ArcaMax

When the economy shows signs of weakness, Wall Street analysts expect to see what they call a "flight to safety." Investors sell stocks and buy bonds or gold. The same phenomenon can sometimes be found in politics. Understanding that George W. Bush was riding high in 2004, after what was perceived as a successful response to the 9/11 attacks, ...Read more

There's an old story -- apocryphal, as the best stories always seem to be -- that Richard Nixon asked Chinese premier Zhou Enlai what he thought about the French Revolution, and Zhou said, "It's too soon to tell." At first blush, the minicrisis between Iran and the United States appears to have ended well for the U.S., but it may be too soon to ...Read more

When I emailed Mary Ellen Bork that our mutual friend, Gertrude Himmelfarb, aka Bea Kristol, had passed away at 97, she replied, after expressions of sadness, "Now she and Irving can resume their conversation."

Irving was Irving Kristol, Bea's husband of 67 years. It was one of the great marriages of our time -- two towering intellects who ...Read more

You won't hear young Democrats deride Bernie Sanders with the "OK, boomer" dig. At 78, he's actually too old for the cohort, but that's not why he won't get dinged. He's the most popular Democrat among the under-35 crowd, and judging by recent polling, he's the second-most popular Democrat overall. Sanders has raised nearly twice as money as the...Read more

If I have this straight, House Republicans are united in the belief that public integrity is critically important for our nation. Accordingly, Joe Biden deserves to be impeached. During a meeting of the Rules Committee, Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., referencing Biden's supposed role in pressuring Ukraine to cease investigating his own son's company,...Read more

It's easy to treat Kim Jong Un as a figure of ridicule. I've done it myself. His foreign ministry issues statements like this: "If any language and expressions stoking the atmosphere of confrontation are used once again on purpose at a crucial moment as now, that must really be diagnosed as the relapse of the dotage of a dotard."

His youth, his...Read more

Josef Stalin is reputed to have said: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." In the hands of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the deaths of thousands can be a partisan bludgeon.

A number of scholars have pondered the recent rise in deaths of despair -- those attributed to alcoholism, suicide and drug ...Read more

People often offer cynical interpretations of American support for Israel. It's the malign influence of the Jewish lobby, or Israel is a colonial outpost of the American hegemon or Israel has brainwashed American policymakers. What these right-wing conspiracists, anti-Semites and committed leftists miss is that there isn't any mystery about the ...Read more

Caitlin Flanagan has written a searing piece for The Atlantic titled "The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate: Why We Need to Face the Best Arguments From the Other Side." Flanagan argues that neither the pro nor the anti side of the abortion debate reckons with the best arguments of the other side. She then takes the reader through some ...Read more

If I were addressing a young audience today, I would face an uphill battle to explain why conservatism so inspired me during my own impressionable years. Today, what has been dubbed "Conservatism, Inc" has become so cynical, so nasty, so truth-challenged, and so dumbed-down that it repels all but one-quarter of people between 18-29. The ...Read more

We don't care. You can check Pew or Gallup or any other polling company. We are running deficits that ought to make us nauseated with worry -- the federal deficit passed $1 trillion in September -- but we're not interested. Well, a majority of us anyway. About 48% of those polled by Pew in January said that reducing the deficit should be a top ...Read more

Here's a parlor trick: How many people can you name who were in favor of impeaching William J. Clinton and also favor impeaching Donald J. Trump? Or flip it: How many opposed Clinton's impeachment at the time and now also oppose Trump's?

Of the 14 House impeachment managers in the Clinton case, most have retired from Congress and one has died. ...Read more

During the last impeachment, the Latin expression coitus interruptus got a workout. This time, it's quid pro quo. Republicans lashed themselves to this mast when the White House's own rough transcript of the Donald Trump/ Volodymyr Zelensky call was disclosed. That document, so damaging that one might think its release was the work of Trump's ...Read more