National Columns

The Washington Post, beginning Nov. 1, 2019, will allow its syndicated columns to appear only in print. The columns will still be available as part of our e-edition newspaper online, but they will not be available as separate pieces on our website, ljworld.com. These columnists include George Will, David Ignatius, Michael Gerson and others. This does not affect other columnists like Leonard Pitts, Mona Charen, Connie Schultz and Mark Shields, who are not affiliated with the Washington Post.

Opinion: The choice between reform and disorder

Despite what progressives have been arguing lately, the United States does not have a tax problem. Federal revenues, even after last year’s extension of the Trump tax cuts, are running above their historical average as a share of GDP. What America has is a spending problem so large that the ...

Opinion: The president, the poet and the Civil War

In early 1862, Union generals, soldiers and even the commander in chief of the Civil War were literally at a loss. Morale ran low. Engaged as we are now in a great civil war, a leader tearing the nation in two, it’s well to look back to this time. Taking the oath of office in March ...

Opinion: Today’s Big Brother gets you to watch him

A poster depicting an enormous face gazed from the wall. The caption ran, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” So wrote George Orwell at the opening of his dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Big Brother’s image was everywhere, on printed material and on telescreens blasting state ...

Opinion: ‘Deplorables’: Right about the elites, very wrong about Trump

In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton found herself in hot water after declaring that half of Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” Ten years later, we’ve discovered an overflowing, ...

Opinion: Liberty doesn’t have strings attached

“Freedom has more often been lost in small steps by progressive incrementalism, than it has been by catastrophic upheavals such as violence or war.” — James Madison (1751-1836) Last week, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and ...

Opinion: Marco Rubio is the only adult in the room

Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address. I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, ...