It’s Tehran’s turn for the “fire and fury” treatment. In response to Iranian President Hasan Rouhani telling Donald Trump not to “play with the lion’s tail” because “war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” the president fired back in an emphatically all-caps tweet warning of “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY […]
Rich Lowry
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Don't dismiss NATO's faraway members
Donald Trump thrives on an image of strength, so it’s never a good look when he inadvertently invokes the spirit of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister whose name has become a watchword for appeasement. In September 1938, Chamberlain referred to the process of the Nazis dismembering Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a faraway country […]
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Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Trump could take leasons from Putin
Donald Trump is not, and never will be, the Moscow correspondent for The Nation magazine, and he shouldn’t sound like it. The left-wing publication is prone to extend sympathetic understanding to adversaries of the United States and find some reason, any reason, to blame ourselves for their external aggression and internal suppression. Especially to the […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Yes, the Supreme Court is undemocratic
In an era of partisan polarization, it is rare to get agreement on anything, but about this there should be a consensus: The Supreme Court is an undemocratic institution whose power should be carefully circumscribed. The right has long been of this view, and the left is suddenly and opportunistically partway there. In an essay […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Don't cry for Angela Merkel
Angela Merkel is, her supporters like to gloat, the leader of the free world. Just don’t ask her to spend as if she is. Donald Trump has made the German chancellor one of his favorite rhetorical targets, especially over Germany’s anemic defense expenditures. This has led to worries about the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance, […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Abolish ICE — a foolhardy idea whose time has come
There are few things more powerful in politics than a dumb idea whose time has come. This accounts for the seemingly inexorable momentum of the rallying cry, “Abolish ICE,” which has rapidly gone from fantastical left-wing cause to mainstream Democratic issue embraced by prospective presidential candidates. The great advantage of “Abolish ICE” is precisely its […]
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Roe is a travesty
The prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade will be at the foreground of the battle over Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement, and it should be. Roe is judicially wrought social legislation pretending to the status of constitutional law. It is more adventurous than Miranda and Griswold, other watchwords of judicial activism from its era. It is […]
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The tawdry and dumb Nazi charge
The Nazi analogy has long been recognized as the crudest and dumbest form of argument, but it is enjoying a renaissance. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden notoriously tweeted a photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a response to family separations at the border. Upon a report that parents at the border were being told that their children […]
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What Trump gets
In the 1950s, the great neo-conservative intellectual Irving Kristol acknowledged Joe McCarthy’s stark failings, but famously refused to take the side of his critics. “For there is one thing,” he wrote, “that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Enforcement, not separation, is the issue
President Donald Trump climbed down on separating families at the border, but the underlying argument is not going away. The central question isn’t whether we should separate families — even most immigration hawks would prefer to hold families together — but whether migrants should stay in the United States or not. Trump hopes to salvage […]