What “Big Deals” Did to America

By Patrick J. BuchananThanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt.Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama's "grand bargain," the "big deal" of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."These crazed ideologues, Continue reading...

A Fire Bell in the Night for Norway

By Patrick J. Buchanan"Like a fire bell in the night," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, "this momentous question ... awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union."Jefferson was writing of the sudden resurgence of the slavery issue in the debate on Missouri's entry into the Union, as foreshadowing a civil war.And that massacre in Oslo, where a Continue reading...

Is a Tea Party Triumph at Hand?

By Patrick J. BuchananThey were called "terrorists," "fanatics" and "unpatriotic."Yet the principled resistance of the Tea Party Caucus in the House has put their leader right across the table from Barack Obama to negotiate the final terms of armistice in the debt-ceiling battle of 2011.Today is July 22. On this day, it was said, either Congress will have voted to raise the debt Continue reading...

The Long Retreat of Liberalism

By Patrick J. BuchananThough President Obama has run rings about the Republican Party in the debt-ceiling debate, that party can yet emerge victorious, if it will stick to its guns.Clearly, the Republican strategy was not thought through, when the party chose the debt ceiling as the legislative terrain on which to fight its fiscal war.The president had wanted a clean debt-ceiling Continue reading...

We’re All Greeks Now

By Patrick J. BuchananDeparting for New Hampshire in November 2010, Sen. Judd Gregg, the fiscal conservative President Obama wanted in his Cabinet, blurted an inconvenient truth: "This nation is on a course where if we don't do something about it, get ... fiscal policy (under control), we're Greece."The remark was regarded as hyperbole. But Gregg had a point. For though Greece, measured by Continue reading...