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Is Private Bad Judgement Relevant to High Public Office?
The controversy over Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court poses complicated questions about the connection between private misbehavior and service in high office.
In the 1960’s, a 21-year old college student met a married public official when she was assigned to write a term paper about him. He made advances toward her, dumped his second wife,...
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Explaining the Left, Part IV: Leftist Contempt for Middle-Class Values
When I was in graduate school, I learned a lot about the left. One lesson was that while most liberals and conservatives abide by society’s rules of order and decency, most leftists do not feel bound to live by these same rules. I watched the way leftist Vietnam War protesters treated fellow students and professors. […]
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Fighting Back Against Underage Drinking Should Unite Dems, GOP
The Kavanaugh confirmation fight conveyed one message that Democrats and Republicans should both embrace: America needs to make serious efforts to guard against the very real dangers of teenaged alcohol abuse.
Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser describes a party when she was fifteen and he was seventeen where—if he was actually there—were both drinking, perhaps...
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Kavanaugh Fight Shows Liberal Hypocrisy
Whatever the final outcome of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight, the struggle has exposed the hypocrisy of Democratic opinion leaders in stark, glaring terms.
They seek to destroy Judge Kavanaugh over uncorroborated charges about drunken teenaged incidents 36 years ago, while they rally behind a sitting Congressman, and their party’s...
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Kavanaugh Fight Shows Liberal Hypocrisy
Whatever the final outcome of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight, the struggle has exposed the hypocrisy of Democratic opinion leaders in stark, glaring terms.
They seek to destroy Judge Kavanaugh over uncorroborated charges about drunken teenaged incidents 36 years ago, while they rally behind a sitting Congressman, and their party’s...
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What Does Female Empowerment Mean?
My last column elicited tens of thousands of comments – from the thoughtful to the sick – on the internet and Twitter. In the column, I made two points. One was that the accusation made against Judge Kavanaugh – for which there is no evidence, that was made by an anti-Trump activist, that concerns an […]
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Was It Really a Mistake to Confirm this Great Man for His Seat on the Supreme Court?
Read his beautiful address to Christendom College:
It is an honor to be with these students. What a wonderful group. I looked around and I saw these statues and icons, the pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, and I realized I was in a Catholic school. It encouraged me to put “JMJ” at the top of my speech.
I am deeply humbled to receive the Pro...
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Senate Must Resist a Last-Ditch Smear
In their desperate attempt to smear Judge Brett Kavanaugh, many left-leaning commentators try to connect him to #MeToo malefactors like Harvey Weinstein. For two reasons, this association is utterly unfair.
First, the #MeToo villains all exploited positions of power; Kavanaugh was a 17-year-old high school junior at the time of his alleged misdeeds.
Second, all...
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The Charges Against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored
It is almost impossible to overstate the damage done to America’s moral compass by taking the charges leveled against Judge Brett Kavanaugh seriously. It undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society. Those who claim the charges against Judge Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford are important and worth investigating, and that they...
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“Curled Up in a Ball of White Shame”?
A student at an elite university recently wrote to the New York Times: “I’m riddled with shame. White Shame … I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else … Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame.”
This...
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Trouble in Socialist Paradise
The left regularly cites the Nordic nations as proof that socialism works but a new report from the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen shows trouble in paradise. Young people in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden show a sharp recent rise in “poor mental health” and the New York Times ran a recent headline proclaiming “Gloom in...
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Is the President a Bad Role Model for Children?
“Most voters say President Donald Trump is not a good role model for children, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll. “While 90 percent of voters say the president should be a good role model for kids, only 29 percent say he is while 67 percent say he is not.” — U.S. News Jan. 26, […]
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Rushmore Lessons Could Help Trump
If President Donald Trump ever wearies of the polarization and the pettiness, the insults and investigations, he need only turn his gaze toward Rushmore to lift our politics to a higher plane.
The four great presidents depicted on that South Dakota mountainside exemplify four valuable qualities that could help heal today’s punishing, take-no-prisoners politics...
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Mysteries in the Mourning for John McCain
How is it that the respect and affection for the late Senator John McCain seemed so overwhelming after his recent death, but in two energetic presidential campaigns he could never get a majority to vote for him? And what were the great accomplishments from McCain that admirers across the country were celebrating?
His most famous legislation—the McCain-Feingold...
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A Victory for Respectful Persuasion
An unexpectedly encouraging development in California should remind us that conversation can work better than confrontation in politics. The author of Assembly Bill 2943 agreed to pull it from the legislature’s agenda—dropping a new law that would have imposed severe penalties on mental health professionals who agreed to help patients wanting to overcome...
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Explaining the Left, Part III: Leftism as Secular Religion
One of the most important books of the 20th century — it remains a best-seller 59 years after it was first published — is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. Marx saw man’s primary drive as economic, and Freud saw it as sex. But Frankl believed — correctly, in my opinion — that the […]
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