“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi (or somebody)
That giant sucking sound you hear right now is the entire political establishment reacting in shock to Donald Trump’s deeply informed and comprehensive plan to address the rampant illegal immigration that has plagued America for more than a quarter century.
It’s time to ask a question, the answer to which we do not know: Will former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal do fatal damage to her campaign?
Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency.
Humans need rules. Rules make life more predictable. But when the rules multiply, the world needs some rule-breakers.
In 1935 George Dangerfield published "The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914," a vivid account of how Britain's center-left Liberal Party, dominant for a century, collapsed amid conflicts it could not resolve.
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
Hillary Clinton's recent attack on fellow presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, R-Fla., over abortion ("offensive," "outrageous" and "troubling," she said) reminded me of something I've been wanting to wonder aloud for some time:
Why doesn't the Democratic Party call for a federal law legalizing abortion?
My Instagram and Facebook feeds have been filled with unwitting apologists for racism against Korean-American small-business owners.
Heckuva job, Hollywood!
August is traditionally a vacation month, and East Coast elites, following European tradition, are thick on the ground in the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard (the Obamas' choice) and Nantucket.
Whatever you think of him, Donald Trump is a stick of dynamite thrown into the presidential pond. All the boats have been rocked, and given Trump’s potential for more explosiveness, the political waters show little sign of settling down anytime soon.
Donald Trump is so special that we’ve created a category (and perhaps a word) just for him in our Republican presidential rankings: “The Un-Nominatable Frontrunner.”
Get off that late-summer snooze button, America. The Obama administration is plotting to break a major promise made under oath -- and jeopardize our nation in the name of social justice.
This week, top White House officials floated renewed plans to close down Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Pentagon and Justice Department bureaucrats have been powwowing over how to shutter the facility and import up to hundreds of detained jihad suspects into the U.S. It's a longtime legacy promise President Obama wants to fulfill to progressives before he rides off permanently to Martha's Vineyard and Hawaii's lushest golf courses.
Yikes, you really hate me!
Many of you, anyway, based on Twitter and Facebook comments posted after I argued immigration with Ann Coulter on my TV show.
The so-called "debates," among too many Republicans to have a debate, are yet another painful sign of how much words and ideas have degenerated in our times.
Thursday was the biggest night of the political year so far, for what happened on the stage at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena and for what happened offstage as well.
The stage was the scene of the first two Republican presidential debates, hosted by Fox News, which together lasted some 200 minutes between 5 and 11 p.m. EDT. What happened there did not go unnoticed. According to overnight Nielsen ratings, the two-hour prime-time debate got a rating as high as the national basketball finals -- almost triple the highest rating of a Republican debate in the 2012 cycle and more than half that of the first Obama-Romney debate that fall. It was apparently the most watched primary debate in history.
Why did Fox News decide to schedule two Republican presidential debates rather than one? Simple arithmetic: 90 minutes divided by 17 candidates equals 5 minutes and 29 seconds apiece. That's scarcely enough time for the oral equivalent of a few tweets.
As Republicans take the stage in Cleveland for their first presidential primary debate tonight — with Donald Trump in the middle of it — one thing is already abundantly clear: A lot of voters are angry. Very angry. In fact, a lot of voters have been angry for some time. The phenomenon that we call “negative partisanship,” antipathy on the part of Democratic and Republican voters toward the opposing party and its leaders, has been on the rise since the 1980s, and today it is arguably the most salient feature of the political scene in the United States. Now voter ire appears to be shaping both parties’ 2016 presidential nomination races. The rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders in the Republican and Democratic nomination contests, respectively, is symptomatic of this increased anger in the American electorate.
My town, New York City, enforces rigid gun laws. Police refused to assign me a gun permit. The law doesn't even let me hold a fake gun on TV to demonstrate something.
But New York politicians are so eager to vilify gun ownership that they granted an exception to the anti-gun group States United to Prevent Gun Violence. New York allowed States United to set up a fake gun store, where cameras filmed potential gun customers being spoofed by an actor pretending to be a gun-seller.
This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama's Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he's trying to impose it without Congress, an audacious ploy his old Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe condemns as "burning the Constitution."
With Hillary Clinton's multiple misdeeds coming to light and causing her political problems, reflected in her declining support in the polls, both she and the Democratic Party have reason to be concerned. But both of them may yet be rescued by "The Donald," who can turn out to be their Trump card.
Donald Trump has virtually no chance of becoming even the Republican Party's candidate in 2016, much less being elected President of the United States.
Faute de mieux. That means "for want of something better" in Secretary of State John Kerry's second language. It's also the best case made by its journalistic defenders for approval of the nuclear weapons deal Kerry negotiated with Iran. Or to be more exact, for rallying 34 votes in the Senate or 146 votes in the House to uphold a presidential veto of a congressional vote to disapprove.
