3 December 2020 John Podhoretz All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied – and to some extent overshadowed – by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz The problem is that borrowing money to pay back more borrowed money that will oblige you in the future to borrow even more money doesn’t sound kosher. Because it isn’t.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz If you want to know why Republicans and conservatives are in a political crisis, you need only consider the fact that the Right’s deeply held view now boils down to this: Taxes should not go up on the wealthy, and your health benefits should be cut.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Making recess appointments when the Senate isn’t in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It’s a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America’s leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called ‘progressives’ should be thanking him for it – even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud he sits upon the throne.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel’s existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz Your race and gender don’t change, but you can choose to change your political affiliation at will.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz The thing is, Obama is right that it would be a calamity for the government to default on its debt by not meeting its obligations. Such a thing has never happened and can’t be allowed to happen.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz You’d think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three.
3 December 2020 John Podhoretz What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films – their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.
