Political insanity can be defined as refusing to admit the reality of destructive violence. How crazy does the violence have to get before it costs the Harris-Biden campaign the election? (Nomenclature update: On Monday, Kamala Harris referred in public to something she called the “Harris administration.” In a speech the next day, Mr. ...

Coronavirus lesson #1: The U.S. is willing to shut down for three months, but that’s about it. The threat in March of a Covid-19 apocalypse worked: From coast to coast, the $21 trillion U.S. economy essentially shut down. Today in all 50 states, the experience with coronavirus has peaked, plateaued or fallen, and the time has arrived to ...

Wonder Land: We are overdue today for another wave of creative thinking about everything—politics, the culture, education and morality. But this time, hold the roaring. If time travel were real, nearly half the U.S. population—and all the Democrats—would ship Donald Trump back to the Roaring ’20s, an era presumably more in sync with his ...

The opposition to traditional virtues was evident at the 1992 convention. With the certainty of the tides, the media is awash with invidious comparisons between George H.W. Bush in death and Donald J. Trump in the White House. From the anti-Trump metronomes at the Washington Post there was this: “Trump’s time in office, by contrast, has ...

The College Board’s about-face on U.S. history is a significant political event. In this summer of agitated discontent for American conservatives, we can report a victory for them, assuming that is still permitted. Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and ...

Professors and historians urged opposition to the College Board’s new curriculum for teaching AP U.S. History. The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm ...

Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using. Last weekend, with the ink on the Iran nuclear deal still being deciphered, the Obama Doctrine fell out of an interview between President Obama and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

“You asked about an Obama doctrine,” Mr. Obama said. “The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.” ...

The IRS isn't Watergate; it's worse than Watergate. With 2½ years left in the Obama presidency, it is at least an open question what will be left of it by December 2016. Or us.

In this week's Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, conducted as the disintegration of Iraq began, Mr. Obama's approval rating has fallen to 41% and his handling of foreign policy to 37%. ...

The antidote to global chaos is American leadership. As the year turns, the subject becoming impossible to duck is growing global disorder. The days before the New Year brought two suicide bombings in Russia and a major political assassination in Lebanon. Throw a dart randomly at a map of the Middle East or Southeast Asia and it will ...

The talkative Mr. Obama has made this a presidency of speeches, and at times even the most committed political mind can lose focus amid the now-familiar tone. So attention must be paid when the president reveals something out of the ordinary. That would be his recent speech in Washington on income ...

The next president will have to restore the tradition of durable U.S. foreign commitments. 'We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that's a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons."— Barack ...

Obama's biggest failure is that he hobbled the U.S. economy. The ObamaCare train wreck is plowing through the White House in super slow-mo on screens everywhere, splintering reputations and presidential approval ratings. Audiences watch popeyed as Democrats in distress like Senators Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor decide whether to ...

Lincoln's view of individual freedom is at odds with the current president's. The White House recently whispered out the back door that President Obama would not appear in Pennsylvania next Tuesday at the ceremonies for the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The political betting had been that this was a big-speech ...

The cruise ship called the USS Obama has hit the rocks. It won't sink, but the captain never expected to be taking on this much water. The insertion of ObamaCare into American life was supposed to be a breezy, second-term victory lap. It isn't.

Gallup has the president's approval rating down to 40%. Ken Cuccinelli almost won Virginia's governorship by pummeling ObamaCare. ...

Obama's ideology is the politics of the personal cram down. A reader remarked last week that Barack Obama is running out of human shields. With the father of ObamaCare unavailable to explain the greatest fiasco of his presidency to Congress, the American people had to settle Wednesday for his surrogate, Kathleen ...

Obama and Ted Cruz preside over a dangerous political spectacle. With Washington embarked on another of its oxymoronic shutdowns, everyone is giving it in the neck to the Republicans. So maybe someone should give it to Barack Obama in the knees. He's the president. He wanted this job and must bear some responsibility for what has become ...

Congress can't kill the entitlement state. Only the American people can. What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.

As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance ...

Barack Obama's modus operandi is: I think, therefore you do. We should admit the obvious: Barack Obama is the most anti-political president the United States has had in the post-war era. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter (even), Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. All practiced politics inside the tensions between Congress and ...

After the Syrian slapstick, it's time to sober up U.S. foreign policy. After writing in the London Telegraph that Monday was "the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began," former British ambassador Charles Crawford asked simply: "How has ...

A GOP Syria vote shouldn't ratify U.S. decline at home and abroad. David Axelrod on Saturday gave his opinion on the situation in Syria with a tweet on Twitter: "Congress is now the dog that caught the car." On Wednesday, the president of the United States retweeted Mr. Axelrod's 43-character analysis. He said in Stockholm that the credibility ...

First health, then finance and now higher ed gets a federal fix. Thousands of American higher-education administrators will spend part of Labor Day weekend trying to plumb the meaning of the ideas President Obama dropped on them last week to "reform" the American college and university system. Given the political genome of college ...

The Keystone decision is a signal to blue-collar workers that this is no longer their fathers' Democratic Party.

The decision by the Obama administration to "delay" building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn't hooked for life to ...