Daniel McCarthy

Latest by Daniel McCarthy in Chronicles

• Editorials

  November 2019

  Impure Politics

  In criminal law, there are times when a crime has clearly been committed, but it’s not clear whether the perpetrator had criminal intent. The impeachment effort against Donald Trump is the opposite situation: a case where there is no high crime or misdemeanor, but the president’s intentions are said by his enemies to be so plainly criminal that he simply must be impeached and removed.

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• Editorials

  September 2019

  Democrats Adrift

  The field of Democrats aspiring to be their party’s presidential nominee resembles what the Republican field of four years ago would have been, had Donald Trump not entered the race.

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• Blog

  May 13, 2019

  John Lukacs, R.I.P.

  When Lukacs died on May 6, the country lost one of its finest adopted sons, who was also one of its finest writers and historians. The scope as well as extent of his work defies summary . . .

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• Editorials

  May 2019

  We’ll Get Him Next Time

  After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats. On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

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• Editorials

  April 2019

  Ideologies and Priorities

  Now here’s a headline: “Blackface, sexual assault scandals don’t appear to have tarnished Virginia’s image,” the Washington Post declared on March 3. The story referred to controversies surrounding each of the commonwealth’s three top statewide officials—all of them Democrats.

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• Editorials

  March 2019

  The Belligerent Advantage of Congress

  The way foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C., talk about Afghanistan, you would think that country had successfully launched a ballistic-missile attack against us on 9/11.

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• Editorials

  February 2019

  AOC and GOP Suicide

  As the new Congress was sworn in early in January, the Republican Party unveiled a plan for its own assisted suicide. In fact, Mitt Romney got started before he was even seated as the latest senator from Utah.

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• Editorials

  January 2019

  A Foreign-Policy Quagmire

  Foreign policy has been a stumbling block to Democrats for fully 50 years now. In 1968, the party of Lyndon Johnson was the party of the Vietnam War, and replacing Johnson with Hubert Humphrey at the top of the ticket that November was not enough to get Americans to give the Democrats four more years of war.

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• Editorials

  December 2018

  Middle Eastern Blood and Dirt

  For over three years Saudi Arabia has been fighting a war in Yemen with little regard for civilian suffering. The war itself has been deadly for thousands of bystanders, but far worse has been the famine the conflict has brought about, which has killed some 50,000 people already and has the potential to kill millions.

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• Editorials

  November 2018

  Cradle of Empire

  As of October, the U.S. has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for fully 17 years. Young men who were not even born when the war started are now almost of an age to serve and be deployed.

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• Editorials

  October 2018

  No Free Ride for Bezos Socialism

  Imagine an economic system in which government pays the wages of workers, but the businesses where they work remain privately owned, and profits accrue to the owners. Could this fairly be called free-market capitalism?

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• Editorials

  September 2018

  Steeling Ourselves for the Future

  Many a new genre of journalism has sprung up thanks to President Trump. The latest is the “victims of tariffs” industry profile.

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• Editorials

  August 2018

  The Libertarian Trajectory

  NeverTrump really means “forever war.” Proof of this could be seen in the 2016 election, where anti-Trump Republicans fielded a candidate of their own, ex-CIA man Evan McMullin, rather than casting their votes for a third-party ticket with two non-Trump Republicans on it.

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• Editorials

  July 2018

  Faith Whittlesey, R.I.P.

  The mice had a problem with Faith Whittlesey. These mice were not the four-legged kind; they were Chief of Staff Donald Regan’s functionaries in the Reagan White House, scurrying around and gnawing away at conservative policy efforts.

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• Editorials

  June 2018

  Calling the Deomocrats’ Bluff

  Rep. Adam Schiff knows something about impeachment. The California Democrat first won his seat in Congress in 2000, when he defeated a Republican incumbent, James Rogan, who two years earlier had been one of the “managers” acting for the House of Representatives in the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

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• Editorials

  May 2018

  GOP National Stage Fright

  Democrats are feeling overconfident. They won a hard-fought special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District in early March, then saw over a million people take to the streets in cities across the country to march for gun control some two weeks later.

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• Editorials

  April 2018

  Tariffs and Delusions

  Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason. Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the capitalists’ own incorrigible naiveté.

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• Editorials

  March 2018

  An Honest Reckoning

  John le Carré could hardly imagine a better scenario: a spy-for-hire—once a servant of Her Majesty’s government, now selling his services in a foreign market—takes payouts from two masters simultaneously, as both a police informant and a political dirty-tricks man.

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• Editorials

  February 2018

  Shoes to Fill

  America is a nation of normal people who find themselves thrust into increasingly abnormal situations. Left-wing ideologues want to take a country of families, churches, and businesses and turn it into a playpen of radical identities.

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• Editorials

  January 2018

  Politicians #NeverLearn

  Donald Trump’s first year as President is drawing to a close, and it’s been rough. The Republican Congress proved unequal to the task of repealing Obama Care. The border wall hasn’t been built.

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