Rich Lowry
The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.Collection: Car
Calculation has its advantages, but no one likes naked calculation.
In person, George W. Bush is extremely forceful. He has a restless energy when he sits in a chair, and nearly leaps out of it when making certain points.
The debate about the war seems pretty robust and free. Many publications, from the New Yorker to the Nation, feel perfectly comfortable printing anti-American articles and that's fine. That's what the First Amendment is all about.
If Bill was all id, Hillary is all superego.
John Kerry couldn't even order a Philly cheesesteak properly.
It is Hillary's lot in life not to be able to fake it well.
Al Gore adopted three utterly different personas in three national presidential debates.
Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes.
Bush's faith in the rightness of his strategy in the broader war is deep-seated. It is a product of faith.
Bill Clinton was a liberal who could appeal to conservative-leaning Bubba voters.
Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting.
Message to Obama: Fighting the Clinton machine won't be as easy as picking up favorable press clips.
Comedians still make fun of Bill's out-of-control appetites, but with Hillary, the mockery is about how she lets nothing be out of control.
There's no wobble in Bush. If anything, the opposite. Right after hello, the next words out of his mouth are: I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.
Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.
Because liberalism typically doesn't sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists.
You have to check out 'March of the Penguins'. Penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy.
When my dad was badly weakened by the flu and my mom wanted to call an ambulance to take him to the emergency room, he wouldn't go unless he could shave first and change into a nice shirt and a pair of slacks.
Parents are the most likely to be victims of the violence of their mentally ill children.
Yes, this is 21st-century America. Where we have better means to treat mental illness than ever before, but choose to let the insane people decide to get it or not.
When they are treated, the seriously mentally ill aren't more violent than the general population. If untreated, though, they are.
France will always be France no matter what, but America involves striving toward an ideal.
Multiculturalism, if its logic is fully played out, is the ideology of national suicide.Collection: Suicide
From where I sit, it's a superb cabinet [for Donald Trump] so far. A lot of these choices could have been made by Ted Cruz. So you're going to have this shotgun marriage between a very orthodox Republican cabinet and a very unorthodox.Collection: Choices
The debate over troop levels will rage for years; it is...beside the point.Collection: Years
Ultimately Rex Tillerson will reflect [Donald] Trump's policy towards Russia, which will be friendly up right up to the point of time it isn't.Collection: Russia
We are a product of our families, schools, and churches. Without the liberty and rule of law that characterize America, entrepreneurship would indeed be impossible. Any successful American who is not a patriot is a rank ingrate.Collection: School
We're going to cut taxes, deregulate to try to create general pro-growth conditions, at the same time, much more than any other Republican ever before, [Donald Trump] is going to focus on trying to tighten the labor market directly through discouraging outsourcing and tightening up on immigration, all towards the goal of actually increasing wages, that's a new focus for the Republican Party and a very important one.Collection: Party
[Donald Trump] campaigned on repealing Obamacare.Collection: Obamacare
If Hillary can't win the nomination - and it's clearly very, very hard for her - she's basically a stalking horse for McCain. She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama.Collection: Horse
No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy.Collection: Politics
The horn of dilemma of energy politics is what really drives concern about this energy in this country, at the gut level for most people, is high gas prices. And if you really want to fight global warming and try to reduce our carbon emissions, the cleanest, easiest, most rational way to do it would to make the price of gas even higher through very stiff gas prices.Collection: Country
Peter Beinart excoriates the doughface liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off.Collection: Country
We believe in the power of 21st-century international norms. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes in the power of lies and brute force, and implicitly asks, in the spirit of Josef Stalin, 'How many divisions do international norms have?'Collection: Lying
There is no appeasing Putin. Frankly, there is no directly stopping him, either. It is only possible to raise the costs to him of his war, including the military costs. If we won't provide military materiel to Ukraine now, we deserve the contempt with which Putin regards us.Collection: Military
I think all of us in the commentary business need to take a deep breath. And it can't be true that every single week the world is ending in some different way. And this presidency [of Donald Trump] will be judged like all presidencies - on the state of the economy and by events.Collection: Thinking
[Donald Trump] campaigned on an enormous tax cut, and he campaigned on a deregulatory agenda.Collection: Cutting
It is Hillary's lot in life not to be able to fake it well...Collection: Fake People
Arizona seeks only to enforce the nominal immigration policy of the United States. Perhaps the federal government should try it sometime.Collection: Government
There's no point trying to sugar-coat this or get Jesuitical about it. Yes, Russia tried to manipulate our election. It's appalling. Yes, it should be investigated and taken seriously.Collection: Taken
What (the Arizona immigration law) is likely to mean effectively is that if in the course of a traffic stop, a cop asks you for a driver's license, and you don't have one, and he asks you for other identification, and you have none, and he calls ICE and they have no record of you as a legal immigrant, you're in trouble. This is near-fascism?Collection: Mean
America roused to a righteous anger has always been a force for good. States that have been supporting if not Osama bin Laden, people like him need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution.Collection: Pain
Contemporary Democrats are people who can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere is experiencing good news.Collection: Ideas
I do think - you look at actually what WikiLeaks came out with, most of it was just gossipy interest, except for like this Doug Band memo from a Clinton crony in black and white who explained the Clinton Foundation was a profit center for Bill Clinton and people around him.The Russians didn't make that up, that was all Hillary's [Clinton] vulnerability her own.Collection: Black And White
There is simply no substitute for forceful American leadership. Sometimes the best way to get allies is to be willing to forge ahead alone.Collection: War
If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American.Collection: Country
Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who are very skeptical of [Rex Tillerson]. At the same time the Democrats will portray him as a climate criminal because he heads a big oil company. So, he'll be in for really tough confirmation hearings.Collection: Oil
I think just focusing on the wealth of these cabinet picks misunderstands [Donald] Trump's economic strategy here, which is going to be equal parts traditional Republican economics.Collection: Thinking
I think likelier targets are [Steve] Mnuchin, the Treasury pick. When you look at his dealings during the financial crisis, that's going to be a target rich environment, and [Rex] Tillerson.Collection: Thinking