It is not a compliment to human nature to say that there is something within us that is sometimes drawn to watching — for a limited period of time, anyway — the comically deranged on display. Which brings me to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. By now Olbermann's hyper-partisanship and straight-from-the-fever-swamps mentality — witness just about any

Wouldn't you know it? In my recent exchanges with Joe Klein, I made the point that blogging was harming Klein because it allowed his unfiltered rage to make its way into print (so to speak), thereby embarrassing him and Time magazine. Klein responded with a blog post offering… more unfiltered rage. I sense a pattern

To listen to Barack Obama attempt to explain his views on Iraq and the so-called surge is becoming, for those of us who have followed his responses over the last 18 months, something of a spectacle. With every effort, it seems, he is compounding his mistakes in judgment with intellectually dishonest answers, ones which melt

N.T. Wright is an outstanding New Testament scholar, having authored some very significant books on Christianity in the last several decades. When speaking out on issues on which he has expertise, Wright is among the best in the world. But when it comes to making pronouncements on international affairs and especially the war against militant

This is the week that the Democratic party ran up the white flag when it comes to the surge in Iraq. Leading the surrender was none other than Barack Obama, the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for president and among the most vocal critics of the counterinsurgency plan that has transformed the Iraq war from a

**An NRO Symposium: Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died on Saturday after a long battle with cancer. National Review Online asked a group of colleagues and friends how they will remember Tony Snow. ** The best contribution I made to the Bush White House was my (inadvertent) role in bringing Tony Snow on

Most of today's political debates in America fall into a familiar pattern. On issues ranging from taxes, health care, energy, education, and abortion to the Iraq war and government surveillance of suspected terrorists, liberals and conservatives assume distinct and often diametrically opposed positions. But in the last few years, one issue–immigration–has roiled American politics in

Earlier this week, Focus on the Family's James Dobson criticized Sen. Barack Obama, accusing him of “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit … his own confused theology,” of having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution” and of appealing to the “lowest common denominator of morality.” Dobson's judgment was based on Obama's

I have now read through the Supreme Court's decision, as well as the dissents, in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the Court held that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in U.S. courts. In doing so, the Court, in Chief Justice Roberts's words, “strikes down as

Dan Balz, one of America's finest political reporters, wrote this on his Washington Post blog yesterday: The most important decision Barack Obama will make between now and the November election is the selection of a vice presidential running mate. That makes all the more remarkable his effort Tuesday to suggest that the people he has