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President Obama finally makes it back to familiar and frozen Copenhagen, scene of his earlier success in winning the Olympics for Chicago, trying to figure out a way to make zero plus zero amount to something big. His prospects aren't good. He leaves behind a chaotic debate over his health care "reform," a debate awash in irony, confusion and incredulity. The next stop is farce. ObamaCare, which the president promised would be a simple, thrifty, economical cure-all for the health care system, runs to 2,074 pages that a roomful of Philadelphia lawyers (or worse, Washington lawyers) couldn't parse. But...

Now that every nut in America is equipped with a laptop computer, you're likely to run afoul of a nut on the loose almost anywhere. I observed in this space earlier this week that Barack Obama's curious need to travel the world to make endless apologies for America might stem from his spending the most formative years of his childhood growing up in the Third World. I mentioned two observable facts, neither in any way accusatory or rude, that his father was a Kenyan (Marxist) and the mother who raised him was obviously attracted to men of the Third World,...

A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us. He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path. So far it's a memorable trip. He established a...

From Article Some of the president's critics are giving him a hard time, and it's true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog,...

This is one Mr. Deeds who apparently isn't going to town. The collapse of the Democratic campaign for governor of Virginia speaks volumes about what the body politic is trying to tell Obama's Democrats. They're learning, painfully, that campaigning without George Bush is baffling, frustrating and scary. Worse, it offers a preview of what the congressional campaigning will be like next year. For weeks, The Washington Post, house organ of the national Democratic Party, pounded away at McDonnell, the Republican nominee, for having written politically incorrect term papers in graduate school, as proof that he doesn't like women very much....

Throwing rotten eggs at "them lyin' newspapers" has always been great sport in America, and sometimes even effective politics. But it has to be done with wit and humor, which may be above Barack Obama's pay grade. Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government. Harry Truman threatened to demolish the...

The cruel world is closing in on Barack Obama. Springfield was never like this. The president can only look back with yearning for the days when he was the star of the state legislature, where a legislator's only concern is who's going to pick up the tab for drinks and supper. His dithering time in the big new world is limited by events, which occur to a timetable that mere man, even a minor-league messiah, cannot control. The White House insists that the president is hard at work on what to do about Afghanistan, and whether to send more troops...

Barack Obama is merely following precedent by fleeing Washington and big headaches - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deteriorating prospects for health care reform, legislation to cool the globe (or should we worry now about warming the globe?), and various "czars" gone wild. He's in Copenhagen with the missus not on the nation's business, but the business of his cronies in Chicago. [Snip] The White House thought [it was a bad idea to skip town] last week, when the president's men said it was unlikely that the president would go to Denmark when there was so much rotten...

The White House is a risky place for on-the-job training, as Barack Obama and the rest of us are learning. But the president doesn't deserve all the blame for the installation of a handsome but unprepared matinee idol in the toughest job in the world. The adoring cult, the 53 percent of the giddily oblivious electorate that took a flyer on Election Day, deserves most of it. Matinee idols only do what matinee idols do, look pretty and inveigle softly with practiced seductiveness. Trouble arrives when the matinee idol and his public confuse role with reality. Reality arrives with the...

At The Top Of The Televangelist's Game Wesley Pruden. Barack Obama did what he does best. Billy Graham once said Bill Clinton could make a great evangelist, but Bubba's not a patch on this president. Mr. Obama early on mastered the cadence of the black church - dropping his voice on the last word of the sentence to make the listener pay attention - and he understands the power of language. He speaks great prose. He understands that a televangelist concentrates on sales, not substance. The president was on his game Wednesday night, soaring with a promise of partisan geniality...

Master politician that he is, Barack Obama is a lousy calculator. He spectacularly misjudged the American public's appetite for a government nanny. Or maybe he miscalculated the power of his slippery tongue to sell government snake oil. His apparent willingness to abandon the attempt - for now - to nationalize the health-care industry appears to defer the Democratic first step in remaking the home of the brave and the land of the free into Little America, cutting it down to a size incapable of intimidating the likes of Switzerland or Swaziland. But only if the opposition keeps up unremitting pressure....

Recycling is so popular that even our congressmen, unaccustomed as they are to practicing what they preach, do it. They're reaching back into the dark past to recycle contempt. Never waste a crisis, even if you have to manufacture the crisis. Democrats from the cosseted life in the House and Senate, accustomed to getting the deference at home so often denied in Washington, are suddenly having to deal with inconvenient old folks at home. President Obama insists that the War on Terror is over, ended by his ultimate weapon, the Apology Bomb. But to listen to delicate congressmen whose feelings...

The killer disease dispensed by Barack Obama slipped into remission yesterday, and we can be thankful it did. "Remission" is not "cure," but it's a start. Harry Reid, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, led the obsequies for the rush to judgment, though he was not necessarily obsequious about it. "It's better to have a product based on quality and thoughtfulness rather than trying to jam something through." Nary a Republican in Washington could have said it better. The president is trying to make the best of the demise of his promise to get health care "reform" on...

The second stage of this mourning exercise begins with the arrival of the major-league scam artists. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have landed and even now are erecting competing circus tents. Rev. Al, always on the scout for the racial slight, says, "Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color way before Tiger Woods, way before Oprah, way before Barack Obama." Mr. Jesse hints at what's coming next. "The family has questions ... There is concern about what happened the last 12 hours of Michael's life ... the doctor did not confer with the family ... he was missing...

You can't blame Democrats for hurrying to enact their hot-air legislation. The public is finally paying attention, recognizing the global warming crisis for what it is, a giant scam that will cost every American plenty...The only "crisis" was what to do with Al Gore. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had invited the ex-veep to Washington to make a last-minute appeal for the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Note there's not a word about "global" or "warming" in the title. Once you stink up perfectly good words, you have to find new ones. (That's why liberals now call themselves "progressives.") Mrs....

Now it's on to Normandy, to apologize to the Germans. It's the least an American president can do after the way the Allied armies left so much of Europe in rubble. There's a lot of groveling to do for what America accomplished in the Pacific, too. This prospect should appeal to Barack Obama, who relishes the role of Apologizer-in-Chief. Apologizing for manifold sins against civilization is not always easy, but it's simple enough: "Blame America First." You just open a vein and let it flow. In Cairo, Mr. Obama opened an artery. America, unlike the president, is guilty of hubris,...

Now it's on to Normandy, to apologize to the Germans. It's the least an American president can do after the way the Allied armies left so much of Europe in rubble. There's a lot of groveling to do for what America accomplished in the Pacific, too. This prospect should appeal to Barack Obama, who relishes the role of Apologizer-in-Chief. Apologizing for manifold sins against civilization is not always easy, but it's simple enough: "Blame America First." You just open a vein and let it flow. In Cairo, Mr. Obama opened an artery. America, unlike the president, is guilty of hubris,...

Two of the peace-loving republics formerly known as the Axis of Evil threw a frightful scare into anyone paying attention Monday, with North Korea exploding a nuclear bomb as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima and Iran telling Barack Obama to get lost (and take his teleprompter with him). Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wouldn't accept an invitation to freeze work on his own nuclear weapon and he's not interested in talking to Mr. Obama or anyone else about it. But not to worry. The United Nations Security Council postponed its afternoon tea to hold an "emergency session" to consider...

We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu. But here we are, proof that there really is life after death. Now we learn that we might freeze before the pigs get us. (The chickens failed.) NASA scientists have observed that the solar wind is the weakest since we began keeping such records, that the magnetic axis of the sun is tilted to an unusual degree, and Ol' Sol is the quietest he has been in a...

Steady descent into third world By Wesley Pruden Friday, April 24, 2009 Opening a can of worms always tempts a mischief-maker, but it's risky business. That can of worms might turn out to be a can of snakes, like Barack Obama's latest gift to the nation. The president's on-again, off-again, maybe-he-will and maybe-he-won't decision to punish someone who loosened tongues of Islamist terrorists at Guantanamo suddenly threatens not only the CIA interrogators and Justice Department lawyers, but even members of Congress. Maybe it won't stop there: if the lawyers who offered legal opinions are at risk of punishment for their...

The president's critics ought to lighten up. We should give him credit for not knowing any better. (He was "finished" and "polished" at Harvard, after all.) Barack Obama is an accident of history, a street hustler from the South Side of Chicago with the gift of gab who landed on the world stage like a whale beached at the whim of a storm, the wrong man at the right time...The masses...eagerly stepped forward to take the pledge of the cult. This wouldn't be one of Dr. Freud's difficult cases. He was born to a mother obsessed with the pursuit of...

Barack Obama may not be the Big Thinker his fans think he is, but his big-time groveling is impressive. We've never seen a presidential performance quite like his Groveling, Toadying and Apple-Polishing Tour of the Olde Countries. If this is Monday, this must be a mosque. The president is understandably eager to see whether his honeyed tongue can tease and tickle the Europeans the way it teases the libido and scratches the itch of the hoi polloi at home, but the early returns show that he gave away a lot more than he got in return, which was nothing. The...

Watching faith healers is fun, if you can overlook the pain and desperation in the eyes of the supplicants, and cheerfully endure the mosquitoes, gnats and other night bugs flying in tight formation through gaps in the tent flaps. You have to ignore reality and just enjoy the show. But the next morning, with the sound of the singing and the scent of the sawdust lingering on the cool air, the sick, the halt and the infirm are well advised to call the doctor. Barack Obama conducted the picture-perfect campaign with the skill and bombast that any smooth-talking piney-woods charlatan...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: Now we're about to see who Barack Obama really is. We won't any longer have to rely on parsing his speeches, looking for clues and deciphering the contradictions. We'll still get speeches - he delivers good ones - but presidents don't get to vote "present" when the question on the table is what to do about a collapsing economy or terrorists plotting mayhem on New York City. We'll learn exactly what he means by "change." So far his administration looks more like a Clinton Restoration than anything anticipated by the embittered cult on the far fringes of the nutcake...

With only 26 days left to harangue, mock and bash President Bush, some of our colleagues in the media aren't wasting a day. Bashing ex-presidents, except for the ex-presidents with shrill prominent wives, isn't nearly as much fun as bashing while he's still the real thing. There's method in the gladness at the New York Times, which relieved itself at the beginning of Christmas week with an umpity-thousand word accusation - beginning on Page One and continuing across several acres of newsprint inside - that George W. Bush invented the meltdown of the subprime housing market, which in turn has...

With only 26 days left to harangue, mock and bash President Bush, some of our colleagues in the media aren't wasting a day. Bashing ex-presidents, except for the ex-presidents with shrill prominent wives, isn't nearly as much fun as bashing while he's still the real thing. There's method in the gladness at the New York Times, which relieved itself at the beginning of Christmas week with an umpity-thousand word accusation - beginning on Page One and continuing across several acres of newsprint inside - that George W. Bush invented the meltdown of the subprime housing market, which in turn has...

The Democrats are having a hard time selling the bailout of General Motors because nearly everyone has suffered the agony of buying a car. That's how the "used-car salesman," fair or not, became the American icon of deception, fraud and thievery. Maybe it's true that GM is "too big to fail," though from all the available evidence GM is succeeding spectacularly at failure. What the pols and their lobbyist buddies really mean with their used-car salesman's spiel is that GM is "too big for Joe Sixpack to let fail."

If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really bad, you'll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells really bad. Karl Marx The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan. The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt,...

The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan. .... Mr. Obama doesn't think much of the Constitution, or even of the Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to accommodate notions of "social justice." The Warren Court, which wrote finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, has been...

But nobody is stalked like Barack Obama. He's terrorized every time Joe Biden opens his mouth, which is often. Even good old Joe can't wait to see what he'll say next. We were supposed to be worrying about the innocence and inexperience of Sarah Palin, but while she's drawing enormous crowds and staying resolutely on the message laid out by John McCain, like a good running mate should, there's good old Joe, who was recruited to give Mr. Obama heft and gravitas in foreign affairs, up in Seattle predicting catastrophe once the Obama administration is fixed firmly in place. Joe...

Barack Obama is talking landslide, but the polls are getting tighter. Not by much, but a little. Despite the big talk, the issue is still in doubt. The kindling is available to light a fire to burn down the messiah's barn, if John McCain can find the match. So why the jitters among certain followers of the tree-tall and thistle-thin messiah from Chicago's Hyde Park, where everyone has an IQ of 500 (just ask any of them), a Prius in the garage and a radical in the parlor? Are the Obama campaign's internal polls telling him something he doesn't want...

Something odd is going on. The Obama campaign boasts of a landslide in the making even as his polling lead slips a point or two, and there's anger bordering on rage when John McCain and Sarah Palin raise questions about Barack Obama's judgment in his unexplored past in Chicago. An investigation of ACORN, a cabal of "political activists" hired to register voters in the neighborhoods where few friends of John McCain abide has now spread to 10 states. Investigators discovered that the entire offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys had signed up to vote in Las Vegas, unless it turns...

It's October and time to start throwing the kitchen sink. Throwing the kitchen sink is fun because it makes a lot of noise when it shatters against an opponent's head, particularly when the sink is full of dirty dishes. The dirty dishes this year are mostly from the Obama's Good Time Diner on Chicago's always interesting South Side. However, you're not supposed to criticize Sen. Barack Obama, because only racists do that. Good citizenship requires keeping some dirty dishes segregated. But somebody forgot to tell Gov. Sarah Palin, the Wasilla housewife who knows about sinks and stones and stacks of...

It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig. After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the...

It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig. After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the...

The rap on Joe Biden is that he's bright, well-meaning and amiable, and when he opens his mouth you never know what's likely to fly out. But sometimes he comes up with interesting ideas. Joe thinks that Barack Obama, clearly rattled by the Sarah surge, should find a skirt to get behind as the runners finally make the clubhouse turn and head down the homestretch. Whose skirt is wider than Hillary Clinton's? Changing running mates in mid-campaign, for no other reason than the first running mate was a big mistake, would invite disbelief and bipartisan hilarity. George McGovern kicked...

How mean, how low can a partisan stoop? Mean enough to humiliate a 17-year-old girl at the time she needs sympathy and understanding. Low enough to bruise the broken heart of a girl's mother and to mock a father's affection. Within minutes after John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, the blog sites on the sleaziest margins of the Democratic left went to work on the deconstruction of the lady of the far north.....[ snip ] But resentment from the left boiled into rage when they learned that not only did Mrs. Palin oppose abortion as a matter...

Al Gore picked a bad day to tout his global-warming scam. Just as he was telling an easily conned columnist for the Associated Press that Earthlings have just 10 years to get in line behind him to save the world from the frying pan, a consortium of 50,000 physicists conceded that maybe Al's evidence of man-made warming isn't so hot, after all. Al, who confuses the hot air of flatulent cows, forgetting to turn out the lights and fumes from cars and trucks with the hot air he contributes himself, now wants to abandon coal-fired generation of electricity and turn...

What happens if it turns out that we've nominated two unelectable candidates for president? Do we get our money back? This illustration provided by The New Yorker magazine, the cover of the July 21, 2008 issue by artist Barry Blitt, shows Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim and his wife as a terrorist. The magazine says the cover is meant to satirize the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Obamas campaign, but Obama's campaign called it "tasteless and offensive." (AP Photo/New Yorker) Logic, common sense and the Constitution insist that either...

Barack Obama got the polling bump he expected when he clinched the Democratic nomination, but the bump only bumped him to the edge of a shallow but inconvenient ditch. A new poll by the Zogby organization for Reuters finds that John McCain, whose campaign is having trouble getting on track, has nevertheless pulled within five points of Sen. Obama. This is a gain of three points over the past month. He leads John McCain 47 to 42 percent, close to the margin of error, which means the two presumptive nominees have moved into a tie, more or less.

Barack Obama's loyal legion tried. The story the boys on the bus want is for Hillary to throw in her crying towel today, at last the last day of the primaries. The symmetry and poetry of it all would bring a tear to any scribe's eye. Everyone is eager to pop the corks on the bubbly. Hillary can laugh last tonight even if, as expected, Democrats in South Dakota and Montana give their hearts, hands and votes to the man whose camp followers call Precious. (Some of them, to be even more respectful, call him Mr. Precious.) She has only...

Nothing destroys a man like his betrayal of friends. The mortal wound is self-inflicted and he dies from the inside out, inviting neither compassion nor commiseration, only contempt, disdain and ultimately scorn. This is the hard lesson Scott McClellan is buying with his 30 pieces of silver. George W. Bush, flawed and maker of mistakes, finishes his presidency almost as unpopular as Harry S. Truman finished his, and who knows whether history will revise his presidential reputation.

Has anybody got a flag pin? By Wesley Pruden May 2, 2008 Patriotism is not always the last refuge of the scoundrel. Sometimes it's just the last refuge of a frightened politician. Barack Obama, hotly pursued by his preacher and the crazy preacher's aggressive racism, has revised his stump speech. His once formidable polling lead over Hillary Clinton has dwindled to the single digits. The man who wouldn't wear a tiny American flag on his lapel is looking for a flag pin the size of a bass fiddle. "You want to know who I am?" he asked a crowd in...

"The race card" was for decades the most reliable card in the Democratic deck, and even today, as we've seen this spring, Democrats play the card with residual skill. The card must be played carefully, and with exquisite subtlety. No place for George Wallace or Orval Faubus here. But now race is all that Democrats are talking about as they stagger and stumble toward agreement on a presidential candidate, maybe next week in Indiana and North Carolina, or if not then maybe the week after that in West Virginia, and if not then surely the week after that in Kentucky...

Innocents eager to flee the endless campaign of '08 can take heart. Some people are already gearing up for the campaign of 2012. And why not? We've rarely had a field of such likely one-termers as John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. President McCain would be pushing 76 in the summer of '12, and the prospect of a second term would be giving the envelope a mighty shove. Four years of a hip-hop White House or the shrill echoes of a nagging nanny would surely be enough to sate the appetite of the hardiest masochist.

A little night music can soothe the savage beast, at least sometimes. This, alas, can give a well-meaning musician the idea that his tuba is mightier than his enemy's sword. Lorin Maazel, the musical director, boasted that his orchestra had thawed a cold war once before, with a concert in the old Soviet Union in 1959. After that it was inevitable that the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down. Mr. Maazel imagines that his Pyongyang concert was available to ordinary people, but the 2,500 men and women who filled every seat of the East Pyongyang Grand Theater were carefully chosen....

John Solomon took over the Washington Times on Jan. 28. But he arrived today, via a message from the paper’s copy operation. The news, in short: No more scare quotes. Longtime Washington Times readers know well what this is all about: Under the regime of Wesley Pruden, the Times, unwilling to acknowledge anything so radical and immoral as gay marriage, treated the term in its pages as gay “marriage.” Likewise other terms. In the old Washington Times, there were no illegal immigrants, just “illegal aliens”; no gays, just “homosexuals.” Now comes the following memo from the Solomon regime, wiping...

Now that former AP and Washington Post reporter John Solomon is in charge, he’s begun the "Solomonizing." Erik Wemple of Washington City Paper reports that the new boss wants the Times to join the "mainstream" in using sensitive terminology on homosexuality and illegal immigration.

You can almost almost sympathize with Bill Clinton. But only almost. It's not easy to run against the man with a halo. The Clintons bought the grief that threatens to derail their train, and paid for it with arrogance and self-importance. Only the Clintons would imagine they could play the race card in modern America, and their only defense is that the sin is not contempt for their presumed inferiors. They're contemptuous of everybody. Promising to rise above race is an important part of the considerable charm of the campaign of Barack Obama, one of the most attractive candidates, black...

Mon Jan 14 2007 14:24:11 ET WASHINGTON, DC - The Washington Times today announced the appointment of John F. Solomon as executive editor to succeed Wesley Pruden, who is retiring after 25 years in The Washington Times newsroom. Solomon brings to the newsroom's leadership over two decades of journalism experience, with a strong background in investigative reporting and managing interactive digital content. "John Solomon's appointment is a great step forward for The Washington Times, and is good news for our readers, staff and advertisers," said Thomas P. McDevitt, president of The Washington Times. "He is a working journalist, innovative manager,...