It’s reported that President Obama was ready to order a military strike against Syria, with or without Congress’s blessing, but “on Friday night, he suddenly changed his mind.” According to the Huffington Post: Senior administration officials describing Obama’s about-face Saturday offered a portrait of a president who began to wrestle with his own decision – at first

On his program last night, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, in speaking on the subject of strikes against Syria, said, “It’s got to be done quickly. Bang, boom. And then let the chips fall where they may. But no more dead kids breathing poison gas.” It appears the White House is considering the same strategy. I happen to disagree with

In his column yesterday, Daniel Henninger—in writing about President Obama’s summer trips and series of speeches on the economy—asks, “Is anyone listening to these speeches? Do they matter?” The answer to both questions is, I think, no. And it raises a deeper issue: Has any previous president devalued his words quite so much, in quite so

The New York Times reports on a study issued yesterday by two former Census Bureau officials. The study shows that although median annual household income rose to $52,100 in June, from its recent low of $50,700 in August 2011, it remained $2,400 lower—a 4.4 percent decline—than in June 2009, when the recession ended. According to the Times: Since the

In this interview with Relevant magazine the journalist Peter Hitchens, a Christian, was asked what he says to people who would say–as a good many people do these days–“Who are you to tell me that your morality is more right than mine?” To which Hitchens responded: I would say the source of morality is not me. I’m merely informing

Originally published in August 19, 2013 edition of the Weekly Standard. Earlier this summer, Roger Ailes, president of the Fox News Channel, was honored by the Bradley Foundation. Ailes’s speech, delivered to a right-leaning audience at the Kennedy Center, was rollicking and well received, filled with red meat and barbed humor, and proudly pro-American. Liberals didn’t

Michael Medved is a very intelligent and sober conservative commentator, and earlier this week he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that’s worth reading. He quotes Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who last month said this: “You know, if you look at the last 40 years, a consistent pattern emerges. Any time Republicans nominate a candidate for

I’ve praised Senator Marco Rubio on many occasions. He is, in fact, one of the lawmakers I most like and admire. By all accounts he’s a person of some depth. All of which makes his arguments about shutting down the federal government unless the president agrees to defund the Affordable Care Act rather puzzling. In

One of C.S. Lewis’s main endeavors as a teacher was to persuade young people that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but it is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. And so, Lewis wrote, a student would do better to read Plato than to “read some dreary modern

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, in addressing the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, reiterated that the Department of Justice is considering filing federal civil rights charges against Zimmerman in the aftermath of his acquittal. Mr. Holder went on to say, “I want to assure you that the Department will continue to act in a