A Bibi-Barack Coalition?

“Where there is no solution, there is no problem,” geostrategist James Burnham once wryly observed. Ex-Sen. George Mitchell, the latest U.S. negotiator to take up the Palestine portfolio, may discover what it was that Burnham meant. For Israel’s three-week war on Gaza, where ...

Ronald Wilson Obama

With a host of near 2 million gathered on the Mall to see him sworn in, Barack Obama delivered an inaugural that was the antithesis of a rallying cry for the “it’s-our-turn!” faithful assembled below. Rather, it was an admonition, a warning to the American people of the gravity ...

Is the Party Over?

As President Barack Obama delivers his inaugural address to a nation filled with anticipation and hope, the vital signs of the loyal opposition appear worse than worrisome. The new majority of 49 states and 60 percent of the nation Nixon cobbled together in 1972, that became the Reagan coalition ...

Ehud’s Poodle?

As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale. He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi ...

An Unreflective Man

With his public approval where Harry Truman’s stood when he left office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday. And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a Trumanesque defiance of his critics—and a Trumanesque failure to understand what ruined ...

Obama’s Choice: FDR or Reagan

Barack Obama, it is said, will inherit the worst times since the Great Depression. Not to minimize the crisis we are in, but we need a little perspective here. The Great Depression began with the Great Crash of 1929. By 1931, unemployment had reached 16 percent. By 1933, 89 percent of stock value ...

Wasn”€™t That a Time

New York had Joe Dimaggio. Boston had Ted Williams             And Washington, D.C.? Well, we had Sammy Baugh, the greatest football player ever to pull on a jersey.             In 1943, Baugh led the NFL in pass ...

There’s Something About Harry

About the appointment by Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Roland Burris to the U.S. Senate, somebody big is lying, big-time. It is either the governor or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Last week, Reid declared that he would not permit Burris, the African-American elder statesman of Illinois politics, ...

Do As I Say…

On the eve of the New Year, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, charged with conspiring to sell the Senate seat of Barack Obama, put the ball back squarely in the court of a Democratic Party that had disowned him. Blago named Roland Burris, former attorney general of Illinois and first African-American ever ...

Bush, Obama, and the Gaza Blitz

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people ...