If Joe Biden wants to run for president, fine. But not this way. On Wednesday, the group Draft Biden released an ad that supposedly explained why Americans need him as president. It’s mostly about the death of Biden’s wife and daughter in 1972, and the way he found “redemption” through his surviving sons—one of whom, Beau, died of brain cancer this May. The ad closes ...
Something revealing happened over the weekend on Fox News Sunday. Dick Cheney had stopped by to bash President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal and promote his new book (co-authored with his daughter Liz). But moderator Chris Wallace, to his credit, wanted to ask Cheney about his own failings on Iran. On the Bush administration’s watch, Wallace noted, Iran’s centrifuges for enriching uranium “went from zero to ...
Next week, Donald Trump will join Ted Cruz, Glenn Beck, and others at a rally denouncing the Iran deal. Which is ironic, because Trump is one reason the deal will pass. …
Donald Trump has gotten a boost in his efforts to maul Jeb Bush in recent days from an unexpected source: Jeb Bush himself. Trump’s attack on Jeb isn’t mostly about issues. As with most things Trump, it’s mostly about persona. The Donald thinks Jeb is a dud. “He’s a man that doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing,” Trump said in June. “I call ...
Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down. As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed “neoconservative” seemed on the verge of collapse. In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group, which included such Republican eminences as James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Ed Meese, and Alan Simpson, repudiated Bush’s core ...
Saying that Donald Trump performed poorly in last night’s debate is stating the obvious. By any sane standard he’s been performing poorly since he entered the race. Yet he’s leading in the polls. Still, last night Trump didn’t even do obnoxious well. The reason, I suspect, is that to debate effectively, even if you’re a goon, you must talk about something other than yourself. ...
Mike Huckabee’s sin was being too vivid. Last week, after the Republican presidential hopeful said that by signing the Iran nuclear deal, President Barack Obama “would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven,” a parade of organizations and politicians accused him of inflammatory language and bad taste. But in both the United States and Israel, Huckabee’s core assumption—that the ...
Any day now, Rick Santorum is going to gyrocopter into the White House and try to make a citizens arrest. That’s how desperate the GOP presidential hopefuls not named Trump, Bush, Walker and Rubio are for attention. Every four years, the Republican base creates a market for crazy. But this year, with 16 GOP candidates, being crazy enough to get noticed is a lot harder. ...
I have a fantasy. It’s that every politician and pundit who goes on TV to discuss the Iran deal is asked this question first: “Did you support the Iraq War, and how has that experience informed your position?” …
Pundits are pretty sure that Donald Trump has “jumped the shark.” “Mr. Trump’s candidacy probably reached an inflection point on Saturday after he essentially criticized John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War,” declared The New York Times’ Nate Cohn last weekend. “Republican campaigns and elites quickly moved to condemn his comments—a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from ...