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John Edwards brings to the Kerry cause two principal assets: an optimism contrasting with Kerry's lugubrious pessimism, and — during the Democratic presidential primaries — a refusal to go negative on his opponents. In the retrospectives on Ronald Reagan we have just seen repeated testimonies as to the importance of optimism to political achievement — optimism President Bush possesses in abundance. And if Edwards maintains his anti-negative insistence regarding the President and his administration, his selection may herald that political rarity — a campaign based not so much on the personalities of the contenders as on the ideas they respectively...

Complaints mount about the U.S. in Iraq. They follow two principal avenues — about the war generally and about interrogation abuses specifically. On the war generally, John Kerry's latest line holds that President Bush's prosecution of the entire affair is "inept." Al Gore, Kerry's Democratic predecessor on the campaign trail and this time around a Kerry stand-in, unloaded the other day — terming Bush a congenital liar who dares not admit the truth about Iraq for political reasons. Other Democrats variously liken Bush and Republicans to the Taliban and Nazis. And the debate about details of dubious import plods on....

[snip] Tom Brokaw, reputedly the most moderate of the network anchors, got an invitation, too. And Dan Rather, in announcing Reagan's death, is said to have been close to tears. But if the two are offering themselves as Reagan disciples today, they were hardly so years ago:- Brokaw, in Mother Jones, April 1983, on Reagan's values: "Pretty simplistic. Pretty old-fashioned. And I don't think they have much application to what's currently wrong or troubling a lot of people. . . . Nor do I think he really understands the enormous difficulty a lot of people have in just getting through...

What a magnificent week wherein the nation buried Ronald Reagan. Overdone, perhaps, and too much of a muchness. Still, it was wife and choreographer Nancy's final gift to her husband — regarding whom, her beloved Ronnie, it wasn't always so. The week had unlikely people on the fringe — too often called "observers" — saying astounding things. As one watched in awe, one listened in incredulity. Many of those most fulsome in praise of Reagan now were most sneering in criticism of him then — which set the mind to comparing President Reagan's circumstances to President Bush's. Reagan viewed his...

If you weren't around in 1980, or you were insufficiently sensitized to key world realities, you cannot know how bad things really were — hence the extent to which the nation required, the world required, a catalytic change artist like Ronald Reagan. Regarding Reagan, this is an hour of self-serving hagiography, of transmogrifying anthropomorphism — and comically by many in the press who spent seemingly their every waking hour ripping him and detesting everything he tried. Reagan was not a saint, not a god in human form. Nor was he the Lucifer of leftist desire. He was merely a man...

Time flies - or from campus days, tempus fugit . And a lot is coming unglued. The question is: Does enough time remain to stick everything back together? Other questions, equally important - or more so: Does America have the stomach to prevail in Iraq? Indeed, will our morals allow us to win the War on Terror? Each news cycle seems to pile the worse on the bad. Nicholas Berg, bullet holes in mosques, an attack on a wedding party (wedding revelry, with children in attendance, at 3:00 a.m.?), the ransacking of the office of a member of the Iraqi...

Memorial Day, the war on terror, Bush, Kerry, a mainline press that does not so much inform as inflame: They're all intertwined, all of a piece. And the same elements, or elements like them with different names, have coalesced before. This isn't the first time. We'll come back to Memorial Day and what it means. First, recall these things: In the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts, battlefield successes cast as mistakes. Genuine mistakes — Abu Ghraib, under-manning, underestimation of Iraqi (and Afghan) readiness for self-government, insufficient rhetorical rallying of the American people — played up. Defeatism. Doubts about the mission and...

Time flies — or from campus days, tempus fugit. And a lot is coming unglued. The question is: Does enough time remain to stick everything back together? Other questions, equally important — or more so: Does America have the stomach to prevail in Iraq? Indeed, will our morals allow us to win the War on Terror? Each news cycle seems to pile the worse on the bad. Nicholas Berg, bullet holes in mosques, an attack on a wedding party (wedding revelry, with children in attendance, at 3:00 a.m.?), the ransacking of the office of a member of the Iraqi provisional...

On Sunday, with his "Jobs First" bus tour of Midwestern swing states, John Kerry kicked off his general election campaign. About the same time Al Gore threw his not inconsiderable weight behind the Kerry elec- tion enterprise, in addition to $4 million left over from Gore's failed effort four years ago. So okay, the race is on. Some random thoughts as Kerry leaves the gate … . Kerry started out with talk about jobs. "This administration," he said, "is standing by while the jobs are being outsourced, the jobs are going overseas." He insistently did not say that in his...

At the two-month marker of heightened anguish over Iraq and (oddly less so) the war against terror generally, what better time for pulling off to stretch the legs and appraise the situation? Highlights: Fallujah and Najaf. Ayatollah Sistani and Islamofascist thug Muqtada al-Sadr with his "Mahdi Army" of goons. The targeting of American troops and the kidnapping of foreigners; IEDs, firefights, riots, charred American bodies. Madrid and the Zapatero tergiversation. Terrorists in Europe calling for jihad and the rule of Islam; swift rejection of the great Osama's attempted manipulation of European antiwar sentiment, wherein he offered a "truce" with European...

At the two-month marker of heightened anguish over Iraq and (oddly less so) the war against terror generally, what better time for pulling off to stretch the legs and appraise the situation? Highlights and who-shot-john: Fallujah and Najaf. Ayatollah Sistani and Islamofascist thug Muqtada al-Sadr with his "Mahdi Army" of goons. The targeting of American troops and the kidnapping of foreigners; IEDs, firefights, riots, charred American bodies. Madrid and the Zapatero tergiversation. Terrorists in Europe calling for jihad and the rule of Islam; swift rejection of the great Osama's attempted manipulation of European antiwar sentiment, wherein he offered a "truce"...

Miscellaneous quotes on topics more or less in the news:JAY LENO: "John Kerry's victory over Howard Dean has completely changed the presidential race around. Now instead of the rich white guy from Yale who lives in the White House facing off against the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Vermont, he may have to face the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Massachusetts. It's a whole different game."FORMER SENATOR AND 1996 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BOB DOLE: "On Fox News recently, my friend John Kerry stated: 'I've never made any judgments about any choice somebody made...

The presidential campaign has gone full-steam. Contemplating the prospects, the mind recalls O. Henry's "It is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir and all of us, are in it — and yearns to head for the hills." Already the candidates are on the campaign trail full time, except for various medical bypasses to fix John Kerry's this and that. Already the attack ads are saturating the airwaves, with leftie lobbies (the Sierra Club, MoveOn) counterbalancing for Kerry President Bush's loping lead in campaign funds (recent headlines: (1) "Kerry Campaign Relying on Help of Groups' Ads," and (2) "Groups'...

Comments on items recently in the news. • Having missed Hamas' dialectician Ahmed Yassin in September, the Israelis now have picked him off — as they vowed they would. The mastermind of hundreds of attacks against Israel, resulting in the murder of at least 377, Yassin vowed in January: "We do not fear the threat of death. We will not bow to pressure, and resistance will continue until the occupation is destroyed." That Israel has killed him should come as no surprise. Nor should the double-standard outrage reserved for Israeli and American actions against terrorists. Yassin's successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi,...

Amythical conversation with John Kerry. The questions are drawn from fact. The responses are logic-based fantasy … . A Washington Post headline the other day read, "Kerry Labels Bush a 'Contradiction.'" Could an even greater contradiction be you? Of course not. I am totally consistent — always have been.How does consistency explain your votes against the 1991 Gulf War, for last year's war to remove Saddam, and against appropriating $87 billion to rebuild Iraq now? Those votes demonstrate my abiding belief in the extension of liberty and democracy, and my abiding support for American forces — my "band of brothers"...

An old evangelistic line holds the Bible as "the greatest book ever written," though many Brits gave that kudo — in a 1997 poll — to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson's movie version of Tolkien's Middle Earth epic is leaving the nation's screens, though it may get a reprise if what should happen does happen at the Oscars Sunday night. Mel Gibson's movie version of Christ's Passion opened Ash Wednesday across the land. As with Jackson's effort, so with Gibson's: The puristic and the all-knowing have nits to pick. With Jackson, the movie is not easily comprehensible —...

Since last we met in this form, much has gone up and gone down. The most exciting, perhaps, are the romps of the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity across the Martian landscape. Astounding stuff. Less astounding but still notable were … . • Howard Dean's implosion and his primal scream. Key pols lately have had their defining moments: Michael Dukakis in a tank, Ed Muskie in tears, Jimmy Carter and the killer rabbit, Bill Clinton and those bimbo eruptions, Teddy Kennedy and his Chappaquiddick swim. Add now Dean's post-Iowa outburst, confirming he had reached the end of the line —...

With the Democratic presidential nomination already boxed, John Kerry — or someone on his staff — is wrapping it up and topping it off with a pretty bow. His competitors and the Democrats' special-interest felines, seemingly so hard to herd, are falling in behind, as Democratic constituencies so often do so much better than their Republican counterparts. Howard Dean, an also-ran everywhere and sounding ever more desperate, at last has folded his quixotic enterprise. Clark himself has left the field, taking a seat with Richard Gephardt on the Kerry bench. Joe Lieberman is in the showers. The party's extremists and...

So here we are again, well into another calendar - and the past year's winning quotations from the media (mostly television) rated by the Media Research Council (www.mediaresearch.org). It's full of doozies.The MRC collects quotations certifying generally the idiocy of many in the mainline media, specifically the idiot leftism - even of "personalities" who seemingly will go to their graves protesting the very suggestion they are anything but even-handed, caring, centrist moderates.With that, here are samples from the MRC's "Best Notable Quotables of 2003" (Disclosure: I have judged such collections as an MRC panelist in the past, but not...

With Teddy Kennedy, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis, John Kerry is the fourth Massachusetts pol to seek the presidency since 1980. Massachusetts pols have an ideological panache that wins them heart-thumping enthusiasm with the nation's leftist establishment, but tends to win them less favor with the broader electorate. Kerry will be the Democratic nominee — no doubt. Lacking any victory anywhere, Howard Dean has imploded. Wesley Clark never ignited. Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman have left the field. John Edwards, a trial-lawyer smoothie, has no hope of closing Kerry's widening lead. The Democratic ticket could be Kerry-Edwards, Kerry-Hillary (unlikely), or...