I see that Mike Bloomberg is angling to become the Didius Julianus of our day. Historians refer to 193 A.D. as the “Year of the Five Emperors.” Julianus became the second contestant in that sweepstakes after the Praetorian Guard murdered the emperor Pertinax, who had been stingy about distributing the pelf they had come to
The news Friday that the Department of Justice had decided not to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe got me thinking once again about the legend chiseled into the façade of the Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.” Is that what we have? Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general, concluded that McCabe had lied
Back in New York, we have recently started an informal reading group at The New Criterion and Encounter Books. If that sounds dull, let me add that I have combined the reading with a little seminar on wine appreciation. At the moment, our palettes are padding around Bordeaux, learning to discriminate reliably among Paulliac, Saint-Estèphe,
On Friday, as I and about 456,874 other people predicted, the Senate voted against calling yet more witnesses in the make-believe, 100 percent certified partisan impeachment fiasco run by the Democrats and their media cheerleaders. That vote brought this lucrative entertainment to an end, de facto if not de jure. The official, signed-sealed-and-delivered end will
In January 1956, John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, biographical encomia to eight U.S. senators, from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft, whom Kennedy thought exhibited conspicuous courage in the discharge of their public duties. I say Kennedy published Profiles in Courage. But the book was written not by JFK but by the loyal
Eventually, I am going to get around to saying something about CNN’s hostility to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—evidenced, most recently, by its energetic exertions on behalf of the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren at last Tuesday’s Democratic debate. And I’ll say something, too, about the delicious exhibition of angst-filled hand-wringing that said hostility occasioned in
My favorite literary expostulation from the last couple of days came from Javad Zarif, foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It entered the world in the form of a tweet, that contemporary answer to the haiku, and concerned the fate of Ukrainian flight 752, which met its end shortly after taking off from
In the great contest now underway to determine the most fatuous responses to the elimination of the Iranian terrorist, Major General Qasem Soleimani, on January 3, Matthew 22:14 has the last word: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” We lack instruments of sufficient vigor and precision to cut through the ambient static that this
You might think that what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the “sad” and “solemn” pre-Christmas impeachment special was a one-off. The Democrats owed it to the country, you see—they had (are you sitting down?) a “duty to the Constitution” to impeach Donald Trump, otherwise (as Representative Al Green of Texas put it) he might
Did we just witness an historic event, the impeachment of only the third president in the entire history of the Republic? Or was this a case of accusatio interrupta: impeachment interrupted by an untimely withdrawal from Nancy Pelosi? The speaker of the House, unhappy at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obvious contempt for the House
