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I'm Not A Global Warming Believer. I'm Not A Global Warming Denier. I'm A Global Warming Agnostic Who Believes Instinctively That It Can't Be Very Good To Pump Lots Of Co2 Into The Atmosphere But Is Equally Convinced That Those Who Presume To Know Exactly Where That Leads Are Talking Through Their Hats.

-Charles Krauthammer

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I'm Not A Global

Charles Krauthammer

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I'm Not A Global Warming Believer. I'm Not A Global Warming Denier. I'm A Global Warming Agnostic Who Believes Instinctively That It Can't Be Very Good To Pump Lots Of Co2 Into The Atmosphere But Is Equally Convinced That Those Who Presume To Know Exactly Where That Leads Are Talking Through Their Hats.

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Baseball Is A Slow, Boring, Complex, Cerebral Game That Doesn't Lend Itself To Histrionics. You "take In" A Baseball Game, Something Odd To Say About A Football Or Basketball Game, With The Clock Running And The Bodies Flying.

Obama Is Clearly A Narcissist In The Non-scientific Use Of The Word. He Is So Self-involved, You See It From His Rise.there’s Not Anyone Of Independent Stature Around Him. There Was In The First Term, Because He Needed Them To Prop Him Up. But Now That He Entered A Second Term, He’s The Master Of The Universe, So There’s Nobody Around Him. He Is Impervious To Outside Advice, Real Advice That He Takes.

The Brady Bill's Only Effect Will Be To Desensitize The Public To Regulation Of Weapons In Preparation For Their Ultimate Confiscation.

History Has Blessed Us With All The Freedom And Advantages Of Multiculturalism. But It Has Also Blessed Us, Because Of The Accident Of Our Origins, With The Linguistic Unity That Brings A Critically Needed Cohesion To A Nation As Diverse, Multiracial And Multiethnic As America. Why Gratuitously Throw Away That Priceless Asset? How Mindless To Call The Desire To Retain It 'racist.

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Majority Leader

To Understand The Workings Of American Politics, You Have To Understand This Fundamental Law: Conservatives Think Liberals Are Stupid. Liberals Think Conservatives Are Evil.

Third Parties In America Gravitate Not Only To The Extremes, But To Irrelevance. (john Anderson's Upcoming Presidential Campaign Will Undoubtedly Confirm Both Tendencies.)

Israel Is The Very Embodiment Of Jewish Continuity: It Is The Only Nation On Earth That Inhabits The Same Land, Bears The Same Name, Speaks The Same Language, And Worships The Same God That It Did 3,000 Years Ago. You Dig The Soil And You Find Pottery From Davidic Times, Coins From Bar Kokhba, And 2,000-year-old Scrolls Written In A Script Remarkably Like The One That Today Advertises Ice Cream At The Corner Candy Store.

The War Is Not Going Well And It Is Time To Say Why. It Has Been Fought With Half-measures. It Has Been Fought With An Eye On The Wishes Of Our "coalition Partners." It Has Been Fought To Assuage The Arab "street." It Has Been Fought To Satisfy The Diplomats Rather Than The Generals... Why Have We Not Loosed The B-52s And The B-2s To Carpet-bomb Taliban Positions? And Why Are We Giving The Taliban Sanctuary In Their Cities? We Could Drop Leaflets Giving Civilians 48 Hours To Evacuate, After Which The Cities Become Legitimate Military Targets.

There's No Free Lunch. If You Want An Industrial Economy, You Need Energy. If You Want Energy, It Will Produce Pollution. You Can Have It In Two Forms. You Can Have It Dissipated In The Atmosphere - Like Carbon Dioxide - Which Then You Cannot Recover, Or You Can Have The Waste Concentrated In One Small Space Like Nuclear. That Is Far Easier To Deal With. The Idea That You Can Be Able To Create Renewable Energy At A Price Anywhere Near The Current Price For Oil Or Gas Or Coal Is A Fantasy.

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The Free Lunch Is The Essence Of Modern Liberalism.

The Houthi Have Local Religious Grievances, Being Shiites In A Majority Sunni Land. But They Are Also Agents Of Shiite Iran, Which Arms, Trains, And Advises Them. Their Slogan - 'god Is Great. Death To America. Death To Israel' - Could Have Been Written In Persian.

When A Party Is In Opposition, It Opposes. That's Its Job. But When It Comes To Power, It Must Govern. Easy Rhetoric Is Over, The Press Of Reality Becomes Irresistible. By Necessity, It Adopts Some Of The Policies It Had Once Denounced. And A New National Consensus Is Born.

Truman Left In The Middle Of An Unpopular War, A War Of Choice. Truman Didn't Have To Go Into South Korea. And He Was Reviled And Ridiculed For The Stalemate That Resulted. Now, He's Seen As One Of The Great Presidents Of The 20th Century.

The International Community Lies At The Center Of The Obama Foreign Policy. Unfortunately, It Is A Fiction. There Is No Such Thing. Different Countries Have Different Histories, Geographies, Necessities, And Interests. There's No Natural, Inherent, Or Enduring International Community.

I Would Say I See Myself As A Psychiatrist In Remission.

Don't Touch My Junk, You Airport Security Goon - My Package Belongs To No One But Me, And Do You Really Think I'm A Nigerian Nut Job Preparing For My 72-virgin Orgy By Blowing My Johnson To Kingdom Come?

There Is A Mystique About Psychiatry That People Think That You Have Some Kind Of A Magical Lens, You Know, Superman's X-ray Vision Into The Soul. One Of The Reasons I Left Psychiatry Is That I Didn't Believe That.

Pass Legislation. When Obama Signs, You've Shown Seriousness And The Ability To Govern. When He Vetoes, You've Clarified The Differences Between Party Philosophies And Prepared The Ground For 2016.

Chess: It's Like Alcohol. It's A Drug. I Have To Control It, Or It Could Overwhelm Me. I Have A Regular Monday Night Game At My Home, And I Do Play A Little Online.

Ron Paul Is Not Going To Be President, So We Don't Have To Worry About Who's Going To Be In His Cabinet.

A One-hour Work-week...would Minimize The Damage That Congress Can Do.

When You Have The Worst Disaster In American History, You've Got To Be Attuned To Expectations,.

American History

Why Should We Care About The Coup? First, Because We Depend On Yemen's Government To Support Our Drone War Against Another Local Menace, Al-qaeda In The Arabian Peninsula (aqap). It's Not Clear If We Can Even Maintain Our Embassy In Yemen, Let Alone Conduct Operations Against Aqap. And Second, Because Growing Iranian Hegemony Is A Mortal Threat To Our Allies And Interests In The Entire Middle East.

Obama Has Committed The U.s. To War On The Islamic State. To Then Allow Within A Month An Allied Enclave To Be Overrun - And Perhaps Annihilated - Would Be A Major Blow.

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What Made Obama Unique Was That He Was The Ultimate Charismatic Politician - The Most Unknown Stranger Ever To Achieve The Presidency In The United States. No One Knew Who He Was, He Came Out Of Nowhere, He Had This Incredible Persona That Floated Him Above The Fray, Destroyed Hillary, Took Over The Democratic Party And Became President. This Is Truly Unprecedented: A Young Unknown With No History, No Paper Trail, No Well-known Associates, Self-created.

Somebody Actually Said That I'm The Only Entity On Earth, Other Than Rogue States, That Has Received An Apology From The White House.

The Medical Malpractice System Is Totally Out Of Control. Everybody In The System Knows It. And It's Not Just Of The Outrageous Judgments, It's Not Just The Fact That Some People Get Millions Of Dollars, Others Get Nothing, And The One People Who Get Rich Are Lawyered, It's Just That It Causes Doctors To Practice Defensive Medicine.

Doves Oppose War On The Grounds That The Risks Exceed The Gains. War With Iraq Could Be Very Costly, Possibly Degenerating Into Urban Warfare.

There Used To Be A Cruel Joke That Said Brazil Is The Country Of The Future, And Always Will Be; Obama Is The Brazil Of Today's Politicians. He Has Obviously Achieved Nothing.

I Happen To Believe That The Preemption School Is Correct, That The Risks Of Allowing Saddam Hussein To Acquire His Weapons Will Only Grow With Time.

In An Essay 10 Years Ago, I Pointed Out That It Is Utterly Logical For Polygamy Rights To Follow Gay Rights. After All, If Traditional Marriage Is Defined As The Union Of (1) Two People Of (2) Opposite Gender, And If, As Advocates Of Gay Marriage Insist, The Gender Requirement Is Nothing But Prejudice, Exclusion And An Arbitrary Denial Of One's Autonomous Choices In Love, Then The First Requirement - The Number Restriction (two And Only Two) - Is A Similarly Arbitrary, Discriminatory And Indefensible Denial Of Individual Choice.

Individual Choice

In The Course Of His Presidency, Obama Has Gone From An Almost Magical Charismatic Figure To An Ordinary Politician. Ordinary. Average.

Obsession With Self Is The Motif Of Our Time.

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The Results Of The Great Society Experiments Started Coming In And Began Showing That, For All Its Good Intentions, The War On Poverty Was Causing Irreparable Damage To The Very Communities It Was Designed To Help.

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The Obama Foreign Policy, In Broad Strokes, Has Been A Disaster.

In Science, Modesty And Genius Do Not Coexist Well Together. (in Washington, Modesty And Cleverness Don't.) Einstein Is Perhaps The Most Famous Exception To The Rule.

Exception To The Rule

It Is Ridiculous To Sue The President On A Wednesday Because He Oversteps The Law, As He Has Done A Dozen Times Illegally And Unconstitutionally, And Then On A Thursday Say That He Should Overstep The Law, Contradict The Law That Passed In 2008 And Deal With This Himself.

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Identity Politics Is The Mother's Milk Of The Democratic Left.

Identity Politics

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Ideas Matter. Legislative Proposals Matter. Slick Campaigns And Dazzling Speeches Can Work For A While, But The Magic Always Wears Off.

The Joy Of Losing Consists In This: Where There Are No Expectations, There Is No Disappointment.

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Washington Is The Only Place In The World Where A Gaffe Is When A Politician Accidently Speaks The Truth.

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The Iraquis Can See It. The Kurds Can Feel It. The Jihadists Are Counting On It.

A Three-year Diet Of Rubber Chicken And Occasional Crow.

The Liberal Vision Of America Is That It Should Be Less Arrogant, Less Unilateral, More Internationalist. In Obama's View, America Would Subsume Itself Under A Fuzzy Internationalism In Which The International Community, Which I Think Is A Fiction, Governs Itself Through The U.n.

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There Are Cycles In American Politics. Us Cycles Are Even More Pronounced Because We Americans Have A Totally Entrepreneurial Presidential System. We Don't Have Parliamentary Opposition Parties With A Shadow Prime Minister And Shadow Cabinets. Every Four Years, The Opposition Reinvents Itself.

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Perfectly Normal

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History Is Not Just Cruel. It Is Witty.

Better To Be Paralyzed From The Neck Down Than The Neck Up

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The Conservative Idea Is Not That Government Has No Role. You Might Have Argued That In The Thirties When Conservatives Opposed The New Deal.

I'm A Former Red Sox Fan, Now Fully Rehabilitated.

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I Am Not Religious. I Do Not Believe That Personhood Is Conferred Upon Conception. But I Also Do Not Believe That A Human Embryo Is The Moral Equivalent Of A Hangnail And Deserves No More Respect Than An Appendix.

Some Geopolitical Conflicts Are Morally Complicated. The Israel-gaza War Is Not. It Possesses A Moral Clarity Not Only Rare But Excruciating. [...] For Hamas, The Only Thing More Prized Than Dead Jews Are Dead Palestinians.

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Life And Consciousness Are The Two Great Mysteries. Actually, Their Substrates Are The Inanimate. And How Do You Get From Neurons Shooting Around In The Brain To The Thought That Pops Up In Your Head And Mine? There's Something Deeply Mysterious About That. And If You're Not Struck By The Mystery, I Think You Haven't Thought About It.

I Began My Journalistic Career On The Day Ronald Reagan Was Sworn In. That's The Day I Showed Up For Work At 'the New Republic' Magazine.

If You Subsidize Apples, You Get More Apples; If You Subsidize Unemployment, You Get More Of It.

If You Believe That Health Care Is A Public Good To Be Guaranteed By The State, Then A Single-payer System Is The Next Best Alternative. Unfortunately, It Is Fiscally Unsustainable Without Rationing.

Science Has Everything To Say About What Is Possible. Science Has Nothing To Say About What Is Permissible.

Increasing Public Safety Almost Always Means Restricting Liberties.

Great Leaders Are Willing To Retire Unloved And Unpopular As The Price For Great Exertion.

If Russia Were To Do Something That It Could Do, It Looks Like It Might Even Be Preparing To Do, To Invade Ukraine And Essentially To Dismember It, This Would Be The One Item That Could Reflect Really Badly On Trump Because Of The Warm Way He Spoke About Putin.

To Go Into Ukraine And To Take Over, To Invade Crimea, Is A Huge Step. And [russian President Vladimir Putin] Would Only Have Done It With A President Who Has Shown From The Very Beginning That [president Obama] Is Living In A Fantasy World...they Imagine The World As A New Interconnected World Where Climate Change Is The Biggest Threat And They Are Shocked That The Russians Actually Are Interested In Territory.

An Oil Crisis Looms, Prices Are Spiking - And Our President Is Extolling Algae. After Solyndra, Keystone And Promises Of Seaweed In Their Gas Tanks, Americans Sense A President So Ideologically Antipathetic To Fossil Fuels - Which We Possess In Staggering Abundance - That He Is Utterly Unserious About The Real World Of Oil In Which The Rest Of Us Live.

If Fences Don't Work, Why Is There One Around The White House.

We Must Now Brace Ourselves For Disquisitions On Peer Pressure, Adolescent Anomie, And Rage.

Obama Was Quite Serious When He Said He Was Going To Change The World. And Now He Has A National Crisis, A Personal Mandate, A Pliant Congress, A Desperate Public - And, At His Disposal, The Greatest Pot Of Money In Galactic History.

Fairness Through Leveling Is The Essence Of Obamaism.

Under Our Constitutional System, The Executive Executes The Laws That Congress Has Passed. It Should Not Be Executing Laws That Congress Has Rejected.

Ted Cruz Is Not The Official Spokesman For American Conservatism. If You Want Somebody Who Has Been Out There, Who Has Offered An Alternative - The Person Who Offered An Alternative, For Example, Is... Paul Ryan.

With Our Financial House On Fire, Obama Makes Clear Both In In His Speech And His Budget That The Essence Of His Presidency Will Be The Transformation Of Health Care, Education And Energy.

As The Romance Of Manned Space Exploration Has Waned, The Drive Today Is To Find Our Living, Thinking Counterparts In The Universe. For All The Excitement, However, The Search Betrays A Profound Melancholy - A Lonely Species In A Merciless Universe Anxiously Awaits An Answering Voice Amid Utter Silence.

If The President Signs Any Of It, Good. If He Vetoes, It Will Be Clarifying. Who Then Will Be The Party Of No? The Vetoed Legislation Would Become The Framework For A 2016 Gop Platform. Let The Debate Begin.

Clashes Of Values And The Struggle For Primacy Constitute A Constant In Human History That Accounts For That Other Constant - Conflict And War.

Hawks Favor War On The Grounds That Saddam Hussein Is Reckless, Tyrannical And Instinctively Aggressive, And That If He Comes Into Possession Of Nuclear Weapons In Addition To The Weapons Of Mass Destruction He Already Has, He Is Likely To Use Them Or Share Them With Terrorists. The Threat Of Mass Death On A Scale Never Before Seen Residing In The Hands Of An Unstable Madman Is Intolerable – And Must Be Preempted.

Mass Destruction

It’s Not The Advertising - It’s The Dog Food. Every Time Anybody Has A Look At It Or Has A Lick Of It, They Don’t Like It.

I Think If You're Going To Master Policy, Especially World Affairs, You've Got To Know History.

I Would Write My Editorials Using A Manual Typewriter In Pitch-black Darkness... I Would Produce The Whole Thing Without Having Seen The Text.

To His Credit, Obama Didn't Just Come To Washington To Be Someone. Like Reagan, He Came To Washington To Do Something -- To Introduce A Powerful Social Democratic Stream Into America's Deeply And Historically Individualist Polity.

[i]t Is More Than Slightly Ironic That Democrats, The Fiercely Pro-choice Party, Reserve Free Choice For Aborting A Fetus, While Denying It For Such Matters As Choosing Your Child's School Or Joining A Union.

Obama's Democrats Have Become The Part Of No. Real Cuts To Federal Budget? No. Entitlement Reform? No. Tax Reform? No. Breaking The Corrupt And Fiscally Unsustainable Symbiosis Between Public-sector Unions And State Governments? Hell No.

Winning Control Of The Senate Would Allow Republicans To Pass A Whole Range Of Measures Now Being Held Up By Reid, Often At The Behest Of The White House. Make It A Major Reform Agenda. The Centerpiece Might Be Tax Reform, Both Corporate And Individual. It Is Needed, Popular And Doable. Then Go For The Low-hanging Fruit Enjoying Wide Bipartisan Support, Such As The Keystone Xl Pipeline And Natural Gas Exports, Most Especially To Eastern Europe. One Could Then Add Border Security, Energy Deregulation And Health-care Reform That Repeals The More Onerous Obamacare Mandates.

Post-watergate Morality, By Which Anything Left Private Is Taken As Presumptive Evidence Of Wrongdoing.

There's A Reason Why In New York Harbor We Have The Statue Of Liberty, Not The Statue Of Equality.

The Left Is Entering A New Phase Of Ideological Agitation No Longer Trying To Win The Debate But Stopping Debate Altogether, Banishing From Public Discourse Any And All Opposition. The Proper Word For That Attitude Is Totalitarian. It Declares Certain Controversies Over And Visits Serious Consequences From Social Ostracism To Vocational Defenestration Upon Those Who Refuse To Be Silenced.

If Obama Has His Way, The Change That Is Coming Is A New America: "fair," Leveled And Social Democratic. Obama Didn't Get Elected To Warranty Your Muffler. He's Here To Warranty Your Life.

Ted Cruz Is A Patriot. He Believes In What He Does. He's Done Marvels In Mobilizing Conservatives, Mobilizing Americans Concerned About The Direction Of The Ever-expanding Entitlement State Under Obama, And Particularly The Threat It Is To Freedom. I Disagree With His Tactics, But I Agree Entirely With His Objectives.

I Don't Think You Can Pump Carbon Dioxide Into The Atmosphere Indefinitely And Not Have A Reaction. But There Are Great Scientists Such As Freeman Dyson, One Of The Greatest Physicists Of The Last Hundred Years, Who Has Studied The Question, Who Believes Quite The Opposite. The Reason Transnational Action Is So Difficult Is Because The Major Problem With Climate Change Is, A, That There Is No Consensus, And, B, That The Economic Cost Is Simply Staggering. Reversing It Completely Might Mean Undoing The Modern Industrial Economy.

I Believe In What I Believe, And I Think After All These Years I've Heard A Lot Of Arguments, And I'm Convinced By The Superiority Of The Arguments That Are Made On The Conservative Side. I Think That's A Better Way To Run A Society.

I Think The Editorial Page Of The Washington Post Is The Best In The Country. I Think The Editorials - Considering It's A Liberal Town, Liberal Constituency And From The Liberal Tradition - I Think It's The Best Editorial Page Around. It's Quite Balanced.

The Only Reason The President Insists On Raising [tax] Rates Is Because He Knows It Will Destroy Republican Unity, It Will Cause A Complete Fracture Of The Republican Majority In The House, It Will Hand Him A Congress That He Can Then Manipulate For The Next Two Years At Least Because The Republicans Will Be Neutered. ... This Is Entirely A Political Action, A Way To Get A Surrender From The Republicans.

Obama Is A Man Of First-class Intellect And First-class Temperament. But His Character Remains Highly Suspect.

I Distrust All Multiculturalism, Liberal Or Conservative. The Balkans Amply Demonstrate The Perils Of Balkanization.

Tuesday's Victory Was Big. But It Did Nothing More Than Level The Playing Field And Give You A Shot. Take It.

This Is How The Great Post-partisan, Post-racial, New Politics Presidency Ends - Not With A Bang, Not With A Whimper, But With A Desperate Election-eve Plea For Ethnic Retribution.

If Harriet Miers Were Not A Crony Of The President Of The United States, Her Nomination To The Supreme Court Would Be A Joke, As It Would Have Occurred To No One Else To Nominate Her.

Whenever You're Faced With An Explanation Of What's Going On In Washington, The Choice Between Incompetence And Conspiracy, Always Choose Incompetence.

Preemption Is A Kind Of Pre-deterrence That Stops The Threat At An Earlier, Safer Stage.

Courage Is Not A Quality One Normally Associates With Mathematicians. Yet It Should Apply To People Who Work In Their Attics In Secret For Seven Years Without Cease On A Problem That Has Eluded The Greatest Mathematical Minds Since First Proposed In 1637.

In Reality, Kyoto Was A Huge Transfer Of Resources From The United States To The Third World, Under The Guise Of Environmental Protection.

I'm Not Against International Institutions That Would Try To Tackle Global Warming. But The Way To Go, At Least In The Short Run, Is To Go To Nuclear Power. It's Amazing To Me That People Who Are So Alarmed About Global Warming Are So Reluctant To Adopt The Obvious Short-term Solution - The Bridge Until The Day When We Have Affordable Renewable Energy - Of Nuclear Power.

This Is A Formidable Enemy. To Dismiss It As A Bunch Of 'cowards' Perpetuating 'senseless Acts Of Violence' Is Complacent Nonsense. People Willing To Kill Thousands Of Innocents While They Kill Themselves Are Not Cowards. They Are Deadly Vicious Warriors And Need To Be Treated As Such.

If We Insist That Public Life Be Reserved For Those Whose Personal History Is Pristine, We Are Not Going To Get Paragons Of Virtue Running Our Affairs. We Will Get The Very Rich, Who Contract Out The Messy Things In Life The Very Dull, Who Have Nothing To Hide And Nothing To Show And The Very Devious, Expert At Covering Their Tracks And Ambitious Enough To Risk Their Discovery.

Highfalutin Moral Principles Are Impossible Guides To Foreign Policy. At Worst, They Reflect Hypocrisy; At Best, Extreme Naivete.

I Envy People Who Write Easily. I Enjoy The Process, But It's Not Easeful For Me.

Every New President Flatters Himself That He, Kinder And Gentler, Is Beginning The World Anew. Yet, When Barack Obama In His Inaugural Address Reached Out To Muslims By Saying, 'to The Muslim World, We Seek A New Way Forward, Based On Mutual Interest And Mutual Respect,' His Formulation Was Needlessly Defensive And Apologetic.

Mutual Interest

Where Religion Is Trivialized, One Is Unlikely To Find Persecution.

Where There Is A Confluence Of Interests Among Nations, As, For Example The Swine Flu Or Polio, You Can Get Well Functioning International Institutions Like The World Health Organization. And You Can Act. Climate Change Is Different, Because The Science Remains Hypothetical And The Potential Costs Staggering.

If [bush's] Successors Don't Screw It Up, Within 10 Years Nasa Will Have Us Back To Where We Belong -- On Other Worlds.

It Is An Axiom Of Political Life That You Never Raise Expectations, Whether In A Political Or Military Campaign, Because Your Defeats Are Then Magnified And Your Victories Discounted.

It Is An Old Liberal Theme That Conservative Ideas, Being Red In Tooth And Claw, Cannot Possibly Emerge From Any Notion Of The Public Good.

Two Decades Ago, However, Socialism And Communism Died Rudely, Then Were Buried Forever By The Empirical Demonstration Of The Superiority Of Market Capitalism Everywhere From Thatcher's England To Deng's China, Where Just The Partial Abolition Of Socialism Lifted More People Out Of Poverty More Rapidly Than Ever In Human History.

The Great Divide In American Foreign Policy Thinking Is Between Those Who Believe In Paper And Those Who Believe In Power.

Fox News Is No Monopoly. It Is A Singular Minority In A Sea Of Liberal Media. Abc, Nbc, Cbs, Pbs, Npr, Cnn, Msnbc Vs. Fox. The Lineup Is So Unbalanced As To Be Comical - And That Doesn't Even Include The Other Commanding Heights Of The Culture That Are Firmly, Flagrantly Liberal: Hollywood, The Foundations, The Universities, The Elite Newspapers.

For Liberals, The Observation That 'the Peasants Are Revolting' Is A Pun. For Conservatives, It Is Cause For Uncharacteristic Optimism. No Matter How Far The Ideological Pendulum Swings In The Short Term, In The End The Bedrock Common Sense Of The American People Will Prevail.

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