Columns ‹ Opinion
Thinking Through “This Town”
Rarely do I devote an entire, three-hour radio show to one guest.
Favorite novelists –like Alex Berenson, C.J. Box, Daniel Silva, Brad Thor and the late Vince Flynn—have regularly been welcomed for two-hour chats. The opportunity to do long-form interviews is one of the great aspects of talk radio. Both Silva and Thor were on this week in fact, and the...
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Needed for the Movies: Better Bad Guys
Two of Hollywood’s biggest summer thrillers suggest that the chief threat to humanity comes from gigantic, vicious reptiles? Both PACIFIC RIM and Will Smith’s AFTER EARTH forced their intrepid heroes to confront these Godzilla wanna-bes to save the human race.
In WORLD WAR Z, a similar menace came from hordes of zombies, and in MAN OF STEEL we needed...
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The Need for Better Bad Guys
Two of Hollywood’s biggest summer thrillers suggest that the chief threat to humanity comes from gigantic, vicious reptiles? Both PACIFIC RIM and Will Smith’s AFTER EARTH forced their intrepid heroes to confront these Godzilla wanna-bes to save the human race.
In WORLD WAR Z, a similar menace came from hordes of zombies, and in MAN OF STEEL we needed...
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Zimmerman: Guilty of Not Being Black
‘We are outraged and heartbroken over today’s verdict,” NAACP president Benjamin Jealous said in a statement moments after a jury of six women found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
That’s what it has come to for the NAACP. The Zimmerman case wasn’t about due process. It wasn’t about Trayvon Martin’s family...
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Misguided and Destructive, Yes; Evil, No.
Recently on my radio show, former Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota slammed colleagues of both parties for their inability to work together to solve the nation’s worst problems. An angry caller disagreed, telling Senator Dorgan that compromise in today’s climate was immoral since conservatives know “you can’t compromise with evil.”
This response...
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The Election of a Black President Has Meant Nothing
The greatest hope most Americans — including Republicans — had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country’s president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.
This has not happened. The election, and even the re-election,...
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A thriller indicts the MSM: Daniel Silva’s ‘The English Girl’ and the Zimmerman trial
“Not guilty.” And “Not guilty” again. With four short words, the Zimmerman travesty ended.
But there were plenty of guilty verdicts to hand around to the media, whose orgy of coverage consumed all before it, absorbing eventually all the cable networks, most of talk radio and endless column inches of ink when every serious student of the...
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The Right Context for Trayvon’s Death
With the widely-anticipated “not guilty” verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial, it’s crucial to place the tragic death of Trayvon Martin in its proper context.
It’s true that black teenagers across the country face a hugely elevated risk of violent death, but very few of them perish due to “racial profiling,” hostility or aggression from...
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The House GOP Fumbles The Fence and Thus Border Security And Thus Immigration Reform
It is easy to agree with Bill Kristol, editor of the WeeklyStandard, and Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, that the Senate immigration bill should die a quick death in the House. There was much that was good in the bill, but it didn’t mandate a border fence, and the vast length of the bill are equally sufficient reasons to judge the bill a giant...
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Should “Entrepreneurs” Abandon Business to Join Government?
In a major address on his “New Management Agenda,” President Obama gave an alarming indication of his underlying contempt for the private sector. He emphasized his desire to recruit “the brightest minds” to work in government and said “I’m going t be asking more people around the country – more inventors and entrepreneurs and visionaries – to...
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Baseball Strikes Out on Culture War Symbols
Departing from its proudly non-political posture, Major League Baseball offered contrasting responses to different symbols identified with the culture war. In St. Louis, a Cardinals fan complained because Busch Stadium regularly featured a cross and what looked like a Christian fish sign inscribed in the dirt behind the pitcher’s mound. It turned out a...
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Egypt’s Coup … and Ours
Here is what Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution had to say about Egypt’s coup in a New York Times op-ed:
“Now supporters of the Brotherhood will ask, with good reason, whether democracy still has anything to offer them.”
As much as I loathe the Muslim Brotherhood and the whole Islamist enterprise, it is difficult to imagine any other...
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Ted Cruz would be a formidable 2016 presidential contender
“I’m Ted Cruz and I approved this message … because I can clean up this mess.”
No, you haven’t heard any thing like that yet (unless you live in Texas where Ted Cruz, R-Texas, romped to a first-time win in the U.S. Senate race last fall.)
But don’t be surprised to hear it in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond, come...
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Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the Most Important Week in the History of the Republic
July 3 marks the last day of the battle of Gettysburg 150 years ago — Pickett’s Charge, the “high water mark of the Confederacy.”
July 4 is of course Independence Day, but this year it is also the sesquicentennial of the surrender of Vicksburg, which split the rebel states in two by securing the length of the Mississippi for the...
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Guilty of Being Southern
Over the years, my African-American friends have shared with me stories of the senseless traffic stops they’ve endured for nothing more than driving while black. There’s an acronym for it: DWB. They admit it happens less than it used to, but it’s wrong, it’s bad, and Americans should not face a presumption of guilt for being who they are.
Which is why...
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The Left, Bert and Ernie and Children’s Innocence
If a Martian were to observe the human condition, he would have to conclude that the left has an agenda to deprive children of their innocence.
The Martian would have no other explanation for the premature sexualizing of children that the left has engaged in for decades, and which seems to increases almost weekly.
The most recent example is the cover of the...
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