ArcaMax

The big lie works -- until it doesn't.

The big lie in this case is Joe Biden's charge that the changes in Georgia election law passed by the majority-Republican legislature and signed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp on April 1 being are "Jim Crow on steroids." This was doubling down on his March 25 press conference statement that the law "...Read more

"This is not politics," President Joe Biden said last week. "Reinstate the mandate if you let it down." Give him credit for consistency: When Gov. Greg Abbott ended Texas' mask mandate last month, Biden called it "Neanderthal thinking."

But maybe the Neanderthals got it right. COVID-19 deaths in Texas plunged in March, and as National Review's ...Read more

The acrid atmosphere last week at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, with its vivid murals of the 18th-century British seafarer James Cook's discoveries throughout the Pacific, sounds very much like the acrid atmosphere almost exactly 60 years ago in the Beaux-Arts American and Soviet embassies in Vienna: grim, at least for the United ...Read more

How to explain Joe Biden's ideological transformation over the years? Perhaps it's the same as the explanation of why the chameleon's complexion changes when he moves from desert to forest: adaptation to local terrain.

About the Biden transformation there can be no question. The senator who opposed government financing of abortions for 30-some ...Read more

"BIDEN," say the young demonstrators' T-shirts, imitating his campaign logo, "PLEASE LET US IN!" The picture ran in The New York Times, but one wonders whether whoever paid for the tees got his money's worth, for President Joe Biden's administration seems determined to let in as many immigrants as want to come.

The numbers are daunting. About ...Read more

When public policies have produced disastrous results, and when alternative policies have resulted in immediate, seemingly miraculous improvement, why would anyone want to go back to the earlier policies? Is there any reason to suppose that this time will be different?

Not that I can see. The earlier policies -- a pullback from active policing ...Read more

The last decade has seen a boom in voter turnout -- for both parties. Between the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections, total voter turnout rose 23%, with Democratic turnout up 23% and Republican turnout up 22%.

Yet, because of the changing distribution of votes, the results were significantly different. The 2012 election was not a close thing:...Read more

You expect a certain number of stumbles from a new administration. President Joe Biden's incoming team professed dismay at having to create a coronavirus vaccine distribution program "from scratch," due to its predecessor's handling of the situation, and this week, Biden complained that "we didn't have" a vaccine when he "came into office." He ...Read more

When you've been consuming and producing political commentary for many years, you get used to certain recurring themes. One is the imminent disappearance or relegation to permanent minority status of the Republican Party.

This was widely predicted after the Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964, after Watergate in the 1970s, after the elections of ...Read more

Pictures matter. Images convey truths -- and falsehoods -- with an emotional impact that can amplify and sometimes completely overwhelm the messages imparted by words.

Consider the photo of the guy with the buffalo-horn headdress and naked midriff standing at the House speaker's podium in the Capitol on Jan. 6. Or the video shot of a CNN ...Read more

On Tuesday, six days into Joe Biden's administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice -- unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday show lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack -- ventured into the White House press room to ...Read more

"We must end this uncivil war," Joe Biden proclaimed shortly after he became the 46th president on Wednesday. Hours earlier, in his last moments as the 45th president, Donald Trump extended "best wishes" to the "new administration." Graceful words, but accompanied by sharp and, in some cases, deserved attacks. Our presidents since George ...Read more

It wasn't just Donald Trump's detractors who felt a sudden sense of relief when they heard that Twitter was blocking his feed after the storming of the Capitol and the disruption of the reading of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. While President Trump's exact words to the crowd on the Ellipse didn't constitute a criminal incitement, they...Read more