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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.

-Charles Krauthammer

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Pass Legislation. When Obama

Charles Krauthammer

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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Perfectly Normal

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.

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.

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

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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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.

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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.

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The 2014 Election Has Given The Gop The Rare Opportunity To Retroactively Redeem Its Brand. The Conventional Perception, Incessantly Repeated By Democrats And The Media, Is That Washington Dysfunction Is The Work Of The Party Of No. Expose The Real Agent Of Do-nothing. Show That, When Harry Reid Can No Longer Consign House-passed Legislation To Oblivion, Congress Can Actually Work.

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

American History

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

Identity Politics

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Fairness Through Leveling Is The Essence Of Obamaism.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Look, I Don't Mind If The President Sends A Budget Which He Knows Is Not Going To Achieve Anything. But When He Prefaces His Remarks As We Just Saw By Saying We Have To Put Politics Aside, Posing Again As The One Person In The Country Who Rises Above Partisanship And Party, Speaks For The National Interest, It's Really Grating.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Majority Leader

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now This Is A Way To Approach Our Healthcare Problems: Increase The Number Of Tax Collectors And Decrease The Number Of Doctors - Brilliant!

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.

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

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.

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.

I Think The First Thing Is To Recognize A Mistake That Obama Made. And Others Have Made In Thinking That You Can Revolutionize A System That's Unbelievably Complex And Interlinked, One-sixth Of The Economy. That Was A Mistake Because Whenever You Change One Thing, It Changes 80 Other Things, And Now If You're Changing Everything At Once, You Have No Idea What The Outcome Is Going To Be And You Get All Of These Unintended Side Effects.

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.

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

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

Passing A Law Like The Assault Weapons Ban Is A Symbolic - Purely Symbolic - Move In That Direction. Its Only Real Justification Is Not To Reduce Crime But To Desensitize The Public To The Regulation Of Weapons In Preparation For Their Ultimate Confiscation.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

This Week, Iranian-backed Houthi Rebels Seized Control Of The Yemeni Government, Heretofore Pro-american. In September, They Overran Sanaa, The Capital. On Tuesday, They Seized The Presidential Palace. On Thursday, They Forced The President To Resign.

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

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.

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

[barack Obama Failed To Sell A Health Care Reform Plan To American Voters] Because The Utter Implausibility Of Its Central Promise - Expanded Coverage At Lower Cost - Led Voters To Conclude That It Would Lead Ultimately To More Government, More Taxes And More Debt.

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

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.

History Is Not Just Cruel. It Is Witty.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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Kenneth Scott Latourette

Freddie Mercury

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