POLITICS

It's as if Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has hung out a sign at the Pentagon: From now on, U.S. missile-defense policy will be made in accordance with how things are, not with how they used to be. That's the upshot, anyway, of what the secretary said at a...

If to govern is to choose, then President Bush made a clear choice in the budget he released two weeks ago; National Missile Defense (NMD) is a big winner, while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a mild loser. In the short run, this might be...

It's generally agreed that American primary, secondary and, increasingly, undergraduate education is a failure. But that assessment depends upon just what evaluation criteria is chosen. By some criteria, American education might be deemed a remarkable success. Let's...

When the Berlin Wall collapsed, one would have expected the poisonous Marxist ideology of class warfare to disappear along with it. But this year's tax debate has shown the politics-of-envy is alive and well. Demagogues are vilifying President Bush's plan to lower tax...

Willy Sutton, in case you are wondering, is the 1930s outlaw who achieved immortality when a reporter asked him why he robbed banks and Sutton replied, simply, "Because that's where the money is." It is an amusing reply because it so utterly misses the point, which...

Although few know how to stop the escalating violence in the Middle East, many think they know who to blame: Israeli Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon. Surely, they say, the landslide election of such a hard-liner means the end of the peace process--and serves as a...

Have pigs grown wings? Is it snowing in Hades? Ralph Nader actually said nice things about President Bush this week. The devil's tail must be blue with frostbite. In an opinion piece Nader co-authored for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the standard-bearer of...

"Year after year in Washington, budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need. We should leave those arguments to...

It's odd to hear people campaigning for a tax that's aimed at them. But it's happening. Some rich people are arguing that the government should keep the death (or estate) tax that was created decades ago to break up the holdings of the so-called robber barons....

It had been a close election, so close it wasn't settled until 10 weeks after Election Day. And it was so bitter the opponents didn't speak for 11 years afterward. But when it was over, and Thomas Jefferson prevailed (on the 36th ballot in the House of...

The outcome of the Lockerbie bombing trial underscores the need for a firm U.S. policy toward Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi. The January 31 verdict, which found one of the two indicted Libyan intelligence officials guilty of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103...