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The Ides of March was the Roman term for the 15th day of the month. This year it falls on Tuesday, which is the date of the Republican presidential primary elections in five states. It was on the Ides of March, of course, that Julius Caesar was famously stabbed in the back. Ted Cruz is trying a new twist on that these.

As I have noted, I never bet more than a six-pack on politics. That keeps it at a level that is fun but not serious. In that regard, I made a bet last spring with state Senator Mike Doherty over whether Chris Christie would formally enter the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. I said yes. Mike said no. Frankly I was a bit surprised. Mike is a conservative Republican from Warren County who has been quite outspoken in his assessment of Christie's overbearing ego and ambition. I thought he of all people would predict that Christie would make...

It's that time of year again. You know what time I mean - the time when the media promote that fake holiday created by a crazed california felon who wanted to create racial discord. That's right - Kwanzaa. Do a news search and you'll find hundreds of articles about wonderful Kwanzaa celebrations held all over America. Good luck finding a single one that mentions the sorry fact that the holiday's creator was imprisoned for torturing a couple of African-American women.

A lot of people are pronouncing the tea party movement dead after Tuesday’s election results. Goodbye and good riddance. The tea party movement was fun for a while. But before long it was taken over by know-it-alls and knuckleheads. If you doubt that, consider all of those partiers who like to say that the "tea" in "tea party" stands for "Taxed Enough Already." This is what is known as a "backronym." A backronym is formed when someone takes a perfectly good English word and tries to treat it as if it were an acronym. Every time I mention the slang...

The media may have pronounced Rick Perry the darling of the right wing, but Justin Raimondo has a different take. Perry's a liberal internationalist, just like the Texas governor before him: Another clueless Texas Governor surrounded by the same Praetorian Guard of conniving neocons who led us down the road to imperial overstretch and fiscal ruin last time around – isn’t that just what the GOP needs right now? The neocons have anointed their candidate, and it’s clear they have some sense he’s swimming upstream: "’He will distinguish himself from other Republicans as a hawk internationalist, embracing American exceptionalism and...

Listen to what Michele Bachmann has to say at the 1:08:50 mark of this video. She honestly appears to believe we could direct the secretary of the treasury to pay off all "pay off all debts of the United States, all interest, all obligations" now. (Note: I inserted the exact language and employed the italics because I noted that in the comments section various Bachmannites were claiming she called for paying off only the interest. If you can't understand plain English, this is not the blog for you.)  She then goes on to say she would balance the budget.  Huh?...

As I've noted, the 2012 Republican presidential primary will be vastly different from the 2008 race. Back then Ron paul was roundly derided for endorsing the traditional conservative approach toward foreign policy. This time around, a lot of the others are going to have to make a choice between conservatism and the liberal internationalism of the so-called "neo" conservatives. This piece on Haley Barbour from The Hill shows that the debate has begun: Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) may have set the tone for the foreign policy debate in the Republican presidential nominating contest when he questioned the war in...

On her blog, Elizabeth Wright offers an excellent analysis of the mass hysteria that is the Sarah Palin phenomenon. Wright is a black conservative who specializes in debunking the sense of victimhood that so many black leaders love to employ to their advantage. She argues that the many wannabe conservatives who are Palin fans are employing the same tactic. They invoke the liberal sense of victimhood in her defense. That of course is the essence of the Palin cult. It consists of people who feel that they're being put upon by their betters. It never occurs to these characters to...

As a conservative, I have pretty much given up on the Republican Party after the big-spending, big-government Bush years. I am firmly in the corner of the one man who called the entire era correctly, and that is Ron Paul.   However, of all the mainstream GOP hopefuls for the 2012 presidential nomination, I would say Mitt Romney is the most capable.  But Mitt's got a problem. A big problem. And that's his health-care policy.When Romney was governor of Massachusetts. he endorsed a health-insurance plan that is little different from the one now being pitched by the Democrats. That alone may...

It has long been my contention that the most regrettable development in American politics has been the takeover of the Republican Party by those denizens of the heartland who tended to infest the Democratic Party until quite recently. And I find further confirmation of this in the events involving Sarah Palin and that joke told by David Letterman. The joke involved may have been tasteless. But taste is not Palin's strength. She first came to prominence parading her pregnant daughter and the daughter's soon-to-be-ex-fiance around the national Republican convention. Recently the lad has been making the rounds of talk shows...

This whole controversy over the tragic incident involving Travis the chimpanzee has restored my faith in my fellow Americans. My faith that they're really dumb, I mean. Democrat or Republican, rural or urban, Americans are ignorant of the most basic facts of their own existence.

How quickly they forget. All these dupes of the national Republican Party, I mean. Just a few months ago John McCain was promising a plan that would have created a budget deficit equal to or greater than the one now being created by Barack Obama. But now that it's Obama who's in the White House, the Beltway Republicans are trying to convince us that they've seen the light and converted to fiscal conservatism.

In a prior post, I asked readers to guess the one Catholic ever named to a national Republican ticket. The answer was William Miller, running mate to the great Barry Goldwater in the 1964 race.   Here's another political trivia question with a religious link. Name the contender in this year's race who is technically excommunicated from the Catholic Church.ANSWER: According to the website of the Global Catholic Network the answer seems to be Palin. The site states that "once a person willingly repudiates Christ, embraces a heresy, knowing it to be contrary to divine and Catholic faith, or refuses submission...

I confess that from the beginning I didn't get the Sarah Palin nomination. Everything about it seemed wrong, from her chirpy Matanuska Valley girl accent, to the MTV morals of her family life, to her complete lack of any experience or even of any stated views on national or international affairs. But now I get it. It represents the last gasp of the effort to turn the Republican Party of 2008 into the Democratic Party of 1896. Or at least I hope it does. The 1896 presidential race represented the high point of populism in America. The Democratic candidate, William...

What Rush got wrong The Democrats are all worked up about Rush Limbaugh's remark about "phony soldiers" who oppose the Iraq War. They miss the point. Limbaugh's attack was not directed at Democrats. It was directed at Republicans. ..."Well, who are these Republicans?" Limbaugh asked. "I can think of Chuck Hagel, and I can think of Gordon Smith, two Republican senators. Who are the Republicans in the antiwar movement?" Hmm. We can start with Pat Buchanan, who predicted with amazing accuracy before the war began that American troops would still be bogged down in Iraq four years later. Then there's...

Those deep thinkers known as the neoconservatives like to make comparisons between the so-called "war on terror" and World War II. Very well then, here's a comparison. Six years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler had already been dead and gone for 2 1/2 years. By that time, the United States had raised and trained a military of 16 million. By Dec. 7, 1947, much of that force had been disbanded because the enemy had been so thoroughly defeated. But today, six years after the in cident that began the war on terror, Osama bin Laden is alive...

Well, I won't say I told you so. But I will say Don Cresitello told you so. Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about a rally in Morristown at which Cresitello, who is the mayor, spoke on the question of illegal im migration. His main objective is simply the attainment of 287(g) status for the local cops. That status deputizes them as agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. This entitles them to hand over any illegal aliens they encounter to the federal government. "We're not going to go after jay walkers," he told me when we...

The race for the Republican presidential nomination has just begun, yet the so-called "top tier" candidates have all been shown to have deep flaws. John McCain is a nice guy, but he's clearly off his rocker. Mitt Romney needs to change all of his positions 180 degrees. Oh, wait. He's already done that. And Rudy Giuliani, he's already bored the public to tears with his self-appointed Sept. 11 sainthood. The next time he mentions "911," it had better be because he's getting mugged. This creates an opportunity for a good, old-fashioned conservative to enter the race. And right on cue,...

Perhaps the lamest bit of spin coming out of the Bush administration concerning the Iraq War is that line, "If we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here." But just how will they get in? Simple. They'll come over the Mexican border and stay for as long as they please. That description applies to three of the six men accused in the Fort Dix terror plot. The parents of the three Duka brothers brought them into the country illegally more than 20 years ago. They attended school, grew into adulthood and took advantage of good,...

In his public television special "Buying the War," Bill Moyers decries the tendency of the media to help the White House sell war to the public. Moyers should know. He was quite a salesman in his day. Moyers served as press secretary to Lyndon Johnson in the run- up to the Vietnam War. In that role, he employed all the tools of modern-day public relations, from schmoozing reporters to intimidating them, to get the press to go along with a war "so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster." In the documentary, Moyers ap plies that description to the...