All politics is local, said the late House Speaker

The huge Democratic turnout in the Iowa Caucuses, over twice that of the GOP, and the stampede by independents to vote in the Democratic precincts, suggests that Iowa, a swing state carried by President Bush in 2004, may be lost irretrievably to the GOP in ...

“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” Emerson’s couplet comes to mind as the New Year opens with Pakistan, the second largest Muslim country on Earth, in social and political chaos, trending toward a failed state with nuclear weapons. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom the White House pressed to return home from exile...

Good for Time. Its Person of the Year was Vladimir Putin, who has presided over the economic rebirth of his nation and reasserted Russia’s role as a great power. A first runner-up was Gen. David Petraeus, leader of the “surge” in Iraq that staved off what appeared a U.S. defeat and debacle, and helped revive...

Four weeks before New Hampshire and three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican race has become a proxy religious war. On one side is a Baptist preacher who called homosexuality

For Dr. James Watson, 79-year-old co-winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, October marked the nadir of a brilliant career. The month began with Watson headed to London to promote his new book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science,” and to lecture...

Observing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House imperil a U.S.-Turkish alliance of 60 years—by formally charging Turkey with genocide in a 1915 massacre of the Armenians—the question comes to mind: Does this generation have the maturity to lead America? About the horrors visited on Armenians in 1915, that year of Turkish triumph over the...

Many in Congress deeply regret having voted President Bush a blank check for war in October 2002. And they are frustrated at their inability to compel him to begin bringing the troops home. Why, then, is Congress pushing for a new confrontation, with Iran, which could involve us in a war with a nation four...

“Mexico does not end at its borders. . . . Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.” That astonishing claim, by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in his state of the nation address at the National Palace Sunday, brought his audience wildly cheering to its feet. Were the United States a serious nation, Calderon’s claim...

The execution-style murder of three African-American college students in Newark, N.J., forced to kneel and shot in the head—allegedly by an illegal alien from Peru who was out on bail for the serial rape of a 5-year-old—has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008. Newark, like New York, is a “sanctuary city,” where...

Why did Bush do it? Why did he suddenly barge into the legal process and erase the entire 30-month sentence of Scooter Libby? For, from his own statement, Bush found the act deeply distasteful. In that statement, Bush calls Libby’s crimes “serious convictions of perjury and obstruction of justice.” He praises Patrick Fitzgerald as “a...

In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity by Patrick J. Buchanan • July 3, 2007 • Printer-friendly “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” said a cocky George W. Bush in Bulgaria, when he heard the Senate had just fallen 15 votes short of voting cloture on the Kennedy-Kyl immigration bill he had embraced. Bush returned home,...

What was anticipated in September, the retreat of the old bulls of the Republican Party from the Bush war policy, happened in June. The beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war is at hand.

In July 1861, the Union Army marched out of the capital to meet the Confederates forming up at Manassas. Washingtonians packed picnic lunches and followed to enjoy the rebel rout. By nightfall, the Union Army was straggling back to the city. Stunned and panicked spectators had already returned to report the defeat of Gen. McDowell’s...

By 1988, Ronald Reagan, who had famously branded the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” was striding through Red Square arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians were pounding both men on the back. They had just signed the greatest arms reduction agreement in history—eliminating all Soviet SS-20s targeted on Europe, in return for removal of the Pershing...

Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran? For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war. —Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq. —The U.N....

A federal program, Ronald Reagan used to say, is the closest thing to eternal life here on earth. Even the Gipper conceded he failed to get control of the federal behemoth. At least he tried. But what can be said for the conservative movement today, as one witnesses the Wall Street Journal battle to save...