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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.

-Charles Krauthammer

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Winning Control Of The

Charles Krauthammer

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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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Some Will Protest That In A World With So Much Human Suffering, It Is Something Between Eccentric And Obscene To Mourn A Dog. I Think Not. After All, It Is Perfectly Normal—indeed, Deeply Human—to Be Moved When Nature Presents Us With A Vision Of Great Beauty. Should We Not Be Moved When It Produces A Vision—a Creature—of The Purest Sweetness?

Perfectly Normal

[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.

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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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

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.

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.

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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Obsession With Self Is The Motif Of Our Time.

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History Is Not Just Cruel. It Is Witty.

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

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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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Middleness Is The Very Enemy Of The Bold.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Free Lunch Is The Essence Of Modern Liberalism.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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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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.

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Identity Politics

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.

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.

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

American History

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

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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.

There Is No Comparing The Brutality And Cynicism Of Today's Pop Culture With That Of Forty Years Ago: From High Noon To Robocop Is A Long Descent.

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.

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

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

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.

Guerrilla War Is A Test Of Wills. Obama's Actual Objectives - Rollback In Iraq, Containment In Syria - Are Not Unreasonable. But They Require Commitment And Determination. In Other Words, Will. You Can't Just Make One Speech Declaring War, Then Disappear And Go Fundraising.

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.

Increasing Public Safety Almost Always Means Restricting Liberties.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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Thomas Chandler Haliburton

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