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The Democrats are having a hard time selling the bailout of General Motors because nearly everyone has suffered the agony of buying a car. That's how the "used-car salesman," fair or not, became the American icon of deception, fraud and thievery. Maybe it's true that GM is "too big to fail," though from all the available evidence GM is succeeding spectacularly at failure. What the pols and their lobbyist buddies really mean with their used-car salesman's spiel is that GM is "too big for Joe Sixpack to let fail."

If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really bad, you'll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells really bad. Karl Marx The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan. The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt,...

The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan. .... Mr. Obama doesn't think much of the Constitution, or even of the Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to accommodate notions of "social justice." The Warren Court, which wrote finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, has been...

But nobody is stalked like Barack Obama. He's terrorized every time Joe Biden opens his mouth, which is often. Even good old Joe can't wait to see what he'll say next. We were supposed to be worrying about the innocence and inexperience of Sarah Palin, but while she's drawing enormous crowds and staying resolutely on the message laid out by John McCain, like a good running mate should, there's good old Joe, who was recruited to give Mr. Obama heft and gravitas in foreign affairs, up in Seattle predicting catastrophe once the Obama administration is fixed firmly in place. Joe...

Barack Obama is talking landslide, but the polls are getting tighter. Not by much, but a little. Despite the big talk, the issue is still in doubt. The kindling is available to light a fire to burn down the messiah's barn, if John McCain can find the match. So why the jitters among certain followers of the tree-tall and thistle-thin messiah from Chicago's Hyde Park, where everyone has an IQ of 500 (just ask any of them), a Prius in the garage and a radical in the parlor? Are the Obama campaign's internal polls telling him something he doesn't want...

Something odd is going on. The Obama campaign boasts of a landslide in the making even as his polling lead slips a point or two, and there's anger bordering on rage when John McCain and Sarah Palin raise questions about Barack Obama's judgment in his unexplored past in Chicago. An investigation of ACORN, a cabal of "political activists" hired to register voters in the neighborhoods where few friends of John McCain abide has now spread to 10 states. Investigators discovered that the entire offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys had signed up to vote in Las Vegas, unless it turns...

It's October and time to start throwing the kitchen sink. Throwing the kitchen sink is fun because it makes a lot of noise when it shatters against an opponent's head, particularly when the sink is full of dirty dishes. The dirty dishes this year are mostly from the Obama's Good Time Diner on Chicago's always interesting South Side. However, you're not supposed to criticize Sen. Barack Obama, because only racists do that. Good citizenship requires keeping some dirty dishes segregated. But somebody forgot to tell Gov. Sarah Palin, the Wasilla housewife who knows about sinks and stones and stacks of...

It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig. After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the...

It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig. After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the...

The rap on Joe Biden is that he's bright, well-meaning and amiable, and when he opens his mouth you never know what's likely to fly out. But sometimes he comes up with interesting ideas. Joe thinks that Barack Obama, clearly rattled by the Sarah surge, should find a skirt to get behind as the runners finally make the clubhouse turn and head down the homestretch. Whose skirt is wider than Hillary Clinton's? Changing running mates in mid-campaign, for no other reason than the first running mate was a big mistake, would invite disbelief and bipartisan hilarity. George McGovern kicked...

How mean, how low can a partisan stoop? Mean enough to humiliate a 17-year-old girl at the time she needs sympathy and understanding. Low enough to bruise the broken heart of a girl's mother and to mock a father's affection. Within minutes after John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, the blog sites on the sleaziest margins of the Democratic left went to work on the deconstruction of the lady of the far north.....[ snip ] But resentment from the left boiled into rage when they learned that not only did Mrs. Palin oppose abortion as a matter...

Al Gore picked a bad day to tout his global-warming scam. Just as he was telling an easily conned columnist for the Associated Press that Earthlings have just 10 years to get in line behind him to save the world from the frying pan, a consortium of 50,000 physicists conceded that maybe Al's evidence of man-made warming isn't so hot, after all. Al, who confuses the hot air of flatulent cows, forgetting to turn out the lights and fumes from cars and trucks with the hot air he contributes himself, now wants to abandon coal-fired generation of electricity and turn...

What happens if it turns out that we've nominated two unelectable candidates for president? Do we get our money back? This illustration provided by The New Yorker magazine, the cover of the July 21, 2008 issue by artist Barry Blitt, shows Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim and his wife as a terrorist. The magazine says the cover is meant to satirize the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Obamas campaign, but Obama's campaign called it "tasteless and offensive." (AP Photo/New Yorker) Logic, common sense and the Constitution insist that either...

Barack Obama got the polling bump he expected when he clinched the Democratic nomination, but the bump only bumped him to the edge of a shallow but inconvenient ditch. A new poll by the Zogby organization for Reuters finds that John McCain, whose campaign is having trouble getting on track, has nevertheless pulled within five points of Sen. Obama. This is a gain of three points over the past month. He leads John McCain 47 to 42 percent, close to the margin of error, which means the two presumptive nominees have moved into a tie, more or less.

Barack Obama's loyal legion tried. The story the boys on the bus want is for Hillary to throw in her crying towel today, at last the last day of the primaries. The symmetry and poetry of it all would bring a tear to any scribe's eye. Everyone is eager to pop the corks on the bubbly. Hillary can laugh last tonight even if, as expected, Democrats in South Dakota and Montana give their hearts, hands and votes to the man whose camp followers call Precious. (Some of them, to be even more respectful, call him Mr. Precious.) She has only...

Nothing destroys a man like his betrayal of friends. The mortal wound is self-inflicted and he dies from the inside out, inviting neither compassion nor commiseration, only contempt, disdain and ultimately scorn. This is the hard lesson Scott McClellan is buying with his 30 pieces of silver. George W. Bush, flawed and maker of mistakes, finishes his presidency almost as unpopular as Harry S. Truman finished his, and who knows whether history will revise his presidential reputation.

Has anybody got a flag pin? By Wesley Pruden May 2, 2008 Patriotism is not always the last refuge of the scoundrel. Sometimes it's just the last refuge of a frightened politician. Barack Obama, hotly pursued by his preacher and the crazy preacher's aggressive racism, has revised his stump speech. His once formidable polling lead over Hillary Clinton has dwindled to the single digits. The man who wouldn't wear a tiny American flag on his lapel is looking for a flag pin the size of a bass fiddle. "You want to know who I am?" he asked a crowd in...

"The race card" was for decades the most reliable card in the Democratic deck, and even today, as we've seen this spring, Democrats play the card with residual skill. The card must be played carefully, and with exquisite subtlety. No place for George Wallace or Orval Faubus here. But now race is all that Democrats are talking about as they stagger and stumble toward agreement on a presidential candidate, maybe next week in Indiana and North Carolina, or if not then maybe the week after that in West Virginia, and if not then surely the week after that in Kentucky...

Innocents eager to flee the endless campaign of '08 can take heart. Some people are already gearing up for the campaign of 2012. And why not? We've rarely had a field of such likely one-termers as John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. President McCain would be pushing 76 in the summer of '12, and the prospect of a second term would be giving the envelope a mighty shove. Four years of a hip-hop White House or the shrill echoes of a nagging nanny would surely be enough to sate the appetite of the hardiest masochist.

A little night music can soothe the savage beast, at least sometimes. This, alas, can give a well-meaning musician the idea that his tuba is mightier than his enemy's sword. Lorin Maazel, the musical director, boasted that his orchestra had thawed a cold war once before, with a concert in the old Soviet Union in 1959. After that it was inevitable that the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down. Mr. Maazel imagines that his Pyongyang concert was available to ordinary people, but the 2,500 men and women who filled every seat of the East Pyongyang Grand Theater were carefully chosen....

John Solomon took over the Washington Times on Jan. 28. But he arrived today, via a message from the paper’s copy operation. The news, in short: No more scare quotes. Longtime Washington Times readers know well what this is all about: Under the regime of Wesley Pruden, the Times, unwilling to acknowledge anything so radical and immoral as gay marriage, treated the term in its pages as gay “marriage.” Likewise other terms. In the old Washington Times, there were no illegal immigrants, just “illegal aliens”; no gays, just “homosexuals.” Now comes the following memo from the Solomon regime, wiping...

Now that former AP and Washington Post reporter John Solomon is in charge, he’s begun the "Solomonizing." Erik Wemple of Washington City Paper reports that the new boss wants the Times to join the "mainstream" in using sensitive terminology on homosexuality and illegal immigration.

You can almost almost sympathize with Bill Clinton. But only almost. It's not easy to run against the man with a halo. The Clintons bought the grief that threatens to derail their train, and paid for it with arrogance and self-importance. Only the Clintons would imagine they could play the race card in modern America, and their only defense is that the sin is not contempt for their presumed inferiors. They're contemptuous of everybody. Promising to rise above race is an important part of the considerable charm of the campaign of Barack Obama, one of the most attractive candidates, black...

Mon Jan 14 2007 14:24:11 ET WASHINGTON, DC - The Washington Times today announced the appointment of John F. Solomon as executive editor to succeed Wesley Pruden, who is retiring after 25 years in The Washington Times newsroom. Solomon brings to the newsroom's leadership over two decades of journalism experience, with a strong background in investigative reporting and managing interactive digital content. "John Solomon's appointment is a great step forward for The Washington Times, and is good news for our readers, staff and advertisers," said Thomas P. McDevitt, president of The Washington Times. "He is a working journalist, innovative manager,...

Drawn by the boxcar headlines, I reached into the newspaper rack to get the latest from the presidential campaign. A homeless bum, his face gnarled and whiskery but with a ray of hope in his rheumy eyes, watched me with a question. "Hey, Mr. Dude," he said, "you got any change?" I gave him my last quarter, breaking the good-sense rule against encouraging able-bodied panhandlers. But for a moment I imagined he thought I was one of the presidential candidates.

NEW ORLEANS. Taking the temperature of the water in New Orleans is everybody's idea of fun. Well, why not? "The City that Care Forgot," as it once nonsensically called itself, has learned that a lot of people care a lot, even if care doesn't. Or something like that. Eating well continues to be the national pastime, and the wealth of wide-bodies bumping bottoms-against-bottoms on the sidewalks and in the narrow streets and alleys of the French Quarter testifies to the triumph of gluttony. A vegetarian platter in the Big Easy is typically a delicate decoration of shredded carrots, a slice...

SAN FRANCISCO. The Governator's back, and that's good news, maybe, for the Republicans in California. This could be bad news, definitely, for a certain Democrat. The mere prospect is one of the few rays of hope for the Grouchy Old Party. A new Field Poll, the oldest and often the most reliable California polling firm, finds that 56 percent of California voters now think Arnold Schwarzenegger is a "satisfactory" governor. This includes even majorities of Democrats and independents. This is despite a monthslong impasse over how to structure the immense state budget and the governor's failure to deliver a "reform"...

It's not exactly the old-time religion, but suddenly there's sawdust on the trail. If some other worthy actually wins the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have a new career open to them, reprising Jim and Tammy Faye. Praise the Lord. Just when everyone thought that no Democrat wanted to be caught in church dead or alive, it's revival time. First Hillary started talking about the influence of the Methodist social gospel on her life — this must have been heck all these years for Bubba, a hymn-singing good ol' Baptist boy — and now Barack Obama invokes God...

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the well-armed fruitcake who is more or less in charge of the government in Iran, knows how to pull the chains of certain wimps in the West. The Iranian president will arrive in New York City on Sunday for a two-day visit to the United Nations, where he will deliver one of his entertaining rants against the United States, Israel and the West. He's entitled, since we're the hosts of the United Nations (and more's the pity). But seeing Manhattan's rich array of temptations not available in the eighth-century world whence he springs, is not enough. He wants...

David Petraeus is a soldier, so he's accustomed to the noise of the guns and the chaos of the battlefield. Snipers don't frighten him. But he had to wonder yesterday whether he had straggled into enemy lines. He was greeted on arrival in Washington by a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" This was the work of the nefarious MoveOn.org, the money machine on the loudest and leftmost fringe of the Democratic Party. No sooner had he sat down at the witness table in the storied Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building, where a...

Hankering to hear some bad news September 7, 2007 Wesley Pruden - Gen. David H. Petraeus comes to town in a week or so with authentic war news...(snip) Harry Reid, the Democratic bag man from Las Vegas, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sneer that the general is only coming to deliver "the Bush report." Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, reacts to the question as if he never heard of the general. "The Bush report?" he asks. "We know what's going to be in it. It's clear. I...

Larry Craig's adventures at the Minneapolis airport didn't inflict harm on anyone in the men's room, but there's collateral damage in higher places. He's likely to be back in Boise for good by the end of the week. The senator from Idaho is learning the bitter lesson that it's not the crime but the cover-up, even when it's not much of a crime and the only complaining witness is an undercover cop assigned to look for creeps and peepers. His "wide stance" in the stall, he says, explains why the cop mistook innocent toe-tapping for an invitation to whatever. The...

Somebody may be pouting at the White House over the collapse of the comprehensive amnesty legislation. For seven years, the Bush administration has been unable or unwilling to enforce the immigration laws, leading to an out-of-control deluge of illegal aliens across the nation's Southern border. Suddenly, the feds are about to do what they said couldn't be done. They've been winking at employers who shrug at the widespread custom of taking prospective employees at their word that the Social Security card they offer is genuine, even when the employers suspect it is not and sometimes even when they know it...

Nothing stirs the blood like talking about religion. That's why it's taboo to talk about it in casual social conversations. Better to ask the boss's wife whether she ever considered a face-lift. But Pope Benedict XVI is a man of firm conviction and blunt talk. Not for this pontiff the Vatican II tradition of warm and fuzzy, as the message of Vatican II, which put a friendly expression on the stern countenance of the church of Rome, has been widely interpreted in the circles of those addicted to warm and fuzzy. This week he authorized a statement of "clarification" of...

One cheer, but no more than two, for George W. Bush. He spared Scooter Libby from prison, as decency demanded, but left intact a $250,000 fine, which can only be regarded as tribute to the venality of a special prosecutor and the vanity of a federal judge. In a perfect world the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, would be cited for misfeasance of office and Judge Reggie Walton would be cited for excessive concern for the professional reputation of a prosecutor watching his ambition about to swirl down a particularly public toilet. If anyone compromised "national security" by "outing" Valerie...

These are the saddest of times and the worst of times for George W. Bush. His war in Iraq continues to truck south, to join the immigration "reform" legislation that took up residence at the South Pole some time ago, and now his remaining friends are urging him to be the stand-up guy Texans are always telling us they are. Not even the iron fence of secrecy and security surrounding the White House can resist the pressure building on the president to stand up to pardon Scooter Libby, soon to be sentenced to 24 months in prison for lying about...

George W. Bush is looking for a legacy to leave behind, and he may have found it. His approval rating now hovers at 28 percent, but with a little more work he could leave office as the most unpopular president ever. He's not there yet. When Harry S. Truman left Washington in 1953 the pollsters said only 23 percent of his countrymen were still wild about Harry. (Adulation would come later.) Pundits, historians and others who track these things reckoned no president could ever match that, but George W. has a good shot at it. Like Harry Truman, George W....

The Democrats have done their worst, and now George W. Bush must do his best. The Senate's 51-47 vote to require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within a year, effectively telling al Qaeda and its terrorist allies that if they can tone down the noise for a year the Shi'ites and Sunnis can get on with killing each other in the name of Osama, Mohammed, Allah or any Muslim notability of their choosing. The moderate Muslims everyone here says he wants to help can drop dead (and many of them will). "Nothing good can come from this bill,"...

The good news is that we were supposed to all be dead by now, done in by SARS, AIDS or bird flu. The bad news is, now we can be cooked medium-rare by global warming. Or not. The jury on global warming is still out -- the jurors are snowbound -- and this seriously frustrates the folks who imagined they had the jury well rigged. (Al Gore comes to mind.) Global warming has become the catechism of a new-age religion, with Mr. Gore as its topmost prelate, entitled to cassock, miter, incense and hot holy water. Anyone who dissents risks...

The Democrats finally installed Nancy Pelosi as the speaker of the House yesterday, and the talk of Capitol Hill was not about what to do about the war in Iraq, the minimum wage, finding that oxymoron quaintly called "congressional ethics," or even the prospect of raising congressional pay. Yesterday was all about celebrating estrogen. More powerful than strontium-90, deadlier than polonium-210, estrogen is better for you than testosterone. That was the new speaker's message, and she got a lot of "amens," even if most were from the "womens." Several Democratic women from the Senate wandered over to join the 71...

Where do you put a one-time undercover CIA agent when she's no longer under the covers with anyone important? If you're Valerie Plame, you'll soon be relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, and then out. The next time she can count on making the papers will be a nice obituary in the Washington and New York newspapers and a few lines of a telegraph dispatch on a page with the truss ads in Topeka.

The wonderful folks at Hezbollah, currently the hottest brand in international terrorism, are learning to appreciate Rodney Dangerfield. They don't get no respect, neither. Some of the more astute Palestinians, knee-deep in rubble, are beginning to look for someone close at hand to blame for the catastrophe of war. Blaming the Jews is always easy, but the words eventually lie bitter and stale on the tongue. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, whose seizure of two Israeli soldiers ignited the fighting six weeks ago, now concedes that if he had to do it all over again, this time he might not do it...

You don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to understand the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is fundamental to everything we are -- and to regard anyone who tries an end run around it as someone who deserves a bracing smackdown. Presidents of both parties are sometimes tempted to try an end run or a shortcut because the Constitution can get in the way of the easiest way to enforce the law. The ruling yesterday by a federal judge in Detroit that the government's wiretapping without a warrant is unconstitutional and must be stopped at once should have been...

(snip) An Israeli company has developed a "security booth," where a passenger puts his hand onto a sensor to measure blood pressure, pulse and perspiration, a computer looks at these biometric readings to tip the cops to a suspect, and cops swoop in. But who needs a machine? (snip).... Something better is clearly needed, something more attuned to the sensibilities of the ACLU, which has never met a criminal it couldn't learn to like. We must find a way to turn perverted religious belief against the Islamic fascists who, we are often told, do not speak for the Muslim masses....

Something happened yesterday in London but some of us aren't quite sure what it was, or even if it was. Scotland Yard, just like in the movies, raided several rats' nests in London, Birmingham and High Wycombe to seize 21 men before they could put in motion their plot to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic. The arrests, which continued yesterday, were the work of dogged detectives with the cooperation of authorities in Pakistan.

The old man lying in the shade of the Lebanese palm was trying to sleep, but the shouts and laughter of the children made it impossible. He called them to his side. "Children," he said, "there's a man at the far gate of the village who is giving away melons. Run quickly now and get cool melons for your family, and your mother will be pleased." With cries of joy and delight, the children ran off to collect their unexpected bounty, and the old man lay down to resume his nap. No sooner had he shut his eyes against the...

If the Jews would just die without making a lot of noise, the Nice People could get on with the really important things in life, stuffing their faces with salmon and bean sprouts, watching the Rev. Billy Don Moyers pontificate on PBS, and making more Nice People. If the Jews would just die without making a lot of noise, the Nice People could get on with the really important things in life, stuffing their faces with salmon and bean sprouts, watching the Rev. Billy Don Moyers pontificate on PBS, and making more Nice People. The Nice People, manipulated by the...

The first thing a Minuteman has to learn is to keep his powder dry. The bigger the powder magazine, the bigger the risk of getting it all wet. This is the lesson that Chris Simcox, the president of the volunteers on the border, who have almost single-handedly aroused the nation's conscience about the tide of illegal immigration, seems to have missed in basic training. The "powder" is the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Americans have contributed to the Minutemen, who have been exceedingly helpful to the U.S. Border Patrol. The careful, rigorous reporting of Jerry Seper in The Washington...

Plain talk gives politicians severe heartburn. The most successful pols learn to speak only in euphemy and obfuscation. President Bush, no doubt smarting from the slapping around from his once-reliable conservative base, spent yesterday on the Arizona border trying to talk the talk to please Americans fed up with the federal government's inability or unwillingness to protect its borders, a failure unprecedented among the nations of the world. "America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society," he said in Yuma, "and we don't have to choose between the two."

Jose, can you see in all that glare? By Wesley Pruden THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published May 5, 2006 Jose, can you see?     But seeing is not the same as singing, as anyone who has reached for the high notes of the "Star Spangled Banner" could tell you.     The old tale that Francis Scott Key stole the music from a Welsh drinking song is obviously rot. Not even a Welshman could reach notes that high after a night at the pub. The original, "To Anacreon in Heav'n," actually has a fancy intellectual pedigree.     The world's most unsingable national anthem has been...