Foreign Policy

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

This afternoon, Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported that "the intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails 'too damaging' to national security to release under any circumstances." This eighth "smoking gun" — on top of the seven an Investor's Business Daily editorial identified last week — wasn't enough to move the Associated Press Bradley Klapper from the AP's default…

For anyone whose knowledge of history extends beyond the current season of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" or the latest instant replay of an NFL game, the four days of meetings involving Iran's president Hassan Rouhani, European leaders and businesses should remind people we have seen this show before.

The Des Moines Register likely broke new ground when it endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination on Saturday. The Register may be the first major newspaper to endorse a major-party presidential candidate under investigation by the FBI at the time of the endorsement. The time stamp at the editorial's link is currently and inexplicably this morning, but pundits and…

These people play the press and the courts like a fiddle. At 2 p.m. Friday — just in time for a slow-news weekend and the onset of what is supposed to be a serious blizzard in the Northeast — the State Department asked a federal court for an extension of time to February 29 to complete its interagency review and release of Hillary Clinton's private-server emails. But State didn't merely use the…

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy:

Brooke Baldwin pursued Hillary Clinton flack Karen Finney on Thursday's CNN Newsroom over her campaign's conspiracy theory that the intelligence community's inspector general purposely leaked the latest revelation about the highly-classified information on Mrs. Clinton's server. When Finney cited unnamed officials who alleged that the I.G. "unfairly targeted Hillary Clinton," Baldwin interjected…

On Wednesday's AC360, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin downplayed the latest development in Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal — the revelation that her private e-mail server "contained highly-classified intelligence from the most top secret of programs," as host Anderson Cooper reported. Toobin asserted that "it's a huge political problem," but added, "I don't think it's a big legal problem. I don…

On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks failed to cover the move by Senate Democrats earlier in the day to filibuster the bipartisan Syrian refugee legislation that had passed the House in November with the help of 47 Democrats that would have tightened restrictions to more thoroughly vet refugees from the war-torn region seeking to enter the U.S. Overall, the vote failed to hit the 60…

With the liberal media continuing its full-court press obsession over the Donald Trump campaign and the endorsement of Sarah Palin, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC partnered with Spanish-language network Telemundo to ignore on Wednesday a new development in the Fast and Furious scandal as a weapon involved in the gun running was connected to the now-captured Mexican drug lord El Chapo.

Politifact, the leftist propaganda mill disguised as a "fact-checking" web site, always has its "Pants on Fire" matches at the ready for conservatives and Republicans. This is remarkable, given that it has never given any Hillary Clinton statement or campaign assertion a "Pants on Fire" evaluation. The one example it cites falsely claims to "involve" her, but has nothing to do with anything she…

Appearing on Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, former Clinton and Bush administration diplomat Hillary Mann Leverett gushed that what President Obama has achieved with Iran is “[s]imilar to what President Nixon did with China” and “profoundly important, strategically grounded diplomacy” whereas George W. Bush “showed weakness on the world stage” with the Iraq War.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is, of course, part of the Bible Belt. Nonetheless, according to Christopher Hooks, another faith flourishes there: “It’s also a place that’s responsible in large part for the rise of the new civic religion built around the worship of the most lethal among us.” Hooks, an Austin-based journalist, was one of about 30,000 persons who attended last week’s world premiere of…

Wow! That was Mika Brzezinski's repeated reaction to Robert Gates' amazingly frank take on the presidential field. Appearing on today's Morning Joe, the former Defense Secretary shot down all contenders mentioned, dumped on two who have not yet entered the race, and retroactively knocked President Obama for always thinking he was the smartest guy in the room.  Here was Gates' rap on various…