The Washington Times

On the eve of the GOP and Democratic conventions, the real opening of the general election season, it might be useful to take a step back from the close-quarters combat of national electoral politics to see how far we’ve come in the past decade.

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The Washington Times

Every now and again, D.C. politics contrives to produce an entirely irrational result. Such is the case with the D.C. Council’s vote last week to require all city employers offering prescription drug plans to include coverage for contraceptives.

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The Washington Times

How close will the presidential election be? Everybody seems to say it’s going to be very close. Whether that is out of respect for the principal contenders or out of disdain for them, people seem to think that Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush are pretty evenly matched.

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The Washington Times

When Norman Podhoretz retired in 1995 after 35 years as editor of Commentary magazine, it was only after having lived one of the great American intellectual lives. The story will be familiar to his readers over the years, since he often found in his own experience a direct route to the heart of the American experience. “One of the longest journeys in the world is from Brooklyn to Manhattan – or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.” So begins “Making It,” his 1967 autobiographical account of the progress that took him from childhood poverty in Brownsville to Columbia University and Cambridge, then on to the editorship of a magazine that he would establish first as the leading intellectual voice of the New Left, later as the leading voice of the “neoconservative” attack on New Left radicalism and defense of the principles and civilizing ideals of the “Free World,” unambiguously and unironically so-called.

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House Republicans, it seems, won’t be punished at the polls after all.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

IT SEEMED LIKE a pretty big deal at the time, the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton. And so it was, as political spectacle, as a search in the U.S. Constitution for its fundamental meaning, as the climax of a long-running clash between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president. It will rank as one of the great political stories of the twentieth century. Yet now — not even 18 months later, as the first election since Clinton was acquitted fast approaches — it’s all but impossible to find so much as a lingering wisp of the Sturm und Drang of impeachment. In the 2000 elections, impeachment is the dog that isn’t barking.

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