All posts in: Senior Fellows
Can you champion human rights while at the same time denying natural rights? This is a core question of political philosophy. It was raised anew for me while re-reading Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, a dialogue with one of the 20th century’s leading political theorists and historian of ideas. Professor Berlin, a man deeply committed to
Read MoreThe 2012 election will be another nasty affair, with the media lamenting incivility and trivial debates even as they do all they can to elevate them. But as the political debate intensifies, we need to keep things in the proper frame. One of the more extravagant claims we hear is that politics has never been
Read MoreSince the founding of the republic, most Americans have believed there is an important connection between personal character and political leadership. Many qualities define character. But thanks to male politicians on both sides of the aisle—including Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign and John Edwards—the issue of character often
Read MoreLet’s all take a stroll down memory lane, shall we? Readers will recall that Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy was built on his opposition to the Iraq war, and when he was in the U.S. Senate, he demanded that America end its involvement there, even though doing so would have led to an epic American defeat.
Read MoreOne of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, N. T. Wright is a man from whom a great deal can be learned about church history and Christian theology. When he ventures from his specialty into areas he does not know very well—international affairs, for example—Bishop Wright is unfortunately prone to silly statements motivated by a
Read MoreThe policy differences among the likely candidates for the GOP presidential nomination will be, I think, relatively narrow (the exceptions are among the marginal candidates like Ron Paul). There will be differences in emphasis, of course, but the philosophical differences will mostly be marginal. Which means that there may be more emphasis than usual on
Read MoreBarack Obama’s budget address last week ranks among the most dishonest and dishonorable presidential speeches in generations. It contained an avalanche of false and misleading statements. It was shallow and bitterly partisan. Yet the speech served a useful purpose: It provided the American people in general, and Republicans in particular, with the basic line of
Read MoreThanks to Donald Trump—real-estate mogul, reality-TV star, and possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination—a fringe conspiracy theory is now front and center in American politics: the claim that President Barack Obama might not be a natural-born American citizen. By focusing on Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, Mr. Trump has garnered a lot of attention and
Read MoreOn the matter of a possible government shutdown, this needs to be said: The impasse is the product of a striking failure of governance by President Obama and his party. The reason we’re debating the 2011 budget several months into the fiscal year is because for the first time in almost four decades, Congress failed
Read MoreRepresentative Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget, released today and accompanied by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, is a document of tremendous ambition and integrity, unlike any we have seen in our lifetime. What it does is to restore the GOP’s reputation for intellectual vitality. This cannot be achieved through incantations or the recitation of
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