises.
I'm still trying to make sense of the news that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign were the forces behind the infamous "Steele Dossier," a dodgy document full of hearsay about Donald Trump that was put together by an even dodgier outfit called Fusion GPS, which has done shady work on behalf of Russia in the past.
William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review (where I work), once confessed in private, "I wish to hell I could attack them without pleasing people I can't stand to please."
A Washington lobbyist once told me that the first rule of rainmakers is: "If it starts to rain, dance!"
In high school civics I was taught that, in America, the president has many roles, often divided in other countries. He's commander in chief, head of state, chief administrator and executive, the head of his party, chief diplomat, legislative leader and, according to some lists, "the guardian of the economy."
Why can't we have nice things? That's the question, if not exactly the phrasing, so many conservatives are asking these days.
If hypocrisy were a greenhouse gas, the ice caps would be gone by now.
The NRA has given money to Republican politicians. But in the grubby bazaar of politician-buying, the NRA is a bit player.
The conservative movement is caught in a Catch-22 of its own making. In the war against "the establishment" we have made being an outsider the most important qualification for a politician. The problem?
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the "Blade Runner" curse. If you're familiar with the 1982 sci-fi cult classic starring Harrison Ford, constantly reissued in some new "director's cut" or "special edition," you'd be forgiven for thinking the "Blade Runner" curse had something to do with a mysterious crone casting an evil eye on the producers, vowing that the film would spend eternity in an editor's suite.
The whole idea of a free society is based on a very simple idea that is very hard to live by: People have the right to be wrong.
One of my favorite kinds of news stories is the report of a new scientific study that verifies the obvious. You've seen them.
Will the real moderate party please stand up?
"At this point, who DOESN'T want Trump impeached?" —Ann Coulter tweet, 7:05 a.m., September 14, 2017
I used to worry that Donald Trump was Lonesome Rhodes in a better suit. I'm starting to wonder if he's Chance the Gardener in a worse one.
The news that President Trump abandoned Republicans to strike a deal with Congressional Democrats on a three-month extension of the debt limit yielded a predictable response from his predictable cheerleaders: It was brilliant and typically shrewd for the author of "The Art of the Deal" to take the very first offer the Democrats made and ask for nothing in return.
The Obama Department of Homeland Security concluded that left-wing "antifa" forces were engaged in "domestic terrorist violence," according to documents obtained by Politico.
The first thing is to recognize that there are no good solutions.
