#4151
Economics professor says gap is due mostly to choices men and women make in their careers.
#4152
Former President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Feb. 11, 2009. (Screen Capture)
#4154
#4156
If White racism is keeping blacks down, why are black women immune to its ill effects, so much so that they are even slightly outperforming white women?
#4157
This morning, President Trump unleashed on his predecessor for wiretapping. 44th President Barack Obama was accused of wiretapping phones at Trump Tower by the current president over Twitter. Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ?wires tapped? in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) ?
#4158
A Chappaqua resident annoyed by the Hillary Clinton e-mail story took a very public stand.
#4159
Go to school, work, marry, have children. Why do we fail to convey this message to poor young people?
#4160
Jodi Rudoren, the Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times, is often criticized as anti-Israel and hostile in particular to conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the wake of a tighter-than-expected reelection campaign and Netanyahu's controversial speech to Congress, in which he warned of the dangers of a nuclear Iran, the Times truly "doubled down" on its hostility, accusing the PM of being panicky, power-hungry, and appealing to racism.
#4161
Everything I need to say about mass shootings has already been said in this post from December 2012. I wrote it in response to Sandy Hook. It went viral and was read by over a million people. I als...
#4162
Alexander Hamilton will be removed from the $10 bill, despite his importance. Well, we no longer deserve him. Here's who should replace him and others.
#4164
The crazed men run wild into traffic, waving their weapons at drivers and firing shots as officers approach before one man bounces off the bonnet of an oncoming vehicle
#4165
Two Indian American men with exactly the same name — same spelling, inflection and intonation — grabbed the hot-new-hires limelight on Wednesday in diametrically...
#4166
The showdown's turned violent.
#4167
The Palestinian Authority aired a children’s show in which a girl read a poem describing Jews as “monkeys” and the “most evil of creations.”
#4168
President Trump has scrambled the very meaning of conservatism. Now, a small group of intellectual publications are enjoying a golden age.
#4169
Students at the University of Chicago are protesting an upcoming campus event featuring Steve Bannon.
#4170
#4171
What did the president know and when did he know it? It’s a question that became famous during the Watergate scandal — and it applies equally well to the US abstention that allowed an anti-Israel r…
#4172
President Obama referred to himself 45 times over the course of the speech he delivered Tuesday at the memorial service for the five police officers killed in Dallas last week. Obama referred to hi
#4173
Nations that have implemented Marxism have witnessed the exact opposite migration trend.
#4174
Christianity’s tent is not big enough to accommodate both the supporters of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Brittney Cooper, who in a Wednesday piece for Salon blasted both the state’s pre-fix RFRA and the religious right in general. “This kind of legislation is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women,” declared Cooper. “That means these people don’t represent any kind of Christianity that looks anything like the kind that I practice…This white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, gun-toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a god of their own making. I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy...This God isn’t the God that I serve…He might be ‘biblical’ but he’s also an asshole.”
#4175
What lies behind Donald Trump’s nomination victory? Received wisdom among conservatives is that he, the outsider, sensed, marshaled, and came to represent a massive revolt of the Republican rank and file against the “establishment.”
This is the narrative: GOP political leaders made promises of all kinds and received in return, during President Obama’s years, major electoral victories that gave them the House, the Senate, twelve new governorships, and 30 state houses. Yet they didn’t deliver. Exit polls consistently showed that a majority of GOP primary voters (60 percent in some states) feel “betrayed” by their leaders.
#ad#Not just let down or disappointed. Betrayed. By RINOs who, corrupted by donors and lobbyists, sold out. Did they repeal Obamacare? No. Did they defund Planned Parenthood? No. Did they stop President Obama’s tax-and-spend hyperliberalism? No. Whether from incompetence or venality, they let Obama walk all over them.
But then comes the paradox. If insufficient resistance to Obama’s liberalism created this sense of betrayal, why in a field of 17 did Republican voters choose the least conservative candidate? A man who until yesterday was himself a liberal. Who donated money to those very same Democrats to whom the GOP establishment is said to have caved, including Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Hillary Clinton.
RELATED: Trump, Alack
Trump has expressed sympathy for a single-payer system of socialized medicine, far to the left of Obamacare. Trump lists health care as one of the federal government’s three main responsibilities (after national security); Republicans adamantly oppose federal intervention in health care. He also lists education, which Republicans believe should instead be left to the states.
As for Planned Parenthood, the very same conservatives who railed against the Republican establishment for failing to defund it now rally around a candidate who sings the praises of its good works (save for the provision of abortion).
RELATED: Trump: Something New under the Political Sun
More fundamentally, Trump has no affinity whatsoever for the central thrust of modern conservatism — a return to less and smaller government. If the establishment has insufficiently resisted Obama’s Big Government policies, the beneficiary should logically have been the most consistent, indeed most radical, anti-government conservative of the bunch, Ted Cruz.
Cruz’s entire career has consisted of promoting tea-party constitutionalism in revolt against party leaders who had joined “the Washington cartel.” Yet when Cruz got to his one-on-one with Trump at the Indiana OK Corral, Republicans chose Trump and his nonconservative, idiosyncratic populism.
#share#Which makes Indiana a truly historic inflection point. It marks the most radical transformation of the political philosophy of a major political party in our lifetime. The Democrats continue their trajectory of ever-expansive liberalism from the New Deal through the Great Society through Obama and Clinton today. While the GOP, the nation’s conservative party, its ideology refined and crystallized by Ronald Reagan, has just gone populist.
It’s an ideological earthquake. How radical a reorientation? Said Trump last week: “Folks, I’m a conservative. But at this point, who cares?”
RELATED: America Needs #NeverTrump Now More than Ever
Who cares? Wasn’t caring about conservatism the very essence of the talk-radio, tea-party, grass-roots revolt against the so-called establishment? They cheered Cruz when he led the government shutdown in the name of conservative principles. Yet when the race came down to Cruz and Trump, these opinion-shaping conservatives who once doted on Cruz affected a studied Trump-leaning neutrality.
Trump won. True, the charismatically challenged Cruz was up against a prepackaged celebrity, an already famous showman.
RELATED: In Case of Trump Nomination, Break Glass
True, Trump appealed to the economic anxiety of a squeezed middle class and the status anxiety of a formerly dominant white working class. But the prevailing conservative narrative — of anti-establishment fury — was different and is now exposed as a convenient fable. If Trump is a great big middle finger aimed at a Republican establishment that has abandoned its principles, isn’t it curious that the party has chosen a man without any?
Trump doesn’t even pretend to have any, conservative or otherwise. He lauds his own “flexibility,” his freedom from political or philosophical consistency. And he elevates unpredictability to a foreign-policy doctrine.
#related#The ideological realignment is stark. On major issues — such as the central question of retaining America’s global pre-eminence as leader of the free world, sustainer of Western alliances, and protector of the post–World War II order — the GOP candidate stands decidedly to the left of the Democrat.
And who knows on what else. On entitlements? On health care? On taxes? We will soon find out. But as Trump himself says of being a conservative — at this point, who cares?
As of Tuesday night, certainly not the GOP.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group.