Are the Bells Tolling for Amy, Liz & Joe?

By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men. Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president ...

U.S. Capital

Failed Coup of a Failing Establishment

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad. In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges. As weekend polls show ...

Is Bernie’s Hour of Power at Hand?

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It's hard to believe but not impossible. As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. ...

President Trump

Impeachment: The Left’s Ultimate Weapon

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer ...

Is Mass Civil Disobedience Our Future?

On the holiday set aside in 2020 to honor Martin Luther King, the premier advocate of nonviolent Gandhian civil disobedience, thousands of gun owners gathered in Richmond to petition peacefully for their rights. King had preached that there was a higher law that justified breaking existing laws ...

Trump’s In-Kind Contribution to Bernie

The directed killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's blood-soaked field marshal in the "forever war" of the Middle East, has begun to roil the politics of both the region and the USA. A stunned and shaken Iran retaliated by firing a dozen missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq. Yet, before launching ...

If Baghdad Wants Us Out, Let’s Go!

Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein's dictatorship into a beacon of democracy, Iraq's Parliament, amid shouts of "Death to America!" voted to expel all U.S. troops from the country. Though nonbinding, the expulsion vote came after mobs trashed the U.S. embassy in an ...

Will War Derail Trump’s Reelection?

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra reminded us. But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this ...

Today France, Tomorrow the USA?

As that rail and subway strike continued to paralyze travel in Paris and across France into the third week, President Emmanuel Macron made a Christmas appeal to his dissatisfied countrymen: "Strike action is justifiable and protected by the constitution, but I think there are moments in a nation's ...

Will the Secessionist Epidemic Ever End?

Fresh from his triumphal "Get Brexit Done!" campaign, Prime Minister Boris Johnson anticipates a swift secession from the European Union. But if Britain secedes from the EU, warns Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland will secede from the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland, which ...