ArcaMax

From the day he entered the race, Joe Biden was the great hope of the Democratic establishment to spare them from the horrifying prospect of a 2020 race between The Donald and Bernie Sanders.

Today, that same establishment wants Joe out of the race.

Why has Biden suddenly become an albatross?

His feeble debate performances and fifth-place ...Read more

In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter.

Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address.

According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of Republicans approve of his handling of his ...Read more

By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men.

Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president ever.

How is it possible, if not probable, ...Read more

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad.

In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges.

As weekend polls show socialist Bernie Sanders surging into the lead for ...Read more

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It's hard to believe but not impossible.

As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls have him running first or second in the ...Read more

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do.

In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross ...Read more

"Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician." So says Hillary Clinton of her former Senate colleague and 2016 rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders.

Her assessment of Sanders' populist-socialist agenda?

"It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it." ...Read more

On the holiday set aside in 2020 to honor Martin Luther King, the premier advocate of nonviolent Gandhian civil disobedience, thousands of gun owners gathered in Richmond to petition peacefully for their rights.

King had preached that there was a higher law that justified breaking existing laws that mandated racial segregation.

When Rosa Parks...Read more

About the impeachment of President Donald Trump she engineered with her Democratic majority, Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday: "It's not personal. It's not political. It's not partisan. It's patriotic."

Seriously, Madam Speaker? Not political? Not partisan?

Why then were all eight House members chosen as managers to prosecute the case against Trump...Read more

The directed killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's blood-soaked field marshal in the "forever war" of the Middle East, has begun to roil the politics of both the region and the USA.

A stunned and shaken Iran retaliated by firing a dozen missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq. Yet, before launching the attack, Iran signaled that its retaliation ...Read more

Since 1969, "Virginia Is for Lovers" has been the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Advertising Age called it "one of the most iconic ad campaigns in the past 50 years."

But the Virginia of 2020 seems to be another country than the friendly commonwealth to which this writer moved four decades ago.

Charlottesville, home...Read more

If Western elites were asked to name the greatest crisis facing mankind, climate change would win in a walk.

Thus did Time magazine pass over every world leader to name a Swedish teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg, its person of the year.

On New Year's Day, the headline over yet another story in The Washington Post admonished us anew: "A...Read more

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra reminded us.

But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s.

Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump's great domestic...Read more

As of Dec. 26, Kim Jong Un's "Christmas gift" to President Donald Trump had not arrived. Most foreign policy analysts predict it will be a missile test more impressive than any Pyongyang has yet carried off.

What is Kim's game? What does Kim want?

He cannot want war with the United States, as this could result in the annihilation of the Kim ...Read more

As that rail and subway strike continued to paralyze travel in Paris and across France into the third week, President Emmanuel Macron made a Christmas appeal to his dissatisfied countrymen:

"Strike action is justifiable and protected by the constitution, but I think there are moments in a nation's life when it is good to observe a truce out of ...Read more

"We're gonna impeach the (expletive deleted)."

Thus did the member from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, declare last January to be the goal of the 2019 House Democratic Caucus.

Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the goods.

The House impeached President Donald Trump on a straight party-line vote. Not one Republican signed on to the most ...Read more

Fresh from his triumphal "Get Brexit Done!" campaign, Prime Minister Boris Johnson anticipates a swift secession from the European Union.

But if Britain secedes from the EU, warns Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland will secede from the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland, which voted in 2016 to remain in the EU, could follow ...Read more

"Quid pro quo" was the accusatory Latin phrase most often used to describe President Donald Trump's July 25 phone call asking for a "favor" from the president of Ukraine.

New Year's prediction: The Roman poet Horace's Latin depiction: "Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus" -- "The mountains went into labor, and brought forth a mouse" -- ...Read more

"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," is attributed, wrongly, say some historians, to Winston Churchill. Still, the words lately came to mind.

While last week ended with a hopeful U.S.-Iranian prisoner exchange that was hailed by President Donald Trump -- "Thank you to Iran for a very fair negotiation. See, we can make a deal together" -- a few ...Read more

The "Our diversity is our strength!" Party is starting to look rather monochromatic in its upper echelons these days.

The four leading candidates for its presidential nomination -- Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg -- are all white.

The six candidates who have qualified for the Dec. 19 debate -- the front four, ...Read more