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It Doesn't Take A Genius To See What Happens When The Entitlement State Outgrows The Economy Upon Which It Rests. The Time Of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, The Rest Of Insolvent Social-democratic Europe — And Now Detroit — Is The Time For Conservatives To Raise The Banner Of Stein's Law And Yell "stop." You Can Kick The Can Down The Road, But At Some Point It Falls Over A Cliff.

-Charles Krauthammer

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It Doesn't Take A

Charles Krauthammer

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It Doesn't Take A Genius To See What Happens When The Entitlement State Outgrows The Economy Upon Which It Rests. The Time Of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, The Rest Of Insolvent Social-democratic Europe — And Now Detroit — Is The Time For Conservatives To Raise The Banner Of Stein's Law And Yell "stop." You Can Kick The Can Down The Road, But At Some Point It Falls Over A Cliff.

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So Far As Im Concerned, Ronald Reagan Was The Best President. Nixon Was The Worst. Some Of His Policies Were Okay, But He Disgraced The Office.

I Don't Mind Going Into A Liberal Lion's Den. That's Where You Test Yourself.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Obsession With Self Is The Motif Of Our Time.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

You Can Have The Most Advanced And Efflorescent Of Cultures. Get Your Politics Wrong, However, And Everything Stands To Be Swept Away. This Is Not Ancient History. This Is Germany 1933... Politics Is The Moat, The Walls, Beyond Which Lie The Barbarians. Fail To Keep Them At Bay, And Everything Burns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Mutual Interest

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.

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

The Peasants Have Seen The Future - Greece And France - And Concluded That It Does Not Work. Hence Their Opposition To Obama's Proudly Transformational New Foundation Agenda. Their Logic Is Impeccable: Only The Most Blinkered Intellectual Could Be Attempting To Introduce Social Democracy To America Precisely When The World's Foremost Exemplar Of That Model - Europe - Is In Chaotic Meltdown.

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

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So A Holocaust-denying, Virulently Anti-semitic, Aspiring Genocidist, On The Verge Of Acquiring Weapons Of The Apocalypse, Believes That The End Is Not Only Near But Nearer Than The Next American Presidential Election. (pity The Democrats. They Cannot Catch A Break.) This Kind Of Man Would Have, To Put It Gently, Less Inhibition About Starting Armageddon Than A Normal Person.

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What Politicians Do Not Understand Is That [ian] Wilmut Discovered Not So Much A Technical Trick As A New Law Of Nature. We Now Know That An Adult Mammalian Cell Can Fire Up All The Dormant Genetic Instructions That Shut Down As It Divides And Specializes And Ages, And Thus Can Become A Source Of New Life. You Can Outlaw Technique; You Cannot Repeal Biology. Writing After Wilmut's Successful Cloning Of The Sheep, Dolly, That Research On The Cloning Of Human Beings Cannot Be Suppressed.

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

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[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.

Torture Is An Impermissible Evil. Except Under Two Circumstances. The First Is The Ticking Time Bomb. An Innocent's Life Is At Stake. The Bad Guy You Have Captured Possesses Information That Could Save This Life. He Refuses To Divulge. In Such A Case, The Choice Is Easy.

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

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

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.

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.

I Don't Really Care What A Public Figure Thinks. I Care About What He Does. Let God Probe His Inner Heart.

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.

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The Free Lunch Is The Essence Of Modern Liberalism.

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

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

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

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.

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

American History

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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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 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.

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

Loyalty To The President Is Great, But Loyalty To Truth, Integrity, And Country Is Even Better.

Take All Your Dukes And Marquesses And Earls And Viscounts, Pack Them Into One Chamber, Call It The House Of Lords To Satisfy Their Pride And Then Strip It Of All Political Power. It's A Solution So Perfectly Elegant And Preposterous That Only The British Could Have Managed It.

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.

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.

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

Identity Politics

A Drone Is A High-tech Version Of An Old Army And A Musket. It Ought To Be Used In Somalia To Hunt Bad Guys, But Not In America. I Don't Want To See It Hovering Over Anybody's Home.

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

When Under Attack, No Country Is Obligated To Collect Permission Slips From Allies To Strike Back.

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.

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

After The Soviet Collapse, Marxism Is A Relic, A Pathetic Anachronism Reduced To Its Last Redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, And The English Departments Of The More Expensive American Universities.

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

I Don't Know About You, But I Lie Awake Nights Worrying About Canadian Uranium. I Know These People. I Grew Up There. You Have No Idea What They're Capable Of Doing. If Sidney Crosby Hadn't Scored That Goal To Win The Olympic Gold Medal, There's No Telling What Might Have Ensued.

In Explaining Any Puzzling Washington Phenomenon, Always Choose Stupidity Over Conspiracy, Incompetence Over Cunning. Anything Else Gives Them Too Much Credit.

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.

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.

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

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

The Democratic Line Is That The Republican House Does Nothing But Block And Oppose. In Fact, It Has Passed Hundreds Of Bills Only To Have Them Die Upon Reaching The Desk Of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He Has Rendered The Senate Inert By Simply Ensuring That Any Bill That Might Present A Politically Difficult Vote For His Democratic Colleagues Never Even Comes To The Floor.

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In The Liberal Remake Of 'casablanca,' The Police Captain Comes Upon The Scene Of The Shooting And Orders His Men To 'round Up The Usual Weapons.' It's Always The Weapon And Never The Shooter.

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

The Indecisiveness And Ambivalence So Devastatingly Described By Both Of Obama's Previous Secretaries Of Defense, Leon Panetta And Bob Gates, Are Already Beginning To Characterize The Syria Campaign.

Americans Are Not Intrinsically Imperial, But We Ended Up Dominant By Default: Europe Disappeared After The Second World War, The Soviet Union Disappeared In 1991, So Here We Are.

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.

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.

In The Middle Ages People Took Potions For Their Ailments. In The 19th Century They Took Snake Oil. Citizens Of Today's Shiny, Technological Age Are Too Modern For That. They Take Antioxidants And Extract Of Cactus Instead.

For All The Sublimity Of Art, Physics, Music, Mathematics, And Other Manifestations Of Human Genius, Everything Depends On The Mundane, Frustrating, Often Debased Vocation Known As Politics (and Its Most Exacting Subspecialty - Statecraft). Because If We Don't Get Politics Right, Everything Else Risks Extinction.

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