The Washington Times

How much difference can one person pressing an argument make? In the case of Andrew Sullivan and marriage rights for gays, the answer is a huge and perhaps decisive difference. In the eight years since he published “Virtually Normal,” which concluded with a call for gay marriage rights, he has refined his argument to force those confronting it to make a choice among three options: 1] accepting gay marriage; 2] stating a moral objection to homosexuality and homosexual life itself; and 3] incoherence.

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The Washington Times

Professional Republicans are increasingly getting the idea that they are a governing majority party, just as the Democrats under FDR became a governing majority party – and visions of 60 years or so of GOP electoral dominance, in the manner of the New Deal coalition, are dancing through their heads.

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The Washington Times

Much of the commentary following the House Democratic Caucus’s election of Nancy Pelosi as the new minority leader focused on the question of whether the proud San Francisco Democrat wasn’t too far to the left to be an asset in Democrats’ quest to regain the House. I think this focus is misplaced, along with the performance standard for Mrs. Pelosi it implies. Mrs. Pelosi’s real constituency is not the national electorate; it’s House Democrats. What matters is how and where she leads them.

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The Washington Times

The scene: A bright but modest kitchen, through the back door of which, right, the noontime sun is streaming. At kitchen counter stands Louise, a fit senior citizen of indeterminate age wearing an apron over a warm-up suit. She is chopping healthy salad ingredients.

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The Washington Times

A while back, a well-placed acquaintance of mine asked me about my thoughts on how President Bush should run for re-election and specifically, could I draft and send him a memo offering a campaign theme for Mr. Bush in 2004. I was flattered, of course. But I never wrote the memo.

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The Washington Times

As one European participant noted at a conference on trans-Atlantic relations here sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, had significant stores of weapons of mass destruction been found in Iraq, Europeans who had opposed, or at least doubted the rationale for the war, would likely have been obliged to concede that the United States and its supporters had a point. There has been no such moral boost for the United States.

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The Washington Times

The Bush administration put a huge bet down on the American economy, and the reported 7.2 percent real GDP growth rate in the past quarter is an indication the bet is paying off.

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The Washington Times

When you mention a U.S. military alliance facing trouble deciding where to go from here and divided over such questions as what threats it faces and how to deal with them, the case that probably comes to mind is the NATO alliance and the bitter transatlantic division over what to do about Iraq. Would that our difficulties were as confined as that. Across a different ocean, our 50-year-old military alliance with South Korea is also facing trouble, this time over the question of what to do about North Korea’s apparent determination to acquire nuclear weapons.

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The Washington Times

One big question on the minds of politically attuned Californians these days is what people in Washington make of the recall venture here – the process itself, the ugliness of the campaign, the landslide election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I tell them that the view from the east is mired in condescension. Which is too bad, because Californians have taught us some useful political lessons.

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