It’s doubtful that a former American presidential candidate has ever formally endorsed incivility before, but Hillary Clinton is ever full of surprises. In an interview on CNN, the erstwhile advocate of “if they go low, we go high” switched around to unapologetically call for going low. “You cannot be civil with a political party,” she […]
Rich Lowry
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Kavanaugh's opponents have nothing on him
Brett Kavanaugh gave high-profile testimony that very few people seem to have paid attention to in any detail. The media is now engaged in a full-court press to establish that Kavanaugh drank to excess — when he admitted in his testimony that he drank to excess. In his opening statement in the Senate hearing, Kavanaugh […]
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Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Kavanaugh has a right to be angry
Brett Kavanaugh may have saved his Supreme Court confirmation with one of the most memorable statements in modern congressional history. After his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, delivered a compelling, sympathetic performance earlier in the day, Kavanaugh entered the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with his chances hanging by a thread. Commentators speculated about how he’d inevitably […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
The assault on Kavanaugh validates Trump
The attempted political assassination of Brett Kavanaugh is bad for the country, but good for a Trumpian attitude toward American politics. The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Donald Trump’s supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become. At least three premises […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Senate losing interest in due process
Christine Blasey Ford deserves a hearing, although at the moment it’s not clear if she really wants one. What she doesn’t deserve is to be believed automatically just because she’s a woman making an accusation. At its best, our system of justice judges each individual — the accuser and the accused — on the basis […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Brett Kavanaugh's Kafkaesque nightmare
If Franz Kafka had written about confirmation hearings, he couldn’t have come up with a better scenario than the one now unfolding in the U.S. Senate. Brett Kavanaugh, who the day before yesterday was an unimpeachable pillar of the legal establishment, stands accused of a heinous offense that is almost impossible to definitively rebut. Even […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
An economic boom is a terrible thing to waste
President Donald Trump is showing that it’s possible to preside over a period of peace and prosperity and still be notably unpopular. Over the past several months, Trump has opened even more of a wedge between the largely benign material conditions in the country and his own political standing, which is precarious and appears to […]
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Future looks promising for blue collar workers
The economic recovery is really beginning to reach into Trump country. The president is famous for his extravagant promises, involving, invariably, the biggest and the best. The landscape is littered with examples, although he never promised to create blue-collar jobs at the fastest clip since 1984, something he achieved in the first half of 2018. […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Leftists find a new standard for stupid
It’s not easy to set a new standard for stupid in 2018, but a few left-wingers on Twitter managed it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. They claimed to have seen one of Judge Kavanaugh’s former law clerks, Zina Bash, making a white-power symbol while sitting behind him at the opening session of the hearings. Less […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
DeVos set to undo outrageous Obama era procedures
A judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American. Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping […]