The past two months of electoral losses for the Trump GOP feel very familiar. Newly elected President Barack Obama’s party lost off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and suffered a stunning upset in a Senate race it had no business losing in Massachusetts. Donald Trump’s party lost off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and […]
Rich Lowry
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Press caught in blatant anti-Trump bias
It’s a wonder that President Donald Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself. The media’s errors over the past week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the past year, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. […]
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Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Bannon's garbage case for Roy Moore
In his Alabama appearance for Roy Moore, Steve Bannon turned in an intellectually and morally putrid performance even by his standards. There is a partisan case for voting for Moore, which is simply that Republicans can’t afford to lose a Senate seat and Moore’s failings must be ignored or rationalized away for the larger good […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
No, Michael Flynn didn't violate the Logan Act
In December 2016, Michael Flynn was three weeks from becoming the national-security adviser to the next president of the United States. This is a pertinent fact in evaluating the conduct underlying his plea deal with Robert Mueller. Flynn admitted to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia and other foreign governments during the […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Democrats fail to censure Conyers
There are sexual harassers, and then there is John Conyers, the Democrat from Detroit who made his congressional office an adjunct of his libido. The evidence suggests that Conyers believed that as a 27-term congressman, he was entitled to the Washington, D.C., equivalent of the Ottoman imperial harem. He routinely hit on his female staffers, […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Trump is right about trophy hunting
It’s not often that President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is the voice of reason and compassion, but on the issue of trophy hunting it makes more sense than his own Department of Interior. Trump put on hold the department’s initial decision to reverse an Obama-era ban and allow the importation of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Roy Moore loses the 'he said/she said' contest
Roy Moore’s reputation depends on denying that he dated teenage girls as a grown man, and yet he can’t quite bring himself to do it. The Alabama Republican’s campaign for the Senate has been rocked by allegations of sexual improprieties with underage girls. While he’s denied the worst of the allegations, he turned in a […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
There is no Trumpism without Trump
Ed Gillespie went from potential vindicator of Trumpism to “cuckservative” in the space of a couple of hours. The Virginia Republican, campaigning in a treacherous political environment defined by an unpopular president of his own party, ran the only race he reasonably could. He distanced himself from Donald Trump personally, hoping to lessen his losses […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
GOP attacks on Trump counterproductive
The showdown between President Donald Trump and Sen. Jeff Flake turned out to be no contest. It wasn’t Trump who was out of the GOP mainstream, but Flake. The Arizona senator supported Gang of Eight-style immigration reform, when immigration restriction is becoming a litmus-test issue in the party. He is a Goldwaterite, libertarian-inflected conservative, when […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Trump refuses to be pinned down on issues
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, President Donald Trump has a position on the Lamar Alexander/Patty Murray health care deal, and if you don’t like it, he has another one. Within hours, Trump veered wildly on the bipartisan compromise on Obamacare that the Tennessee Republican and the Washington Democrat forged at his personal urging. At times supportive, […]