Robert W Tracinski

The U.N.’s “sustainable development” conference in South Africa has been characterized, so far, by what the press calls “divergent agendas,” a confused contest of competing interests and an attitude of futility. One speaker summed up the...

One year later, the hole in New York’s skyline where the World Trade Center towers once stood is a visual reminder of something else that is missing: the ideas and attitudes that make a vigorous war in America’s self-defense possible. For many of us, the...

The president returns to Washington this week after a month on vacation in Texas and three months seemingly on vacation from America’s foreign policy. Since June, President Bush has been telling everyone who asks that he has made no decision on Iraq. Making that...

No bold new ideas have been heard so far, or are likely to be heard, at the president’s “economic summit” today in Texas. Bold new ideas, it is becoming increasingly obvious, are not Bush’s style. In place of new ideas, the summit offers a lot...

Newsflash: Hauling CEOs Away in Manacles Makes Markets Soar! This is not a headline from The Onion, the satirical weekly newspaper that prints fake news stories. No, it is the story that was repeated last week by most of the nation’s supposedly serious financial...

Did you hear the one about the 87-year-old grandmother who had her knitting needles taken away by airport security? They were afraid she was going to knit an Afghan. That is just one of many jibes at the fraudulent airport security measures adopted since September 11....

Just as the War on Terrorism dissipates into total inaction — the latest word is that we will not invade Iraq — our leaders have launched a new war to replace it: the War on CEOs. In reaction to a few cases in which corporate CEOs allegedly violated...

Reporters, commentators and politicians have whipped themselves into a frenzy over the recent corporate accounting scandals, heaping abuse on corporate executives in general and demanding to see the perpetrators led away in leg-irons. But is this feeding frenzy...

With the fall of communism and the alleged end of the “era of big government,” many commentators and politicians grudgingly acknowledge the practical value of capitalism. The free market, they concede, is the best system for producing wealth and promoting...

On July 4, Americans will take a day to honor our Founding Fathers, who gave birth to the first nation dedicated to individual freedom. This day comes, unfortunately, at a moment when our politicians are united in their venomous attacks on a crucial element of the...

Why do so many people hate Martha Stewart? How does a home-decorating and entertaining expert with a sweet, wholesome public persona come to be portrayed as a major cultural villain? Consider the past week’s media frenzy over charges that Stewart engaged in...

Today, more than a million people in Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West. Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all of our top...

The War on Terrorism is over. It ended when President Bush pushed to the top of his agenda the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. This is the climax of a trend that has been building for the past month: the only action the U.S. government is...

Memorial Day is always a solemn occasion, but especially so this year, because we have so recently experienced this day’s meaning first-hand. We have seen it in two different ways: we have seen the courage of our troops on the battlefields of Afghanistan —...

Six months after the collapse of Enron, the left is still sputtering in violent outrage at the company, and with good reason. This display of wrath is the only way to keep people from noticing the real emotion underlying the Enron feeding frenzy: elation. The...

On Thursday, the Bush administration announced that it would join with the United Nations, the European Union and Russia to host an international peace conference to settle the conflict in the Middle East. No location was announced for this meeting, but I can suggest...

After 10 years of seeking security through “land for peace” deals, Israel has finally rediscovered the formula for real security: war for peace. Notice what you have seen in the news for the past few weeks: Europeans screaming about civilian casualties at...

As Israel pulls out of the West Bank — a foolish move that will only allow Palestinian terrorists to regroup — the media is being flooded with piteous tales about Palestinian victims, who, we are told, are innocent civilians. But a glance at the stories...

In the late 1940s, a group of playwrights started a movement called the Theater of the Absurd, based on the Existentialist notion that life is rationally incomprehensible. According to one description, practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd sought “to convey...