Viewers who were unfortunate enough to tune into President Obama's Wednesday night speech at the wrong moment could have been forgiven some measure of confusion. The speech, billed as the president's pronouncement on the future of America's war policy in Afghanistan, spent only about a third of its length actually discussing that conflict.  …

Last week’s bipartisan rebuke of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Libya was dismissed by a White House spokesman as “unnecessary and unhelpful.”  For Americans weighing a change in leadership, it was instructive.  It’s never a good day as president when a congressman representing a fraction of…

Osama Bin Laden is dead. And there isn’t much more to the story than that.   In an era when media outlets proliferate like rabbits and around-the-clock coverage tends to showcase journalist endurance rather than journalistic insight, an important lesson is often lost: The greatest stories are often the simplest. No matter how many hours…

“I don’t oppose all wars … what I am opposed to is a dumb war.” – Barack Obama, 2002   Oh how luxurious the view from the cheap seats must seem to Barack Obama in retrospect. The man who spent the past decade (beginning with the now famous speech quoted above) trying to decide whether he was more preternaturally…

John Bolton is making the rounds at presidential campaign venues like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but he won’t be the 2012 Republican nominee.  With his speeches and media appearances it looks like the former ambassador to the United Nations is angling to star in a different role: Vice President.  Of course…

According to legend, it was the wayward kick of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that began the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Two days later, a third of the Windy City’s property value was destroyed and a third of its people were homeless. One wonders if a similar catastrophe will emerge from another seemingly minor combustion: the self-immolation…

As 2010 recedes into memory and 2011 begins to take center stage, America continues a long and bizarre interregnum in our foreign policy posture. Ever since the war in Iraq began winding down and the economy began cracking up during the 2008 election cycle, we have become a nation whose political focus is concentrated almost exclusively stateside. &…

What to make of Peggy Noonan's recent intellectual fender-bender in The Wall Street Journal?  Ironically entitled “A New Start in Washington,” her piece reverts to the same calcified strategic orthodoxy that her former boss Ronald Reagan so brilliantly challenged.  Noonan’s commentaries often provide an eloquent weekly…

What do you call an axis of authoritarian regimes united by a rejection of the United States and free market capitalism?  A ‘VIRUS’ for 21st century freedom.  The acronym comes from an oft-repeated grouping of Venezuela, Iran and Russia; countries led by three governments that share a statist’s preference for top-down micro…

Given the public’s distemper at the sight of the President, it’s not surprising that the Commander-in-Chief is developing a taste for delivering major addresses to a solitary camera in the Oval Office. Yet even that doesn’t quite explain President Obama’s decision to deliver a nationally televised speech from the White House…

There are no indispensable men in American life.  That is one of the many lessons surrounding the downfall of General Stanley McChrystal, who up until earlier this week was serving as the commander of American forces in Afghanistan. Another lesson?  If you have designs on being an indispensable man, make sure that there’s not someone…

In a desperate bid to inject his boss with some much-needed gravitas, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently revealed to the press corps that President Obama’s nightstand reading included a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, the man who sat in Obama’s chair almost exactly a century prior.  Let’s hope the president is…

“Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;  And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.” – Rudyard Kipling This is an age of contradictions in Washington, when the capitol city’s always tenuous relationship between words and actions has devolved…

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." That legendary line from scripture could just as easily be applied to the prospects for peace in the region where Jesus delivered it. Yet that fact hasn’t kept virtually every White House in recent history from thinking that…

When Barack Obama took office in January of 2009, it was amidst an atmosphere of generalized transcendence.  New eras would dawn, we were told.  Oceans would fall.  Planets would heal.  In general, it sounded a lot like the Bible, except this time we were supposed to worship the guy peddling hope on what looked like a Che Guevara…

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) -- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" Halley’s Comet made impact in the middle of K Street last Thursday.  Only a few months after President Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize brought howls of derision from the conservative…

In the six and half decades since the conclusion of World War Two, Europe – the fountainhead of western liberalism – has been slowly but systematically divesting itself of everything that made it the world’s powerhouse continent for most of the second millennium A.D.    The system of nation-states solidified by the Treaty…

For all the volumes that are filled about the foreign policy predilections of American presidents, a commander-in-chief’s attitude towards foreign affairs can often be captured in a single iconic moment.  There’s John F. Kennedy staring into a camera while explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis to the American people; Jimmy Carter scolding…

Former Republican Congressman and Love Boat television star Fred Grandy likes to remind listeners of his Washington, D.C. morning radio program that in politics, “once you throw down, you can’t throw up.”  In other words, once you attempt to take a stand or assert a position of strength, you cannot subsequently back down when…

"If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all." – Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope" "… I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused…

If the notion of a providential plan for the United States suffers from a touch of romanticism, it’s not difficult to see where the nation’s poets got grist for their mill.    How does the American Revolution succeed and then produce a stable Republic without the singular leadership of George Washington? What other Commander…

Eight months into the Obama presidency – as cap and trade languishes in the Congress, health care reform suffers the slings and arrows of a “racist,” “astroturf” opposition and Americans continue to stubbornly cling to their guns and religion – it’s hard to give much credence to the President’s election…

The Obama administration is a fitful regime. When Iranian protesters took to the streets of Tehran in June to decry a rigged election, the President justified his inaction masquerading as Zen by saying “it’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling.”

In the spirit of American meritocracy, even those of us who usually line up in opposition to President Obama owe it to the man to point out when he’s done something right. The President’s speech in Accra, Ghana, last week was just such a success. What’s most notable about Obama’s July 11 remarks before the Ghanaian Parliament…

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” White House Chief of Staff-to be Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council last November, “… [it’s] an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” In the nearly eight months that have passed since Emanuel made that statement…