Both the 20th and 21st centuries have seen failed presidencies. William Howard Taft lost in 1912, though he might have retained office had not his old friend and former leader Theodore Roosevelt run as a third party Bull Moose candidate and won more votes than Taft. Herbert Hoover failed through …
“The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose,” said Woodrow Wilson in his first inaugural, 100 years ago. The Republican Party of Richard Nixon was called to power in 1968 to bring an honorable end to the …
John Hope Franklin, the famed black historian at Duke University, once told the incoming freshmen, “The new America in the 21st century will be primarily non-white, a place George Washington would not recognize.” In his June 1998 commencement address at Portland State, President Clinton affirmed it: “In a little more …
Thanks 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 …
They 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, …
By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like “fanatics,” writes David Brooks of The New York Times. Anti-tax Republicans “have no sense of moral decency,” he adds. They are “willing to stain their nation’s honor” to “worship their idol.” If …
Now that Benghazi has been spared what we were assured would be a massacre by Moammar Gadhafi’s army, why are the U.S. Air Force, Navy, CIA and Special Forces still attacking in Libya? If our objective was to spare the defenseless people of Benghazi from slaughter, why, mission accomplished, did …
In ordering air and naval strikes on a country that neither threatened nor attacked the United States, did President Obama commit an impeachable act? So it would seem. For the framers of the Constitution were precise. The power to declare war is entrusted solely to Congress. From King William’s War …