I don’t mind admitting that I could really go for a good fistfight just now. Or a race against time to foil a terrorist plot. Or a zombie apocalypse. A zombie apocalypse would definitely hit the spot. As some of you will recall, I gave up those and other literary pleasures a year ago, ...

This is a tightrope column, the kind you’d rather not write, about an event you don’t feel you can ignore. You tread carefully, but you want people to pay attention as you do. Four days after Christmas, five days before he was to be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives, ...

The list of President Donald Trump’s pardons and clemencies so far looks a lot like a supermarket tabloid: In other words, a lot like Trump’s life itself. There’s Rod Blagojevich with his saucy smile, and there’s smug Joe Arpaio. Every president’s pardon list contains some ...

Some heads snapped when Attorney General William Barr told the truth on Dec. 1. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” This was not the Bill Barr we had come to expect. We were surprised again when we learned that Hunter ...

By way of introduction: Tommy Tuberville is the new Republican U.S. senator from Alabama. He was previously a successful college football coach at the University of Mississippi, Texas Tech, Cincinnati and Auburn — where his team six times defeated their powerful in-state rival, the ...

This is the time of year when I try to remind patrons of restaurants and coffee shops to tip generously, in the spirt of the season. I want us to tip well all year long, of course, but December can pack a special wallop of motivation for people whipping out their charge cards in celebration of ...

Off and on for 25 years, I participated in National Review cruises as a speaker. I met lots of wonderful people who were intelligent, curious and great company — but there were always cranks and conspiracy theorists, too. Once, during the Clinton administration, people at my dinner table were ...

The photo looks faked. It’s so heavy-handed. A grinning Australian soldier, his insignia clear as day on his helmet and arm, stands on the Australian flag holding a small, barefoot Afghan child in front of him. He grasps a bloody knife to the child’s throat. The caption reads “Don’t be ...

Gerald Ford was right. It was years before I understood that. I was 17 years old on the day in 1974 when the 38th president pardoned the 37th, Richard Nixon, for his crimes in the Watergate affair. Like millions of others — like Ford’s own press secretary, who resigned in protest — I ...

I am not disappointed in Donald Trump. For there to be disappointment at childish behavior presumes an expectation of adult behavior. No such expectation exists where Trump is concerned. So his weeks of sulking and floating bizarre conspiracy theories since he lost the election, while ...

Missing in any debate about whether it is wise for the United States to reduce our troop numbers in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as the Trump administration has ordered, down to 2,500 Americans in each country (a number, let it be noted, that is too few to fight and too many to die), is the ...

Greed is good. That, you may recall, was the mantra of corporate raider Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” It came to symbolize the rapacious gluttony of that era — and its rejection of the dewy-eyed idealism of the 1960s. Well, 1987 was a long time ago, but Gekko’s ...

“The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” — Rush Limbaugh “One day, it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Donald Trump “The risk to the average person does remain quite low” — Laura Ingraham The American death toll from the novel coronavirus will soon pass ...

Joe Biden won the White House, we are reminded almost daily, on his third try, having run unsuccessfully in both 1988 and 2008. It’s funny; I can’t recall, having covered the 1980 presidential race, much ever being made of the fact that that year’s winner, Republican Ronald Reagan, also ...

Dear Price Wallace: There was a time I would have reasoned with you. There was a time I might even have pleaded. Back then, I’d have been shocked and appalled to see a Mississippi state lawmaker advocate secession from the Union as you did in a Twitter exchange with former state Rep. ...

We turn, one last time, to Hans Christian Andersen. Over the past four years, many observers, this one included, have found one of the Danish writer’s most famous tales irresistible for explaining both Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s slavish sycophancy toward him. In “The ...

Forgive me for being the ant at the picnic. Certainly, this is a glad moment, an ecstatic and delirious moment. The election of 2020 has ended at last. Joe Biden is finally the president-elect and Donald Trump is finally consigned to the dank well of ignominy he so richly deserves. As ...

Allow me to explain. On Thursday night as a Biden victory was beginning to look inevitable, I had a brief Twitter exchange with a Republican blogger who complained that, in cheering the fall of Donald Trump, the “media elite” were “insulting those who supported him.” Let’s just ...

As I write, the outcome of the 2020 presidential race remains in doubt, though it seems very likely that Joe Biden will squeeze out a victory. This is a stunning departure from the resounding repudiation of Donald Trump that we had been hoping for. Here are a few groggy, morning-after ...

Bruce Springsteen is wrestling with death. You hear him as you float high above leafless trees dusted with snow. The scene, captured in creamy tones of black and white, is one of beauty almost unbearably elegiac, sacred in its stillness. Then he speaks, giving words to a truth all too ...