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Following its lopsided victory in the legislative elections of Jan. 12, Taiwan's Nationalist Party (or Kuomintang) has nailed down control of that vital island by electing its candidate as president of the Republic of China for a four-year term. This has been hailed in some American quarters as a victory for those who favor an accommodation between Taiwan and Beijing, but don't be deceived. The Kuomintang was Sun Yat-sen's party, which lost control of the mainland to the communists in 1949 but has maintained itself on the staunchly independent island of Taiwan ever since. Eight years ago, it lost control...

The end of the year is always a treacherous time for columnists, for we know that our readers expect us to tell them what is going to happen next year. And not unreasonably -- after all, we specialize in forecasts. But year-end prognostications are particularly likely to be remembered, since they tend to be sweeping. So I have decided to limit my risk by concentrating on one particular set of events that is sure to happen (one way or another) in 2008: The presidential nominations of the two major parties, and the outcome of the general election in November. You...

With former Sen. Fred Thompson's official declaration of his candidacy, the race for the Republican presidential nomination has now assumed the shape that seems likely to characterize it right down to the finish line. Conceivably some new and unexpected contender could still enter the contest and win it, as Wendell Willkie did in 1940, but the odds against such a development are high. Some observers, noting that the national political conventions won't be held until the late summer of 2008, argue that there is still time for a surprise. But by advancing the dates of many of the most important...

With all due respect to my fellow election observers, I don't think nearly enough attention is being paid to the plans and potentialities of former Vice President Al Gore. Gore is a man who, less than seven years ago, won the votes of over half a million more Americans than the ultimate winner of the presidential election, George W. Bush. If Gore's votes had been a little differently distributed in the Electoral College, he would have become president and might currently be rounding out his second term. But it didn't work out that way. Instead, Gore returned to private life,...

The other day, when I made a reference to "the war on terrorism," a Democratic friend of mine objected: "It's not a war." I never found out what he thought it was -- the conversation wandered off in other directions -- but the question keeps nagging away in the back of my mind. If it isn't a "war," what is it? I have no particular hang-up about calling it a war. Call it a "fracas," if you prefer, or a "brouhaha." But it is certainly something, and deserves a name. And I will concede that, if it is a war,...

The Bolton battle -- again By William Rusher Thursday, August 3, 2006 It is a fair question just what kind of ambassador the United States should send to the United Nations. This country is, after all, by far the most powerful nation in the world -- militarily, economically and therefore politically. It has legitimate interests all over the globe, and, by virtue of its might, is a vital partner in any major international effort. As for the United Nations, it is the principal international forum, where all the world's countries gather to argue, agree, disagree and conspire with one another....

... Nor has the Times been the only major periodical to blow hot and cold (if you will forgive me) on the subject of the global climate.

After the Vietnam war had ended, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the North's top commander, admitted that North Vietnam had never possessed the military strength necessary to defeat the United States. Everything, he acknowledged, depended on eroding the determination of the American home front to win. So the North Vietnamese had hung on grimly, inflicting steady casualties, until the balance of opinion in the United States swung against continuing the war. A similar calculation has obviously been made in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He knows very well that he can never oust the Americans from Iraq by military force. But...

When I retired as publisher of National Review in 1988, I sent all my office files to the Library of Congress. It had requested them, as part of its archive of 20th century political manuscripts. I guess they thought students of conservatism might find them useful someday. Among them were my files on Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a group I had helped found in 1972 to protest Princeton's steady drift toward being what a fellow alumnus, my old National Review colleague James Burnham, sadly called "just another liberal joint." Our two chief concerns were its deliberate debasing of its...

I have been informed by a very reliable source that Senate Judiciary Committee staffers have reviewed the entirety of William Rusher's CAP documents at the Library of Congress and have determined that those documents make no mention at all of Alito. This should be no surprise, as New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick reviewed the same documents in late November 2005 and made the same determination.

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court this morning, Senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) asked Judge Alito (again) about his involvement with a group called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. The question hit close to home here at National Review, because Ted Kennedy requested that the committee go into executive session to discuss subpoenaing the private papers, stored at the Library of Congress, of William A. Rusher, former publisher of National Review. Rusher was a founding member of CAP. Bill Rusher answered some questions from NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez this...

It is often said that American politics today are more acrimonious than they have ever been before. Certainly, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer, they seem to be. The hatred that many Democrats feel toward George W. Bush is truly searing – quite the equal, it is only fair to say, of the hatred many Republicans felt for Bill Clinton. Still, when one reflects on the things the politicians of earlier decades said about each other, and even did to each other, it is possible to argue that what is going on today is only par for the course....

The Feb. 28 issue of The New Republic, that venerable liberal journal of opinion, published editorials by half a dozen of its writers discussing what's the matter with liberalism. That something is the matter with it wasn't seriously disputed. Its long-time home, the Democratic Party, is virtually powerless. The Republicans, solidly controlled by the conservative movement, possess not only the White House and Congress, but almost all the major governorships and even the mayoralty of New York City. Time was, 40 or 50 years ago, when the situation was almost exactly reversed. What has gone wrong? The writers advance a...

Confession, they say, is good for the soul, and I have decided to end 2004 by giving mine a thorough dry-cleaning. For at least four decades, we conservatives have complained loudly that the major media in this country are biased in favor of the liberals. With the sole exception of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (its news pages are another matter), virtually every major source of information available to the American people has religiously followed the liberal line. The New York Times, The Washington Post, all three major television networks, and both newsmagazines (Time and Newsweek) have...

The Republican left Posted: April 8, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. "In politics," Richard Nixon once astutely observed, "no victory is ever complete." No matter how overwhelming the national landslide racked up by one party, some particularly obnoxious representative of the defeated party will always ruin the victor's day by winning his or her personal re-election. And, within each party, there will always be those who insist on behaving as much like members of the other party as possible. Thus, the Democrats have to live with the fact that Zell Miller is a Democratic senator from Georgia, even though...

It would help if the two sides in the debate over "gay marriage" could begin by conceding that each has a point. The gay supporters of the concept are not, in most cases, out to scupper the institution of marriage; on the contrary, all they ask is to be allowed to participate in it. And its opponents are not necessarily homophobes; many people, among them not a few homosexuals, believe that marriage, defined as the union of one man and one woman, is one of the indispensable building blocks of a stable social order, and that expanding the definition would...

The 'Cold' hard truth Posted: March 11, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. Books about the Cold War are a dime a dozen. It would be nice to read them all, or at least all of the good ones, because the Cold War was the defining event of the last half of the 20th century. Its outcome determined mankind's basic direction for centuries to come. Whether you are old enough to remember all of the Cold War, or just parts of it, or whether you have only heard about it, you need to understand the basic story. Although we can't...

Let the states decide what 'marriage' is Posted: March 4, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. It would help if the two sides in the debate over "gay marriage" could begin by conceding that each has a point. The gay supporters of the concept are not, in most cases, out to scupper the institution of marriage; on the contrary, all they ask is to be allowed to participate in it. And its opponents are not necessarily homophobes; many people, among them not a few homosexuals, believe that marriage, defined as the union of one man and one woman, is one...

Dispatch from California by William Rusher Posted Feb 16, 2004 In my last dispatch of the goings-on in California, I reported that the Democrats who control the legislature were stonewalling Gov. Schwarzenegger's requests for a $15-billion bond issue to pay for their previous profligacy. They were also blocking a constitutional amendment that would prevent similar behavior in the future by allowing increases in state expenditures only for inflation and population growth. I predicted that the governor would get both, however, by putting them on the ballot as popular initiatives in November and having the voters pass them over the legislature's...

Politics Dispatch from California by William Rusher Posted Feb 16, 2004 Rusher is a leading conservative figure who was publisher of National Review from 1957-1988 In my last dispatch of the goings-on in California, I reported that the Democrats who control the legislature were stonewalling Gov. Schwarzenegger's requests for a $15-billion bond issue to pay for their previous profligacy. They were also blocking a constitutional amendment that would prevent similar behavior in the future by allowing increases in state expenditures only for inflation and population growth. I predicted that the governor would get both, however, by putting them on the...

Will Bush survive attacks from the right? Posted: February 12, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. The disgruntled mutterings about President Bush in conservative circles are getting too loud to ignore. From National Review to The Heritage Foundation, not to mention such libertarian redoubts as The Cato Institute, the grumbling is reaching impressive levels. It doesn't (yet) amount to outright rebellion. The protesters are still on board for November; few of them are seriously threatening to stay home on Election Day and let John Kerry waltz into the White House. But it is fair to say that, in the opinion...

Globaloney Until recently, the prophets of global warming had the public debate on the subject pretty much to themselves. They had managed to convince the custodians of public opinion, in the media and elsewhere, that the vast majority of the world's scientists agreed that the world's climate was getting warmer, and that a substantial part of the reason for this was an increase in "greenhouse gases" (such as carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, caused in significant part by human economic activity. The results would allegedly be catastrophic over the course of the next few decades, and the only solution was...

Who's lying? Posted: January 8, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. As you have probably noticed, the words "lying," "liar" and their cognates are being tossed around pretty indiscriminately by the liberals these days – an indication of just how much they hate the Bush administration, and how eager they are to bring it down. But it may be useful to examine some of these superheated charges and see just how valid they are. I take as my text a couple of paragraphs by Ruth Rosen, a bush-league liberal columnist whose vaporings appear every so often in the San Francisco...

A peek at 2004 Posted: January 1, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. So the curtain goes up on 2004 and, being human, we long to know what will happen in the new year. The only dependable prediction is that it will surprise us. From the standpoint of the present, the future always looks like a featureless projection of the past – the one thing that it never is. The most cautious political calculations will turn out to be wildly off base. Events that seem, in prospect, unlikely to occur will occur when least expected. No wonder the Democrats refuse...

Those 'special interests' Posted: December 25, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. If there is one thing the nine Democratic dwarves have discovered in the course of their interminable debates, it's that nothing rouses the Democratic faithful like the denunciation of "special interests." On one side, they tell their audiences, are the "regular people" like you. On the other are – and here their lips curl and their voices develop a sneering edge – the "special interests." Just who these special interests are is left unspecified. If questioned, they will name some easy corporate target like Enron, but that defeats...

The Democrats' dilemma Posted: December 18, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. By dragging Saddam Hussein out of his hidey-hole in a farm hut south of Tikrit, the 4th Infantry Division has inflicted a severe blow to the Democrats' thesis that everything is going badly in Iraq. Counting the number of schools that have reopened has never been a very convincing response to the almost daily reports of one or two American soldiers killed by terrorists. But the capture of Saddam is a devastating blow to the whole concept of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq, and here at...

California's next hurdle: The Legislature Posted: December 11, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. There was never any serious hope that the Democrats in the legislature would consent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan for pulling California out of the hole they have dug for the state in the past five years. Both the Senate and the Assembly are securely in the pockets of the powerful special interests their Democratic members were largely elected to serve: the state employees' unions, the Indian tribes that own or want to start casinos, and, above all, the California Teachers Association. The Democratic legislators (and,...

Speaking with forked tongue Posted: November 27, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. Far be it from me to contend that Republican politicians don't occasionally take liberties with the truth. They do, and they should be held accountable for these deceptions. But now it's the Democrats who are playing fast and loose with the truth in three major areas of public policy, and American voters deserve to know about it. In all three cases, Democratic politicians count on most people being too stupid to spot the deception. The first case involves what sounds like a shocking statistic, ideally delivered with...

There has been a lot of talk recently about Hillary Clinton's political game plan. Will she run for president in 2004? Wait until 2008? Is she backing Gen. Wesley Clark, or some other stalking horse, for the 2004 nomination? Might she take the vice presidential spot on his team, expecting him to lose but polishing her own credentials for the top spot next time? Or does she have some even more devious scheme in mind? Actually, Clinton's game plan, though suitably Machiavellian, is not all that complicated. Sen. Clinton wants to be president of the United States. She has...

Hillary's game plan Posted: October 30, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn. There has been a lot of talk recently about Hillary Clinton's political game plan. Will she run for president in 2004? Wait until 2008? Is she backing Gen. Wesley Clark, or some other stalking horse, for the 2004 nomination? Might she take the vice presidential spot on his team, expecting him to lose but polishing her own credentials for the top spot next time? Or does she have some even more devious scheme in mind? Actually, Clinton's game plan, though suitably Machiavellian, is not all that complicated....

In the last two decades, politics in many Western nations has been enlivened by the appearance of a new political entity that calls itself the Green Party. The implication, reinforced by the rhetoric of its spokesmen, is that environmentalism is one of its major concerns. In a number of European states, it also has a mildly socialist agenda, being hostile to business and opposed (for example) to the U.S. attack on Iraq. In Germany, and to a lesser extent in some other European countries, it has bagged enough votes in general elections to insist on being included in governing coalitions...

The Democratic spinners have been busy trying to put the best face possible on the landslide recall of Gray Davis and the impressive election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, but it's tough going. Maybe, they suggest, American voters are angry at all chief executives facing big budget deficits – in which case they may be ready to "recall" President Bush in 2004. And anyway, Schwarzenegger is far from being a typical Republican: He is pro-choice, pro-gay rights and pro-gun control. Save for the governorship, California is still solidly in Democratic hands: They control both houses of the legislature, hold both...

As most people know, the objective of the political opposition in a democracy is to attack the political leader by raising "issues" that gradually chip away at his image until he is reduced to bite-sized bits suitable to be fed to fishes. The Democrats were making slow but reasonable progress at deconstructing George Bush in this way until Sept. 11 came along and rendered him – as a strong war leader – practically unassailable. Now, however, in the aftermath of the Iraq war, the failure (thus far) to find weapons of mass destruction has opened up a new and fruitful...

It's a wonder that no one has thought of it before. Though it's likely that others have and were either talked out of it or simply ordered to forget it. But Lisa McClelland, 15 and a student at Freedom High School in Oakley, Calif., launched the idea, which has attracted the national media's attention. Now the fat is in the fire, and where it will all end (in the words of a famous parody of Time magazine) knows God. Lisa's idea was to start a Caucasian Club at her high school. After all, the school already boasts a Black Student...

The basic trouble with democracy is it forces candidates to be forever on the lookout for new "services" they can pledge to provide for their presumably greedy constituents. The dirty little secret, of course (never mentioned during the campaign), is these services will cost money, which will have to be provided by the taxpayers, since government doesn't have a nickel it can call its own. Then (if and when the services are provided, and taxes have to be raised to pay for them) the politician can complain loudly and virtuously about voters who "demand" services and then protest about having...

<p>William Rusher isn't a household political name. But he will go down in history as one of the important architects of the post-World War II conservative political movement that ultimately put Ronald Reagan in the White House.</p> <p>Q: What is your definition of conservatism, and has it changed much in your lifetime?</p>

<p>The conservative movement has scored historic gains but has yet to achieve several of its basic goals.</p> <p>That's the verdict of some of its founding fathers (and one important mother).</p> <p>"We won the battle against communism, but I guess we've largely lost the battle against big government," says Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, 79, who defied conventional wisdom by leading a women's crusade that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment in the mid-1970s.</p>

As a San Francisco resident, I have a front-row seat to the extravaganza that passes for liberal politics in this huge and astonishing state. The general attitude of its Democratic Party was summed up a few years ago when one of its members in the Assembly was reproached by a Republican colleague. "Don't you realize," the Republican said, "that passing anti-business legislation just drives businesses out of the state?" The Democrat giggled, "What do we care? It's Republicans who are leaving." Using such strategies, the Democrats recently achieved something close to Nirvana in Sacramento. They hold all of the statewide...

This week marks my 30th anniversary as a syndicated columnist, and it occurs to me that I should note the occasion with a few appropriate remarks. In my early teens, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be a writer on political affairs (like my idol, Walter Lippmann) or plunge into politics myself. I ultimately stumbled into the perfect job where I could do both: as publisher of National Review, the nation's leading journal of conservative opinion. For 31 years in that capacity, I managed to participate in the growth of the conservative movement, its capture of the Republican Party,...

The battle over the significance of American communism and what to do about it was probably the biggest domestic controversy of the 20th century. It began shortly after the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1946, with a series of investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and reached its first climax with the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury (in denying that he had been a Soviet spy) early in 1950. The battle was then taken over by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and roiled on for nearly five more years, reaching its second and final...

I am not one of those who think it's unimportant whether we find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or at least find out what happened to them. Their existence – and the possibility of their use by Saddam – was, and still is, the only real justification for the war. Saddam was a truly evil man, and liberating the Iraqis from his grip was noble. But dashing around the world like some latter-day Don Quixote, liberating damsels (or even whole populations) in distress doesn't measure up to my notion of an American "vital interest" – the test by which...

In the last couple of decades, the conservative movement has grown so large, and subdivided into so many factions, that even discriminating observers can be forgiven for confusing one with another. Just who are these "neoconservatives," who are allegedly so influential in the Bush administration, and how do they differ from ordinary, garden-variety conservatives? Where did the "paleoconservatives" come from? What exactly do they stand for? I offer the following definitions to navigate through the swamps of terminology. Back in the late 1950s, most of the conservative movement could and did meet for lunch in the company dining room of...

The late Willmoore Kendall was a brilliant political scientist and a fiendishly clever conservative. Yale University made the mistake of granting him a professorship with lifetime tenure before it discovered, or at any rate realized the full implications of, that second aspect of his character. At Yale, Kendall was one of the teachers of young William F. Buckley Jr. and had a profound influence on him. Small wonder that, when Buckley founded National Review in 1955 as a journal of conservative opinion, Kendall's name appeared on the masthead of the very first issue as a senior editor. Yale subsequently corrected...

A recent letter of mine in National Review seems to have touched a raw nerve. The subject was David Frum's recent article in the magazine, in which he condemned various conservatives for turning against their party, their president and their country in opposing the war on Iraq. Among those he criticized was Robert Novak. In my letter, I took exception to Frum's description of his targets as "unpatriotic," but analyzed separately their alleged deviations from conservative principles. Regarding Novak, I wrote: "Robert Novak's differences with the administration, and with most conservatives, center on Middle Eastern policy. There is nothing wrong...

When President Bush took office in January 2001, three relatively small but unambiguously hostile nations were actively seeking to become nuclear powers: North Korea, Iraq and Iran. In the wake of Sept. 11, Bush called this problem to the attention of the nation and the world, forthrightly labeling them an "axis of evil." Of the three, North Korea posed the most imminent danger, thanks to the disastrous mishandling of that problem by President Clinton. When it became clear in 1993 that North Korea was on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon (and indeed might already have produced at least...

The U.S. attack on Iraq will begin in a matter of weeks, if not days, and it is time to remember how we got here, and why. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the central threat to American security, and indeed to world peace, has been the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – notably (but not exclusively) nuclear weapons. If relatively small but hostile nations are allowed to develop or otherwise obtain these weapons, the world, and especially the United States, will be forced to forever live under the threat of wholly unacceptable damage at the...