Patrick J. Buchanan

Not in memory has the leadership of a party been so out of touch. The Republican rank and file are in revolt, not only against the failures of their fathers but the policies of their present rulers.

A new "New Majority" has been marching to the polls and voting Republican, a majority unlike any seen since the 49-state landslides of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

The crowds that continue to come out for Donald Trump's appearances and the vast audiences he has attracted to GOP debates testify to his drawing power.

In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court?

As the returns came in from South Carolina Saturday night, showing Donald Trump winning a decisive victory, a note of nervous desperation crept into the commentary.

Workers know what our politicians refuse to discuss. They are being sold out for the benefit of corporate elites who pay off those politicians with the big cash contributions that keep the parties flush.

It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him.

If you believed America's longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not.

The morning of the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump, being interviewed on "Morning Joe," said that he would welcome his "friend" Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race.

Cruz, Trump, Carson—the outsiders—won over 60 percent of all caucus votes. Their anti-Washington messages, Trump and Cruz's especially, grew the GOP turnout to its largest in history, 186,000, half again as many as participated in the record turnout of 2012.

Whoever wins the nominations, the most successful campaigns of 2016 provide us with a clear picture of where the center of gravity is today in both parties and, hence, where America is going.

It will be difficult for populists to unite with Beltway conservatives in 2016, when the former see the latter as part of the problem, not the solution.

Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. And, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other Republican campaigns are now channeling Trump's.

The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altars of globalization and a New World Order.

Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only?

To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran's Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories.

Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble.

If Beijing refuses to cooperate to de-nuclearize North Korea, she could find herself, a decade hence, surrounded by nuclear weapons states, from Russia to India and from Pakistan to Japan.

In the Middle East, where the crucial Western interest is oil, and every nation—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Libya—has to sell it to survive—no nation should be able drag us into a war not of our own choosing.

Each year, The McLaughlin Group, the longest-running panel show on national TV, which began in 1982, announces its awards for the winners and losers and the best and the worst of the year. Rereading my list of 39 awardees suggests something about how our world is changing.

Are our own political and racial divisions disappearing, or do they, too, seem to be deepening?

This is today's crucial distinction: Islam is not simply a religion of 1.6 billion people, it is also a political ideology for ruling nations and, one day, the world.

If we do not want Syria in 2016 to become what Sarajevo became in 1914, the powder keg that explodes into a world war, the War Party Republicans, who have learned nothing from the past, should be relegated to the past.

What the Republican collectivity has to realize is that it is they and the policies they produced that are the reason Trump, Carson and Cruz currently hold an overwhelming majority of Republican votes.

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on," Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions.

The rightward shift in French politics is being replicated across Europe, as nations tighten borders and erect new checkpoints against the tsunami of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

In this war against "radical Islamic terrorism," who is the real ally: Erdogan, who has been aiding and abetting Islamic jihadists in Syria, or Putin, who has been bombing them?

"A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists," said Vladimir Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.

If the purpose of terrorism is to terrify, the Islamic State had an extraordinary week. Brussels, capital of the EU and command post of mighty NATO, is still in panic and lockdown.

In denouncing Republicans as "scared of widows and orphans," and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential.

Among the presidential candidates of the Republican Party and their foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill the cry is almost universal: Barack Obama has no strategy for winning the war on ISIS.

Rand Paul had his best debate moment Tuesday when he challenged Marco Rubio on his plans to increase defense spending by $1 trillion.

Will Europe remain Europe if she is repopulated by Arabs, Muslims, Asians and Africans? What will hold Europe together? Free trade?

"Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich." So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in "Trumbo", out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman.

Despite repeated pledges not to put "boots on the ground" in Syria, President Obama is inserting 50 U.S. special ops troops into that country, with more to follow.

Beijing's claim to the Spratlys is being contested by Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan. While Hanoi and Manila have occupied islets and built structures to back their claims, the Chinese have been more aggressive.

If Catholic truths about the indissolubility of marriage and intrinsic immorality of homosexual unions can be changed, then, either the Church has been in grave error in the past, or the Church is toying with heresy today.

Three months ago, this writer sent out a column entitled, "Could Trump Win?" meaning the Republican nomination. Today even the Trump deniers concede the possibility.

In analyzing the presidential race, the one conclusion upon which all agree is that the anti-Washington, anti-incumbent sentiment is far deeper and wider than most had imagined.

The honor of it all aside, Rep. Paul Ryan would do well to decline the speakership of the House. For it is a poisoned chalice that is being offered to him.

Prediction: We are going to have more of these massacres. Why? Because we rewarded Harper-Mercer for his barbarity in the currency he craved, the only currency he cared about: fame and immortality in this world.

Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad.

If America's elites continue to assert their right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations, to make them conform to a U.S. ideal of what is a good society and legitimate government, then we are headed for endless conflict.

America's "red lines" should be set down clearly in front of our vital interests. Then, we should inform our friends and allies that their defense is, first and foremost, their own responsibility.

Beliefs matter. "Ideas Have Consequences," as conservative scholar Richard Weaver wrote in his classic of that title in 1948. Yet, for so believing, and so saying, Dr. Ben Carson has been subjected to a Rodney King-style night-sticking by the P.C. police.

When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon, the country he enters will be a very different one from Eisenhower's America or Reagan's America. And Catholics will be welcoming a new kind of pope.

What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria.

With that kumbayah moment at the Capitol in South Carolina, when the Battle Flag of the Confederacy was lowered forever to the cheers and tears of all, a purgation of the detestable relics of evil that permeate American public life began.

The Court has lately been declaring to be constitutional rights that used to regarded as shameful crimes. This is judicial tyranny. And Kim Davis' defiance is as old as the republic.

If Europe does not seal its borders, what is to stop the Islamic world and Third World from coming and repopulating the continent with their own kind, as the shrinking native populations of Europe die out?

Barack Obama, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, is going to have to stop acting like a conscientious objector in this war on cops.

This month, a Republican Congress will vote to reject the Iranian nuclear deal that Europe, Russia, China and the Gulf Arabs regard as done. While the GOP may muster the votes to reject it, they lack the votes to override an Obama veto of their rejection.

The Wednesday morning murders of 24-year-old Roanoke TV reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were a racist atrocity, a hate crime. Were they not white, they would be alive today.

On issues from mass migrations from the Third World, to deeper political integration of Europe, to the EU's paltry contributions to a U.S.-led NATO that defends the continent, nationalistic resistance is rising.

While perhaps too early for Democratic elites to panic and begin bailing out on Hillary Clinton's campaign as a doomed vessel, they would be well advised not to miss any of the lifeboat drills.

Either Western nations take tough measures to secure their borders, or the Western nations will be swamped. The character of their countries will be altered forever, and smaller countries will become unrecognizable.

In the Cleveland debate, Donald Trump refused to commit to support whomever the Republican Party nominates in 2016. Trump would be wise to maintain his freedom of action.

If his Republican opponents will not take down Donald Trump, Fox News will not only show them how it is done. Fox News will do the job for them.

In his desperation to sink the Iran nuclear deal, Bibi Netanyahu is taking a hellish gamble.

In his new biography "Being Nixon: A Man Divided", Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, "was not paranoid; the press and the 'Georgetown set' really were out to get him."

Early this century, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey seemed to be emerging as a major power, a land bridge between Europe and the Islamic world, a friend to its neighbors, and future member of the EU.

The American political class has failed the country, and should be fired. That is the clearest message from the summer surge of Bernie Sanders and the remarkable rise of Donald Trump.

Planned Parenthood's image—a progressive organization that provides free birth control to women who seek to space pregnancies as they plan their families—will not easily survive these tapes.

As President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran is compared to Richard Nixon's opening to China, Bibi Netanyahu must know how Chiang Kai-shek felt as he watched his old friend Nixon toasting Mao in Peking. The Iran nuclear deal is not on the same geostrategic level. Yet both moves, seen as betrayals by old U.S. allies, were born of a cold assessment in Washington of a need to shift policy to reflect new threats and new opportunities.

From first reactions, it appears that Hill Republicans will be near unanimous in voting a resolution of rejection of the Iran nuclear deal.

Today we have a pope for whom free-market capitalism is the "unacceptable ideological commitment."

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

In the 2016 race, June belonged to two outsiders who could not be more dissimilar. Bernie Sanders is a socialist senator from Vermont and Donald Trump a celebrity capitalist and legendary entrepreneur and builder.

However the Greek crisis ends, whether with Athens leaving the eurozone, or submitting and accepting austerity at the dictates of its creditors, the European Union appears headed for an existential crisis.

Same-sex marriage is the law of the land, as the right of gays and lesbians to marry is right there in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868. We just didn't see it.

As Dylan Roof had filmed himself flaunting a Confederate battle flag, the cry went out to tear that flag down from the war memorial in Columbia, South Carolina, and remove its vile presence everywhere in America.

The Pentagon's message received a reply June 16. Russian Gen. Yuri Yakubov called the U.S. move "the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War."

At the declaration by Donald Trump that he is a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, media elites of left and right reacted with amusement, anger and disgust.

Over three decades, that border has been a causeway into the USA for millions of illegal immigrants who are changing the face of America—to the delight of those who think the country we grew up in was ugly.

We are in the 7th year of the presidency of a black American who has named the first two black U.S. attorneys general. Yet race relations seem more poisonous now than then, when the good will of America's majority was driving legislation.

Toward the end of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, America stood alone at the top of the world—the sole superpower. After five weeks of "shock and awe" and 100 hours of combat, Saddam's army had fled Kuwait back up the road to Basra and Bagdad.

Who rises if Assad falls? That question, which has bedeviled U.S. experts on the Middle East, may need updating to read: Who rises when Assad falls?

The culture war against Christianity is picking up speed. Last week came word Saint Louis University will remove a heroic-sized statue of Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet S.J. from the front of Fusz Hall, where it has stood for 60 years.

Why did the Iraqi army run? And what motivated the fighters of ISIS to attack a city whose defenders so vastly outnumbered them?

"America was born a Christian nation," echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: "This is a Christian nation." But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged to differ: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation."

The fall of Ramadi, capital of Anbar, largest province in Iraq, after a rout of the Iraqi army by a few hundred ISIS fighters using bomb-laden trucks, represents a stunning setback for U.S. policy.

As Middle America rises in rage against "fast track" and the mammoth Obamatrade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Wall Street Journal has located the source of the malady.

Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq.

David Cameron is the most successful Tory Party leader since Margaret Thatcher. Yet history may also record that his success led to the crackup of his country, and Great Britain's secession from the European Union.

In the first quarter of 2015, in the sixth year of the historic Obama recovery, the U.S. economy grew by two-tenths of 1 percent. And that probably sugarcoats it.

In our deepening political divide, the left invokes the narrative that black males are all too often terribly treated by brutal cops, while the right sees tough policing as having cut crime to more tolerable levels and cops as the thin blue line between them and anarchy.

Had Freddie Gray been robbed, beaten and left to die in the streets of his Baltimore neighborhood, no one would be mourning him today. It was the manner of his death, suffering a fractured spine in police custody, that makes Freddie matter.

Almost all of the declared and undeclared Republican candidates for 2016 could be found this weekend at one of two events, or both.

For a month now, the Saudi air force has been bombing Yemen to reverse a takeover of that nation of 25 million by Houthi rebels, and reinstall a president who fled his country and is residing in Riyadh.

The GOP swept to victory in November by declaring that this imperial presidency must be brought to heel, and President Obama's illicit seizures of Congressional power must end.

"Could a U.S. response to Russia's action in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russia War?" This jolting question is raised by Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes in the cover article of The National Interest.

Uninhibited by old friendships, untethered to old allies, Barack Obama is grounding his Middle East policy on what he sees as the new realities.

Faced with a corporate-secularist firestorm, Gov. Mike Pence said Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act would not protect Christian bakers or florists who refuse their services to same-sex weddings.

"Pat, sometimes it seems like our friends want me to go over the cliff with flags flying," President Reagan once told me. Today, it is "Bibi" Netanyahu and the neocons howling "kill the deal" and "bomb Iran" who are shoving the Republican Party toward the cliff.

A voracious and eclectic reader, President Nixon instructed me to send him every few weeks 10 articles he would not normally see that were on interesting or important issues.

Indiana just enacted a law, as have 19 other states, to protect the rights of religious people to practice their beliefs in how they live their lives and conduct their businesses. And the reaction? Nearly hysterical.

The forces that do not want a U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, nor any U.S. detente with Iran, are impressive. Among them are the Israelis and their powerful lobby AIPAC, the Saudis and their Sunni allies on the Persian Gulf, a near unanimity of Republicans and a plurality of Democrats in Congress.

Though "Bibi" Netanyahu won re-election last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will still look into whether the State Department financed a clandestine effort to defeat him.

In November 1956, President Eisenhower, enraged he had not been forewarned of their invasion of Egypt, ordered the British, French and Israelis to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did as told.

With President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry seemingly about to conclude a deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program, House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to use the State of the Union podium to call Obama and Kerry naive and trash their deal as paving the ayatollah's way to an atomic bomb.

As the European Coal and Steel Community of Jean Monnet evolved into the EU, we were told a "United States of Europe" was at hand, modeled on the USA. And other countries and continents will inevitably follow Europe's example.

America, we have a problem. In the blood-soaked chaotic Middle East, with few exceptions like the Kurds, our friends either can't or won't fight.

Eric Holder's Justice Department has completed its investigation into whether Ferguson cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in cold blood for racist reasons when he shot the black teenager last August.

Despite jihadi violence across the Middle East and ISIS terror in Iraq and Syria, John Kerry told Congress, we live in "a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally—less deaths, less violent deaths today than through the last century."

If the sadists of ISIS are seeking—with their mass executions, child rapes, immolations, and beheadings of Christians—to stampede us into a new war in the Middle East, they are succeeding.

Back in 1987, this writer was invited by friends to advise them on a press conference they had called to oppose President Reagan's signing of an INF treaty to remove all nuclear missiles from Europe.

"Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations," warned the Republican Senator from Ohio and future President William McKinley in 1892.

Hopefully, the shaky truce between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko, brokered in Minsk by Angela Merkel, will hold.

The president's request for the authorization to use military force against the Islamic State has landed in a Congress as divided as the country.

After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the president decided his recital of crimes committed in the name of Islam would be unbalanced, if he did not backhand those smug Christians sitting right in front of him.

Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity?

Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence.

Last November, Republicans grew their strength in Congress to levels unseen since 1946. What united the party and rallied the nation was the GOP's declared resolve to stand up to an imperious president.

So alarmed is Speaker Boehner, he invited Bibi Netanyahu to come and challenge U.S. policy toward Iran from the same podium where the president delivered his State of the Union address.

Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that France "is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism." This tells us what France is fighting against.

Selma, a film focused on the police clubbing of civil rights marchers led by Dr. King at Selma bridge in March of 1965, is being denounced by Democrats as a cinematic slander against the president who passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." That maxim of Voltaire was among those most invoked by the marching millions in Sunday's mammoth "Je Suis Charlie" rally in Paris.

Western media are declaring the million-man march in Paris, where world leaders paraded down Boulevard Voltaire in solidarity with France, a victory over terrorism. Isn't it pretty to think so.

Detestation of de Blasio among the NYPD and the cops who came from across the country to stand in solidarity with their slain brothers is broad and deep.

Among the dispositions shared by the two conservatives was a determination to stay out of other people's wars. Peering into 2015, there are wars into which our interventionists are eager to plunge that represent no immediate or grave threat to us.

Words matter. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, how much greater impact can a motion picture have? We are finding out.

The marchers got their wish Saturday in Bedford-Stuyvesant when Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, firing into a patrol car, murdered NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

The celebrations in Havana and the sullen silence in Miami tell you all you need to know about who won this round with Castro's Cuba. In JFK's metaphor, Obama traded a horse for a rabbit.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the most nationalistic leader of postwar Japan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building up Japan's military, asserting her rights in territorial disputes with China and Korea.

Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved.

Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government.

We have found the new normal in America. If you are truly outraged by some action of police, prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, you can shut down the heart of a great city.

Among the primary causes of the ruin of FDR's great coalition, and the rise of Nixon's New Majority, was the belief in Middle America that liberals were so morally paralyzed by racial guilt they could not cope with minority racism, riots and crime.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran and the lone Republican on Obama's national security team, has been fired. And John McCain's assessment is dead on.

Asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, President Obama is going rogue, issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens.

Due to the substitution of natural gas for oil in heating homes and buildings, horizontal drilling, and hydraulic fracking, which enables us to bring oil and gas out of shale rock in places like North Dakota, U.S. production has exploded.

Nov. 4 was a national vote of no confidence in Barack Obama. Had a British prime minister received a vote like this, he would have resigned by now.

After billions in attack ads that turned the approval ratings of almost every candidate, in both parties, upside down, Republicans appear primed to take control of Congress.

As it stands today, Republicans will add seats in the House and recapture the Senate on Tuesday.

Normally a synod of Catholic bishops does not provide fireworks rivaling the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley's boys in blue ran up the score on the radicals in Grant Park.

In 1492, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and discovered the New World. And Oct. 12 was once a celebrated holiday in America.

Do the states have the right to outlaw same-sex marriage? Not long ago the question would have been seen as absurd. For every state regarded homosexual acts as crimes.

Walter Jones is calling for a debate and decision on whether America should go to war in Syria and Iraq, when Congress reconvenes after Nov. 4.

Americans are caught up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting the White House and the president's family.

In his U.N. address, President Obama listed a parade of horrors afflicting our world: "Russian aggression in Europe," "terrorism in Syria and Iraq," rapes and beheadings by ISIL, al-Qaida, Boko Haram. And, of course, the Ferguson Police Department.

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

"Congress must now vote to support the first steps of what will be a long march toward victory," said Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

No matter how the vote turns out on Thursday in Scotland, either for independence or continued union with Britain, the disintegration of the Old Continent appears almost inevitable.

By releasing the grisly videos of the beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, ISIS has altered the political landscape here and across the Middle East.

The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known.

Among the demands of the "protesters" in Ferguson is that the investigation and prosecution of police officer Darren Wilson be taken away from St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch.

What we are witnessing in Ferguson today, and nationally, is not only a collision of reported facts, but also a clash of visions about America.

U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan.

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the "end of history" where "Western liberal democracy" becomes "the final form of human government."

The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day.

With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November.

To observe the decades-long paralysis of America's political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964 -- "Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide."

Barack Obama has asked Congress for $500 million to train and arm rebels of the Free Syrian Army who seek to overthrow the government.

With the Islamic warriors of ISIS having captured all the border posts between Iraq, Syria and Jordan, we may be witnessing the end of Sykes-Picot. That was the secret 1916 treaty by which the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire, with the Brits taking Transjordan and Iraq, and the French Syria and Lebanon.

The panic that engulfed this capital after the fall of Mosul, when it appeared that the Islamist fanatics of ISIS would overrun Baghdad, has passed. And the second thoughts have begun.

President Obama handed the Taliban a victory, critics contend, and imperiled U.S. troops in Afghanistan when the five return to the battlefield. Moreover, he has inspired the Haqqani network and other Islamists to capture more Americans to trade.

The trade of Bowe Bergdahl speaks well of America's 's resolve to leave no soldier behind. But this secret swap, as well as the circumstances of Bergdahl's capture and captivity, are likely to further polarize our people and poison our politics.

When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America's public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C.

The GOP Beltway establishment is celebrating the victory of Thom Tillis, Speaker of the North Carolina House, over his Tea Party and Evangelical rivals in Tuesday's primary for the U.S. Senate.

Richard Engel of NBC, reporting from Maidan Square in Kiev, described what he witnessed as the Feb. 19 truce collapsed.

At the Cold War's end, the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick talked hopefully of America becoming again "a normal country in a normal time." Seems as though the normal times are never coming back.

In July, Graham told a cheering conference of Christians United for Israel: "If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb."

The American people do not want war on Syria, and such a war makes no sense. Who is trying to stampede Congress into war on Syria, and then on Iran—and why? Therein lies the real question.

Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls. But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions—home, church, school, and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths—have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.

In the near term, bet on the men with the guns.

"There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking," said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin. The reason: Putin's grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at the Moscow airport, his computers full of secrets that our National Security Agency has been thieving from every country on earth, including Russia.

Apparently, the threat is both serious and specific. The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens. The threat comes from Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization.

Obama's second-term scandals—IRS, Benghazi, wiretapping The Associated Press and Fox—are in the low-kiloton range compared to the resignation of Nixon or the impeachment of Clinton.

"The First Black President . . . Spoke First as a Black American," ran the banner headline of Sunday's Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up?

"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Ben Franklin is much quoted in today's debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency's easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often sacrificed liberty for safety.

On U.S. military intervention in Syria's civil war, where "both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line 'Allahu akbar' ... I say let Allah sort it out." So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference.

Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

Never before has America been held in lower esteem by the Arab peoples or the Islamic world. As for the reputation of the U.S. military, how many years will it be before our armed forces are no longer automatically associated with such terms as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, renditions and waterboarding?

To see these new Republicans standing by Rand Paul presented the image of a band of brothers standing up for principle. Rarely has this Republican Party looked better than it did last Wednesday.

Pope Benedict XVI restored some of the ancient beauty and majesty to the liturgy. He brought back to the fold separated Anglican brethren. The Church is making converts in sub-Saharan Africa. And in America, new traditionalist colleges and seminaries have begun to flourish.

The Republican capacity for self-delusion is truly awesome.

President Obama and Vice President Biden seem intent on appearing before the nation on Election Day as the sole peace party. This fact leaps out of a close read of Biden's debate transcript.

Mitt was like a contender so keyed up by his title shot that, between rounds, he could not sit on his stool, but stood in his corner to rush out and re-engage the champ the instant the bell sounded for the next round.

If the Islamic world is so suffused with rage and hatred of us—for our wars, occupations, drone attacks, support of Israel, decadent culture, and tolerance of insults to Islam and the Prophet—why should we call for free elections, when the people will use those elections to vote into power rulers hostile to the United States?

The Democratic convention will witness one sustained slander of Romney and Ryan as Randian agents of a plutocracy hell-bent on seeing its taxes reduced and the tax cuts paid for by eviscerating programs on which America's poor and the working and middle class depend for survival.

In 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.

With the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to be asserting itself.

"If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble during the Super Bowl.

The first criterion in choosing a vice president, it is said, is that he or she must be qualified to be president.

Roberts desperately does not want to seen by history as merely a competent but colorless member of the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court, another reliable vote in the Scalia camp. He does not want Anthony Kennedy, the swing justice, to be making history, while he is seen as a predictable conservative vote.

Wilson—not Harding, Coolidge or Hoover, all of whom tried to ease the vindictive terms imposed on a defeated but democratic Germany—set the table for Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born at Versailles.

Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in.

What do these mammoth and mounting deficits mean? A deepening dependence on foreign nations for the necessities of our national life. A steady erosion of our manufacturing base. A continued stagnation in the real wages of the middle class. And an unending redistribution of America's wealth to foreign lands.

With their union dues no longer taken out of their paychecks, tens of thousands of Wisconsin public employees refused to pony up those dues and quit their union, instead. What does this tell us?

Would a President Romney and Republican Congress roll back benefits for scores of millions of seniors, raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, reduce funds for Medicaid, Head Start, Pell grants, student loans, primary and secondary education, and shed federal employees by the tens of thousands?

Bill Kristol's point: Refuse to toe the neocon line on Israel, and you have no future in the Republican Party.

The public mind has been so poisoned that an acquittal of George Zimmerman could ignite a reaction similar to that, 20 years ago, when the Simi Valley jury acquitted the LAPD cops in the Rodney King beating case.

White America is a dying tribe. What do these statistics mean politically? Almost surely the end of the Republican Party as a national governing institution.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

Obama needs one more justice. If elected, he will get it, and same-sex marriage will be forced on all of America.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Netanyahu believes Israel's security and survival mandate the nuclear castration of Iran.

If the Sanford police believe they have no case for murder or manslaughter or any felony, what do they charge him with, after they arrest him?

Japan's fertility rate, the number of births per woman, has been below zero population growth for 40 years and has plunged to where Japanese woman are having only two-thirds of the children needed to replace the present population.

Have the Republican uber-hawks learned nothing from the war for which they beat the drums 10 years ago?

The prime minister of Israel is angry with Barack Obama and is coming here to force a hardening of U.S. policy toward Iran.

The savage sanctions we imposed on a defeated Iraq and the planting of U.S. bases on Saudi soil that is home to Mecca was a casus belli for Osama bin Laden. Ten years after the triumph of Bush I, he brought down the twin towers.

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end. After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged.

In the United States, all religions—Santeria, Wicca, Islam, Christianity—are to be treated equally and all kept out of the public square and the pubic schools. In a Muslim world that contains a fifth of mankind, Islam is the one true faith. Rival faiths have few or no rights. Are we going to push the Islamic world to treat all religions equally?

Should Mitt Romney be nominated, he will need to make a national address defending his career at Bain Capital with the same conviction and passion with which he defended his faith in the campaign of 2008.

Resolving our fiscal crisis seems today beyond the capacity of the U.S. government, as currently constituted. We appear to be in a crisis of the regime rooted in an irreconcilable ideological conflict between two parties of relatively equal strength.

The question for Christians is a simple one: Do they have what it takes to take America back?

For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq.

Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to veto Germany's demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence.

On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war?

Ethnic nationalism, what Albert Einstein dismissed as "the measles of mankind," and religious fanaticism are making headlines and history. Welcome to the new world disorder.

Has America become what Klemens von Metternich called Italy: "a mere geographical expression"?

When the cutting comes, as it shall, the Pentagon will be first to ascend the scaffold. America approaches her moment of truth.

Of George W. Bush, it will be said that, after 9/11, he led his country on a utopian crusade for democracy in the Muslim world—and all but ignored the rise of a rival with a potential that Stalin never had to surpass and eclipse the United States as first power on earth.

"You've damaged your own race," said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.

This downgrade is deeply deserved. For no one really believes the United States is going to pay its creditors back the $14 trillion it owes them, or the $21 trillion it will owe them at decade's end, with dollars of the same value as those that the United States is borrowing today.

The Republican Party is a stool that stands on three legs: social conservatives, economic conservatives and foreign policy conservatives. Yet since Ronald Reagan departed and George W. Bush arrived, that coalition has been under a growing strain that may yet pull it apart and redefine what conservatism means in 21st century America.

That massacre in Oslo, where a terrorist detonated a fertilizer bomb to decapitate the government and proceeded to a youth camp to kill 68 children of Norway's ruling elite, is a fire bell in the night for Europe. For Anders Behring Breivik is no Islamic terrorist.

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 for $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."

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.

"The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice." So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo's role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state.

Centuries before William James coined the phrase, men have sought a "moral equivalent of war," some human endeavor to satisfy the jingoistic lust of man, without the carnage of war.

In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year's end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves.

Michele Bachmann, who emerged as the star of the debate and favorite for the backing of the social conservative and Tea Party right, called Libya a strategic mistake. No vital U.S. interests were imperiled. That debate was a fire bell in the night for the neoconservatives. The days when Republicans stood up and saluted a commander in chief as soon as he starting bombing a country appear to be over.

Late last month, when U.S. air strikes caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan, an angry Hamid Karzai issued an ultimatum. If future U.S. strikes are not restricted, we will take "unilateral action" and America may be treated like an "occupying power."

Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers' U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday.

Given the coordination of the Palestinian actions, we may be on the verge either of a Facebook revolution or a "third intifada," an uprising by Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of descendants of the original exiles still live.

The critical evidence that put John Demjanjuk at Sobibor came—from the KGB.

With his order to effect the execution of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, 40 miles from Islamabad, without asking permission of the government, Barack Obama made a bold and courageous decision. Its success, and the accolades he has received, have given him a credibility as commander in chief that he never had before.

After Donald Trump called on Obama to release his original birth certificate and produce the academic records and test scores that put him on a bullet train from being a "terrible student" at Occidental College to Columbia, Harvard Law and Harvard Law Review editor, charges of "racism" have saturated the airwaves.

One month before the invasion of Iraq, Riah Abu el-Assal, a Palestinian and the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem at the time, warned Tony Blair, "You will be responsible for emptying Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, of Christians." The bishop proved a prophet.

Of our Libyan intervention, one thing may be safely said, and another safely predicted. When he launched his strikes on the Libyan army and regime, Barack Obama did not think it through. And this nation is now likely to be drawn even deeper into that war.

On March 20, Pastor Terry Jones, who heads a congregation of 30 at his Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Fla., conducted a mock trial of the Quran "for crimes against humanity." Pronouncing Islam's sacred book guilty, Jones soaked a Quran in kerosene and set it ablaze in a portable fire pit. Few noticed. But Hamid Karzai did.

When Greek patriots sought America's assistance, Daniel Webster took up their cause but was admonished by John Randolph. Intervention would breach every "bulwark and barrier of the Constitution."

"This will not stand!" declared George H.W. Bush. He was speaking of Saddam Hussein's invasion, occupation and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait as his "19th province." Seven months later, the Iraqi army was fleeing up the "Highway of Death" back into a country devastated by five weeks of U.S. bombing. When Bush spoke, the world sat up and listened.

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions.

the "neo-isolationists" who opposed invading Iraq and a "long war" in Afghanistan were right, in Gates' eyes. Quite an admission from a defense secretary who presided over the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.

George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man's papers are to be housed.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, especially today in the Maghreb and Middle East. For the ouster of Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has sent shock waves from Rabat to Riyadh. Autocrats, emirs and kings have to be asking themselves: If rioters can bring down Ben Ali with his ruthless security forces, what prevents this from happening here?

"Conservative Tycoon ... Dies at 95," said the New York Times headline on New Year's Eve about the death of Roger Milliken. Clearly, the headline writer did not know the man.

With Christmas shoppers out in force and the stock market surging to a two-year high, talk is spreading that the long-awaited recovery is at hand. Perhaps. But gleaning the news from Europe and Asia as U.S. cities, states and the federal government sink into debt, it is difficult to believe a worldwide financial crisis that hammers governments, banks and bondholders alike can be long averted.

A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. "Don't ask, don't tell" is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services. Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.

What in the name of Gilbert Stuart is going on at the National Portrait Gallery?

Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run by faceless bureaucrats, and the 16-nation eurozone it created long survive.

Before Republican senators vote down the strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, they should think long and hard about the consequences.

Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East.

Sunday, on the eve of All Saints' Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they executed him and began their mission of mass murder.

Barack Obama's dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago. The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term?

Before the Tea Party philosophy is ever even tested in America, it will have succeeded, or it will have failed, in Great Britain. For in David Cameron the Brits have a prime minister who can fairly be described as a Tea Party Tory.

Is Europe's adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society where people "live side by side and enjoy each other" has "failed, utterly failed."

What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society—fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer's expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.

The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth.

"Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty," ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he rolled up margins of three to one in the white wards west of Rock Creek Park.