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RUSH: Susan in Thousand Oaks, California. I appreciate that you waited during that little interruption. Great to have you here, Susan. CALLER: Hi, Rush. RUSH: Hi. CALLER: Listen, in my opinion, the only difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton is that Hillary has bigger hands. RUSH: (laughing) How long have you been waiting to say that? CALLER: Well, listen, I'm a never-Trump voter. I just cannot tolerate the thought of voting for him. I think they're both opportunists, and I don't think it really matters. People like to scream and say, "Hey, if you vote for --" RUSH: Wait,...

The supporters of Donald Trump believe he might awaken a sleeping giant -- a cohort of white working-class voters that will propel him to the presidency. His more politically-minded opponents insist he will summon a colossal electoral disaster on Republicans that will not only secure the presidency for the Democrats but lose the GOP the House and Senate. I'll let the Trumpkins make the case for their man. I want to look at the potential for Republican disaster here. John McCain got roughly 60 million votes in 2008. Mitt Romney got roughly 61 million in 2012. Barack Obama secured 70...

In my post yesterday about the #NROrevolt Twitter rebellion by restrictionist Donald Trump fans against the pro-restrictionism National Review, I mentioned that there was a rich stream of apoplectically anti-Donald Trump commentary emanating from within the conservative media. I thought it might be useful to catalogue some of the vituperative and often entertaining arguments thus far into one place. (For a previous post on Trump's conservative-media supporters, click here.) The following list, encompassing neoconservatives, social cons, and libertarian-leaners, includes Bret Stephens, George Will, Glenn Beck, Michael Gerson, Charles C.W. Cooke, Karl Rove, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Kevin D. Williamson, Mona...

In a compelling column, George Will – who knows a thing or two about conservatism – makes the conservative case against Donald Trump. Mr. Will refers to Trump as an “unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate” who is coarsening our civic life. He labels Trump “a counterfeit Republican and no conservative.” And he argues that Trump is an affront to anyone devoted to the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review and a giant in American conservatism. Just as Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, so should conservatives today...

The logic of the Supreme Court ruling upholding the latest challenge to Obamacare is simple: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not destroy them,” writes Chief Justice John Roberts in his 6-3 majority decision in the case of King v. Burwell. “If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.” This is obviously true — and patently ridiculous. It’s true because of course the goal was to improve markets. It’s absurd because government policies often have the opposite effect of what is...

A group of prominent intellectuals, commentators and policymakers are calling on President Obama to act more assertively in Syria to help end the violence there and remove President Bashar al-Assad from power. SNIP The letter was organized by the neoconservative groups Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and signed by 56 mostly conservative foreign policy experts and commentators, including Liz Cheney, Karl Rove, Randy Scheunemann, former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, Commentary editor John Podhoretz, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and ex-New Republic editor Martin Peretz. Full letter text and signatories after the jump.

Can Rick Santorum win the Republican nomination? Sure. He’s leading in the polls nationally and in important states — and he’s doing so without so much as a campaign headquarters. Imagine what might happen if Santorum pulls off a few more stunning upsets. -SNIP- There seems to be a notion in political circles that Mitt Romney can just stay the course and go all the way to the convention in Tampa, but staying the course likely won’t be good enough. -SNIP- Republican voters would be eminently mistaken to believe that. As things stand right now, Rick Santorum can’t win the...

An enraged Barack Obama just took to the nation’s airwaves to announce his effort to strike a deal with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has fallen apart. Perhaps for the first time in American history, this president is literally using this press conference to create a financial panic over the weekend about the opening of the markets on Monday. He is warning of disaster on Monday. Clearly, he wants to use this as leverage to frighten the GOP into passing the plan proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which will push the debt ceiling problem into 2013,...

As the electoral wave ap proaches, pundits and news analysts have morphed into meteorologists, reading the complex undercurrents that will merge and swamp Democratic politicians nationwide on Tuesday. They're all concentrating on the Republicans. One group says the motive force is a school of rich Republican sharks swimming together in secret even though everybody knows who they are. Another says a conservative sleeping giant has been roused like Poseidon from the depths to which it had fallen in despair in 2008. A third says disgruntled moderates are directing the tides, and so Tea Partiers better sit down and stop rocking...

On Oct. 24, 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole got up at a campaign rally and promptly lost it: "I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about, or if people are thinking at all," he shouted. "Wake up, America!" Those words -- an unmistakable harbinger of the humiliation Dole would experience by losing to Bill Clinton in a landslide 12 days later -- seemed to echo painfully like Taylor Swift singing without the benefit of an auto-tune machine in the bewildering comments made over the last couple of days by President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. It's odd, to...

Twenty-seven years ago, I began my professional career at Time Magazine as a reporter-researcher in the World section, which was devoted to international news. Generally speaking, the World section ran 12 pages in the magazine. Nation, devoted to news within our borders, ran about the same or a page shorter. Think of that—an American publication, marketed to millions, that devoted slightly more of its attention, and vastly more of its budget, to news about events outside the United States.

The thing is, Eliot Spitzer is a crook. I’m not referring to the current prostitution scandal. I’m not referring to the scandal last year involving his senior aides and the leaking of confidential police information to the Albany Times Union. I’m not referring to the threatening phone call he made to the august John Whitehead, retired head of Goldman Sachs, who had the temerity to question a case Spitzer was building against an old friend of Whitehead’s. I’m referring to his conduct dating back to 1994, when he designed a complex scheme involving loans and real estate and collateralized apartments to evade...

Michelle Obama today said that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.” Really proud of her country for the first time? Michelle Obama is 44 years old. She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country? Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War;...

THE American Right is up in arms. The new immigration-reform bill announced with great fanfare last week is, say my fellow conservatives, a disaster of Biblical proportions. Virtual spittle is being expectorated all over the senators who negotiated the terms of the bill and the White House, which supports it. Anti-immigration conservatives are the most vocal people in the country when it comes to saying that our immigration system is broken. But now they have been presented with an "immigration reform" bill that attempts to address some of their concerns, and they're screaming bloody murder about it. They're right to...

NOBODY knows what is going to happen in the perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the one-time chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Every day, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's team presents evidence that Libby lied to a grand jury. Every day, Libby's defense effectively pokes holes in the prosecution's case. ...snip.... I have no doubt that Fitzgerald gets up in the morning and looks in the mirror and sees a righteous man. But alas, his eyes deceive him, and his mirror shows nothing but Narcissus.

THE profound quality of the suggestions offered by the Iraq Study Group - the panel headed by former Secretary of State James Baker that presented its report with such fanfare to the president yesterday morning - can be inferred from the following passage on page 60: "RECOMMENDATION 19: The President and the leadership of his national security team should remain in close and frequent contact with the Iraqi leadership." Truly, a grateful nation should fall on its knees and thank the benevolent Creator that the nine wise men and one woman who comprise the Iraq Study Group were willing to...

GEORGE W. Bush just delivered what may be the most important speech of his presidency since he went before the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, and declared his intention to seek regime change in Iraq. The time has come, the president all but said yesterday, to take the gloves off with Iran. "The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," he said flatly. He prefaced those words by saying that efforts were being made to find a diplomatic solution to the problem. Nonetheless, Bush has now said in the strongest sentence he has yet...

THE ABSURDITY OF THE 'HILLARY IS A BITCH' THEORY OF ELECTABILITYAND OTHER PODHORETZ NONSENSE by Mia T, 5.07.06 This is why many believe nominating a woman - nominating Hillary - will play into the GOP's hands. If the public is looking for a tough guy, won't the public want a guy? Maybe. On the other hand, if there were ever an American woman politician who could pass for a tough guy, it's Hillary Clinton. Start with the purely cosmetic. The fact that she never quite figured out what to do with her hair or her clothes, the fact that...

The lovably irascible Beldar, the Texas trial lawyer who is one of the two people on earth hotly defending the Miers nomination (the other being our buddy Hugh Hewitt), has posted a convenient link to articles written by Harriet Miers during one of her stints as a bar association honcho. He did this in part to address a charge I made on Hugh's show that Miers shouldn't be taken seriously because over the past 30 years of hot dispute on matters of constitutional law she hadn't published so much as an op-ed on a single topic of moment. Thank you,...

The War on Terror has always been an imprecise term, a vague placeholder for the real name of the conflict into which we have been unwillingly plunged. In a landmark speech he delivered yesterday, President Bush made it plain for the first time, really, that our enemy is not "terror" per se but something far more complex and therefore far more difficult to defeat.... And while he quickly followed that ground-breaking sentence with one assuring his listeners that "this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam," there's no mistaking that, four years into the War on Terror, the...