Daniel McCarthy

The president is showing loyalty to conservatives who believe he was wrongfully prosecuted and punished.

As the mid-terms approach, the Democrats are divided and dwindling. The GOP’s hand is getting stronger.

John McCain is a victim of hypocrisy. His allies in Washington and admirers in the national media praise him as the conscience of the nation, even as they betray him in his last desperate battle against the normalisation of torture. After a White House communications staffer, Kelly Sadler, joked that McCain’s views don’t matter because … Read more

The Arizona Senator could have been a Donald Trump-type figure. But he never was.

Would Trump without John Kelly be any different from Trump with John Kelly?

Rand Paul’s whole aim in foreign policy is to keep the U.S. out of unnecessary, unwinnable conflicts in which there is everything to lose and nothing gain. So why are some of his supporters angry at him for staying out of just such a conflict with President Trump over Mike Pompeo’s nomination for secretary of … Read more

Nikki Haley is at war with Donald Trump. She may be his ambassador to the United Nations, but she wants to set a foreign policy all her own, closer to the global interventionism of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton than to the muscular but restrained foreign policy that Trump campaigned on in 2016. Her … Read more

The outgoing speaker was never able to connect with voters

A new era of chemical warfare is upon us—an era of chemical warfare as psychological warfare. The poisoning of Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, has dominated the headlines. But another development, from around the same time as the Salisbury attack first became known, is revealing for the attention it hasn’t … Read more

Will foreign pornographers be the last defenders of the Bill of Rights? America is going through one of its periodic seizures of moral grandstanding, with gun owners and supporters of the Second Amendment now deemed so unclean that one may not even have commerce with them. Under pressure from Twitter mobs and activist bullies, companies … Read more

This week marks 15 years since the start of America’s war in Iraq. Regime change was George W. Bush’s objective, and Saddam Hussein was duly removed, tried, and executed. But Bush could not have counted on how much regime change would also come to Washington as a result of the war. It contributed to the … Read more

The special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District has ended in a photo finish. There are absentee ballots still to be counted, perhaps a recount to be demanded. But it looks as if the Democrat, Conor Lamb, has won in this district that just two years ago voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by … Read more

For two years we’ve been hearing that Donald Trump is an ‘isolationist’, whatever that word is supposed to mean. Only now two op-ed writers in the New York Times have discovered that he isn’t — instead, Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim write, ‘Let’s call Mr. Trump’s vision what it is: radical American imperialism.’ Let’s not, … Read more

Should taking rights away from innocent people be a first resort or a last resort—or no resort at all—in response to a spate of heinous crimes? If we were talking about the First Amendment rights of religious minorities or of free speech, most liberals would insist that people who had committed no crime shouldn’t forfeit … Read more