Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
— Bret Stephens
The intelligent defense of free speech should not rest on the notion that we must tolerate every form of speech, no matter how offensive. It's that we should lean toward greater tolerance for speech we dislike, and reserve our harshest penalties only for the worst offenders.
Donald Trump's more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says.
When Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.
Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.
A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.
The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.
Many of you have been reared on the cliche that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong.
This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth. I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life.
All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins.
'Character Doesn't Count' has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. 'Virtue Doesn't Matter' might be another. But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump's shortcomings prove it daily.
The United States can only lead a world that's prepared to follow.
Censoriously asserting one's moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S.
I almost never listen to radio or watch political talk shows, especially if I happen to be on them.
Every president inherits a mixed bag when he comes to office, and Obama's was hardly the worst.
There are necessary taboos and essential decencies in every morally healthy society.
Barack Obama is probably the coolest president this country will ever have.
If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it'll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie.
An abusive cop does not equal a bigoted police department.
My wife is German, so I know something about German energy policy.
For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.
What too many of Mr. Trump's supporters want is an American strongman, a president who will make the proverbial trains run on time.
In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.
Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.
Movements that hector and punish rather than educate and reform have a way of inviting derision and reaction.
The supposedly petty sexual harassment that so many women have to endure, from Hollywood studios to the factory floor at Ford, is a national outrage that needs to end. Period.
Ms. Rice was a bad national security adviser and a bad secretary of state. She was on the wrong side of some of the administration's biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president's core priorities, and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly.
Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.
We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
I don't read 'Vanity Fair,' whose millionaire-fashionista-liberal shtick I find repellent.
I wear two hats at the 'Wall Street Journal': one as a columnist, the other as the editor responsible for our editorial pages in Asia and Europe.
Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.
Of course ABC and its parent company Disney were right to cancel the sitcom 'Roseanne' after its eponymous star, Roseanne Barr, wrote a racist tweet.
The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
When you work at 'The Wall Street Journal,' the coins of the realm are truth and trust - the latter flowing exclusively from the former.
Food insecurity is not remotely the same as hunger.
Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
The best scientific evidence suggests temperatures are rising, and the best scientific evidence suggests man-made anthropogenic carbon emissions have some substantial thing to do with that. However, does that mean the trend will continue forever? We don't know.
The more Mr. Trump traduces the old established lines of decency, the more he affirms his supporters' most shameless ideological instincts.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
If the Republican party essentially becomes the white party, it is going to be the death of it, not only for demographic reasons but for reasons of principle. The party of Lincoln is a party of opportunity for everyone. It's a party about the right to rise, and Mr. Trump unfortunately doesn't represent that view.
Social movements rarely succeed if they violate our gut sense of decency and moral proportion.
In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches, or town halls, we have Trump's demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN.
Did you loathe and detest the Bush administration? If so, you'd probably say its ideas were horrible and their execution worse. Did you not loathe and detest the Bush administration? In that case, you might say its ideas were pretty good - only the execution often left something to be desired.
Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions.
I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not.
My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.
