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Why Is No One Laughing? By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. WASHINGTON -- What would the mainstream media's response be if former governor Sarah Palin described China's economic growth to an audience of students in Shanghai as "an accomplishment unparalleled in human history"? That is what the most inexperienced president in modern American history said in Shanghai this week. I wonder if any of the assembled journalists choked. President Barack Obama makes such unhinged pronouncements with the kind of frequency that if he were anyone else he would be set down by the media as a boobie. I take that back....

WASHINGTON -- Why is the governor of South Carolina still a national news story? This past week, Gov. Mark Sanford was again in the news, and neither sex nor romance had anything to do with it. I can understand his first great news splash, after he completely vanished from the face of the earth. Then he duped his staff into announcing that he was communing with the birds and the bees along the Appalachian Trail. Then it was discovered that he had actually been emulating the birds and the bees down in Argentina with a secret Argentine inamorata. She is...

Allow me a word of encouragement to our president. Mr. Obama, you are doing just fine. You wanted to set a new tone in Washington, and you have. You wanted an open debate on health care, and you have it. Admittedly, the tone is astoundingly rancorous, and not incidentally, your approval ratings continue to decline. Then, too, support for your health care reform is dropping, especially among independents. Yet I believe you can take heart. You have roused the interest of the American people in you, the Democratic Party, the Congress and health care. That is good news, at least...

Stop the presses! Finally, after a half-century of staunchly disagreeing with Dr. Fidel Castro, I see that the Cuban dictator has rendered a judgment with which I heartily agree. Responding to the Prophet Obama's friendly conversation with his brother Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas in steamy Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Fidel, in the words of The Associated Press, "blasted the new U.S. president for showing signs of 'superficiality.'" But given all the Hollywood stars Fidel has hosted on his island paradise, you can rest assured that Fidel is a connoisseur of superficiality. Fidel apparently was angered by the Prophet's...

WASHINGTON -- There is a condign symmetry about this financial crisis. A government-induced crisis is getting a government-insured resolution. The excesses of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are being mopped up by huge federal spending, made all the more massive by all the reckless endeavors of the politicians, the regulators and the financiers who frivoled with the intemperance of Freddie and Fannie. Now President-elect Barack Obama has perhaps faced up to the mess. He has not shied away from bringing former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers onto his economic team as head of his National Economic Council. Summers was...

WASHINGTON -- It has been a mixed week for Sen. Barack H. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. On the one hand, a Reuters/Zogby poll announced that the junior senator from Illinois' 7-point lead over Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, has dissolved into a 5-point deficit. McCain now leads him 46 to 41 percent. On the other hand, the media have discovered Sen. Obama's long-lost half brother George Hussein Onyango (also spelled Owango) Obama living quietly in Kenya. Among the rustics who constitute the Democratic base, this discovery can only help Sen. Obama. According to the Reuters/Zogby...

Print Article         Close Window     The Prophet Obama By R.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Published 7/17/2008 12:08:01 AM WASHINGTON -- As I suggested a few weeks ago, Senator Barack H. Obama is not going to have an easy time of it. For one thing, Senator John McCain is a much tougher candidate than has been suspected. Looking over his career, one will note that McCain learned politics before ever entering politics. As a young Navy liaison to the Senate in the 1970s, he worked effectively with Democratic and Republican hawks to reverse the post-Vietnam military decline. He, having managed the...

WASHINGTON -- The other day an aroused Bill Clinton addressed a lady reporter in South Dakota, shouting a word into her face that the Dictionary of American Slang labels "Taboo." As the reporter recorded it, Boy Clinton was "tightly gripping" her hand and "refusing to let it go." What had aroused him was a story in Vanity Fair that chronicles the excesses -- libidinous, commercial, and ontological -- of his life in retirement and while campaigning for his wife. Among other epithets, the former Boy President applied to the Vanity Fair writer, Todd Purdum, was "scumbag."

If it’s campaign season, that means one thing: Let the mudslinging begin. The latest book by American Spectator founder and Editor in Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., “The Clinton Crack-Up,” hits book shelves next week, and our sneak peek into the tome suggests it’s certain to cause a stir. Tyrrell, you’ll recall, is no fan of the Clintons. His last book, “Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House,” compared Sen. Hillary Clinton’s time in the White House to that of a pre-revolutionary French monarch. And his American Spectator magazine cried “Scandal!” throughout the Clinton administration. With his new...

The Hon. Newt Gingrich's recent oracular rumble to a luncheon audience at the Brookings Institution, during which he threatened to seek the Republican presidential nomination if a "vacuum" remains in the Republican field, reminded me of an inescapable insight I suffered sometime in 1998. Gingrich is the Republicans' Bill Clinton. Being a Republican, Gingrich is not as hollow as the Arkansas huckster, nor as amusing. In fact, he can be boring. Springing from the same late 1960s jugendkultur as the Boy President, Gingrich is the career pol, the hustling, self-promoting narcissist, the sempiternal fantasist. When he was Speaker of the...

WASHINGTON -- The comic career of Senator Jean-Francois Kerry is picking up steam, or gas, as the case may be. This inveterate windbag is, according to the New York Times, reopening the Swift Boat controversy of 2004 that did such damage to his presidential prospects when hundreds of the Vietnam War veterans who served with him deflated his reckless boasts of military gloire. He has undertaken this quixotic mission claiming that he can repristinate his military record despite the Swifties' evidence against it. Then the delusory senator from Massachusetts seems to think he will be a shoo-in for the presidency...

WASHINGTON -- I cannot rid from my mind the name Alioto, Judge Samuel Alioto. That is the name of Judge Samuel Alito as pronounced by the delightful Sen. Edward Kennedy, or is it Eduardo Kennedino? No, it is simply Teddy, and he is as entertaining as any U.S. Senator since the days of the soused Southerners, who would tipple their way through the dreamy days on Capitol Hill, rousing themselves for histrionic oratory in the mid-afternoon and then slumping back into their seats, awaiting the late afternoon hour when they would all gather in one or another's chambers for a...

Reporting the Report By Published 1/20/2006 12:09:31 AM   WASHINGTON -- There was some last-minute drama in Washington before yesterday's release of the long-awaited report by Independent Counsel David Barrett. Sources close to the three-judge panel overseeing the report say that the panel's members were furious about leaks to the press previewing the report's contents. The report, detailing an organized attempt by Clinton Administration officials to shut down an Internal Revenue Service investigation into possible tax violations by President Bill Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development Henry Cisneros, was to be released at 9:00 AM Thursday. The day...

WASHINGTON -- There was some last-minute drama in Washington before yesterday's release of the long-awaited report by Independent Counsel David Barrett. Sources close to the three-judge panel overseeing the report say that the panel's members were furious about leaks to the press previewing the report's contents. The report, detailing an organized attempt by Clinton administration officials to shut down an Internal Revenue Service investigation into possible tax violations by President Bill Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development Henry Cisneros, was to be released at 9:00 a.m. Thursday. The day before, late in the afternoon, word went out from the...

WASHINGTON -- 'Tis the end of 2005 and time to look back. In politics what do I see? Well, I see the Republican party struggling against high seas. In the media the party is depicted as being in danger of losing to the Democrats in the off-year elections next fall. That probably will be the case, unless the Republicans have to run against the Democrats. Against the Democrats they could win with Warren Harding in the White House. The reason for this is that the Democratic leadership is fractured and dominated by people who are hysterical, abusive and oblivious. The...

WASHINGTON -- 'Tis the end of 2005 and time to look back. In politics what do I see? Well, I see the Republican party struggling against high seas. In the media the party is depicted as being in danger of losing to the Democrats in the off-year elections next fall. That probably will be the case, unless the Republicans have to run against the Democrats. Against the Democrats they could win with Warren Harding in the White House. The reason for this is that the Democratic leadership is fractured and dominated by people who are hysterical, abusive and oblivious. The...

Modern broadcast media stars take prodigious pride in the speed with which they can communicate to the masses. Of course, these artistes remain utterly oblivious of the poisonous concomitant of that speed, namely, the media's almost inane superficiality. Discovering the cause of the New Orleans tragedy will take months, perhaps years. In reading "In Command of History," a brilliant history soon to be published here of Winston Churchill's efforts to write his monumental history of World War II, I have been struck by the differing explanations of great events historians accumulate after an event. Doubtless, many explanations will accumulate in...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- One of the reasons I can say with the utmost confidence that the liberal Democrats are going to be out in the cold for a very long time has to do with a sociological observation. Almost no liberal Democrat knows a conservative Republican of whom he is not contemptuous. To be sure, liberals in their think tanks, their universities, their corporate offices or government bureaucracies encounter the occasional conservative. Doubtless over at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, many of the resident liberals knew that amiable moderate conservative former, Sen. Al Simpson. Many probably even liked him. Simpson...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Pondering the many scrapes with the law and with public convention that the Clintons have suffered over the past dozen years of the Clinton Glory, we can ascertain one weird quirk shared by both eminences that explains their unprecedented string of scandals. Having reviewed both their autobiographies now, I see this one weird quirk standing out ever more starkly. The Clintons land in the soup most frequently because they lie when they do not have to, and they tell a whopper when a little white lie would be perfectly understandable.  Whether this gratuitous mendacity is a profound...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Very few things ever surprised the recently deceased editor of The Wall Street Journal, Bob Bartley. However, I know of one firsthand. When the First Amendment rights of The American Spectator were trampled by the Clinton administration, specifically via a melodramatic grand jury investigation, almost no one from the press paid any attention.  That surprised Bob. He believed that legions of civil libertarians would hasten to the magazine's defense, not only from the media but also from the First Amendment "Watch Dog" groups that sempiternally pat themselves on the back for their fearless idealism and their direct...

John Francois Kerry’s 2004 campaign for the presidency is taking on endearing aspects of Boy Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Does that mean this Democratic contender will in the end defeat another Bush? This I cannot say. I will say that as long as the French-looking, cologne-scented, junior senator from Massachusetts remains in the race, the media’s fact checkers are going to be kept on their toes.In 1992, the fact-checkers were repeatedly called to their posts to review Gov. Clinton’s ongoing revisions of his draft record. They worked overtime on the Boy Candidate’s constantly evolving elucidations of his marijuana adventures, his anti-war...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- I do not know what you thought when you heard that Sen. John Francois Kerry was overheard in a scrum of Chicago blue collar workers referring to unnamed politicians as "crooked" and "lying." I thought he was referring to the Clintons. What is more, I thought he was being complimentary. The Clintons have, indeed, been very artful in all their transgressions. Even when they get caught, they wriggle out of it, save for the time that Bill got impeached, and found in contempt of court, and lost his license to practice law. Actually, Bill has never really...

WASHINGTON -- Do my eyes deceive me? The morning after Super Tuesday expired with a burst of fireworks enhaloing the hunk of granite that is John Kerry's head, Senator Hillary Clinton -- still the most popular Democrat in the country -- pops up at Washington's Mayflower Hotel to give a major speech on trade and manufacturing, two burning issues during the Democrats' primary season. What can this mean? Several weeks back as Senator Kerry emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, that veteran Clinton-watcher with the keen eye for political machinations, Dick Morris, announced that Hillary had become a...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Do my eyes deceive me? The morning after Super Tuesday expired with a burst of fireworks enhaloing the hunk of granite that is John Kerry's head, Sen. Hillary Clinton -- still the most popular Democrat in the country -- pops up at Washington's Mayflower Hotel to give a major speech on trade and manufacturing, two burning issues during the Democrats' primary season. What can this mean? Several weeks back, as Kerry emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, that veteran Clinton-watcher with the keen eye for political machinations, Dick Morris, announced that Hillary had become a...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The campaign trail has been cluttered with such fantasticos as Sen. John Pierre Kerry, Dr. Howard Dean, Generalissimo Wesley Clark and the Rev Al Sharpton. Now I, too, have had to venture onto the campaign trail, but a more civilized trail it is. With the publication of my cheerful little tome on the junior senator from New York, "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House," I am on what might be called the literary campaign trail, booming the book's merits hither and yon. That means many appearances on broadcast media, especially talk radio. The exercise...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Readers of this column will remember, as apparently political scientists and pundits have not, that in the rancorous months before the Democratic primaries got underway, I identified that one dynamic new political constituency that would decide the winner. In years gone by, the dynamic constituency was the youth vote. And there was the year of the women's vote. This year as we watched Dr. Howard Dean gain the role of frontrunner, the veins in his neck bursting, his face an angry gnarl of sneers and grimaces, it became obvious that the dynamic new force in the Democratic...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The week has witnessed the departure from the Democratic presidential race of the party's last authentic man competing for the nomination, Sen. Joe Lieberman. The remaining candidates are all hucksters. They are the masters of such lines as "Ah ... let me clarify what I said the other day," and, "Oh, allow me to apologize to my distinguished colleague," and, "Well, what I really meant to say was ..." From frontrunner Kerry to bottom-of-the-heap Sharpton (and a well-upholstered bottom it is), each remaining candidate lives in fear of what a Lexis-Nexis search might reveal about his past...

R. Emmett Tyrrell's New Book: Madame HillaryAnnotated by Mia T   1.29.04   Madame HillaryTyrrell, R. Emmett with Mark Davis "This is a woman who's been first lady, who's lived in the White House and shared power with a president," says one of Hillary's fellow Senators. "Her ambition is not the Senate leadership. . . . It's obvious she has a much greater goal in mind. Her ambition is the White House, with all the moves to prepare the way." Now, R. Emmett Tyrrell and Mark Davis reveal in Madame Hillary: The Road to the White House that not...

WASHINGTON -- I am wondering. At this point in the Democratic lunge for the presidential nomination, does Dr. Howard Dean have a monopoly on that sector of the Democratic vote that we may classify as the moron vote? Or is the idiotic Sen. John Pierre Kerry chipping away at these serried ranks of oafs? And, just as an aside, are there still enough Democrats of the type who nominated Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey to give the nomination to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, heir to the governing wing of the Democratic Party? The other day...