Oh, sure, there’s enough particulate matter in the New York City air to turn a white shirt gray by the end of the workday. And a couple whiffs of a narrow West Side cross street tightly enclosed by high-rises on a hot summer day when the trash is overdue for pickup could put even the strongest stomach to the test...

At last, we have the essential complement to Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, and its subtitle—“How America and Europe Are Alike”—will surely evoke protest from those on both sides of the Atlantic who have become vested advocates of the differences between the United States and Europe and the manifest superiority of one side over and against the other...

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) ranks at or near the top of lists of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, thanks especially to his magnum opus, Being and Time, published in Germany in 1927. . . .

With nothing to lose, will they go for broke? . . .

The view of Obama from Central Europe. . . .

Perhaps President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will spur a sudden global outpouring of love and affection for the United States, but the American Political Science Association (APSA) thinks our image problem runs deeper: Its 20-member blue chip task force (minus two dissenters) has concluded that U.S. standing in the world is in trouble...

If Hogwarts were a school for politicians, there would be a required class on "Defense Against the Dark Arts of Demagoguery."...

Since there is so little of it, let's start with the good news about the release from prison and triumphant return to Libya of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the terrorist who was supposedly serving a life sentence in a Scottish prison for his role in blowing Pan Am 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people...

Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause?...

Here's the main thought Republicans are consoling themselves with these days...

Speaking to the nation on the night he clinched the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama rejected the kind of politics that "uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon."...

"In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car..."

There's no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you'd have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats...

A miniflap recently broke out over a Politico item about a July 9 memo to "Interested Parties" from Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist...

Three weeks ago, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Bush administration's firing of several U.S. attorneys and did so to bad reviews even from conservatives, most of official Washington figured he was a goner...

When I came to Washington in 1985, it was with the expectation that I would be spending my life fighting the Cold War...

If, as Karl Marx's adage holds, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, what happens when the repetition repeats itself?

At what level of giving, if any, would the people who contribute money to political candidates begin to feel overstretched?

I would have joined surge supporters in voting against the House supplemental appropriations bill because of the constraints it seeks to impose on whatever ability we may have to get to acceptable conditions in Iraq, especially the arbitrary imposition of a withdrawal timetable regardless of military needs...

When I moved to Washington 21 years ago and decided to live in the District rather than Maryland or Virginia, I knew I was voluntarily choosing to forgo something most Americans take entirely for granted, namely, their say in choosing a representative in the House and two members of the Senate...

It's hypocrisy season in Washington...

We all know that Hillary Clinton has found herself twisted into a knot over her position on Iraq...

The essential question in crowded presidential fields is always this: What are you really running for?

The House vote opposing the surge in Iraq drew 17 Republicans, far fewer than Democrats hoped, so the scenario of a collapse in congressional support for the war effort forcing President Bush's hand has been averted for now...

The annual meeting of defense and foreign-policy eminences here is usually devoted to a fair amount of carping from one side of the Atlantic to the other...

Opposition to the Iraq war has understandably led to a more generally anti-interventionist climate in Washington...

For years now, the political science literature has been exploring the phenomenon of the "democratic peace," according to which, to state it in its bluntest form, democracies do not go to war with one another...

The Politico, the new Web site specializing in Washington political coverage, may or may not be the wave of the future...

Several strands of conventional wisdom are gathering into an early narrative line on the 2008 presidential race...

No surprise, but Democrats on Capitol Hill and most everywhere else have checked out on Iraq, and they're taking a few Republicans with them...

President Bush has apparently decided that he wants one more chance to win this war...

t's not every politician who gets to write the headline for his own obituary...

This has been a good year for taking stock of the state of the political system...

Not that they are in any other respect comparable, but Iraq and the Clinton health care reform effort of 1993-94 are politically comparable in that each precipitated the loss of control of Congress by the party of the president...

A literary agent once told me that when you are trying to sell a book to a publisher, you should always keep in mind that it's not really the book you're selling; it's the idea of the book...

At the Riga airport on the way to a German Marshall Fund-sponsored conference running parallel to the biannual NATO summit, a German friend asked me what I thought George W. Bush would say in the speech he was scheduled to give...

When people look back on the 2006 elections 10 years later, what will they see?

As we mull the implications of the November elections for what comes next in Iraq, it's worth keeping in mind that this was, in fact, the third time voters have had an opportunity to weigh in on the subject...

Generally speaking, elections are about comparative judgments...

Pathetic Republicans, who can save you now?

Beginning a little less than a year ago, Democrats set expectations for today's elections at levels ranging from high to highest: They were going to win back control of the House for the first time since 1995 and the Senate as well....

Here's an observation for one week before the midterm: Throughout the Bush administration, Democrats have generally believed that they are poised on the brink of victory...

There was one consistently amusing poll question asked in the run-up to the 2004 presidential primary season…

If I had to sum up the conventional wisdom a month before the congressional elections, it would be this: If Democrats can't win control of the House this year, they really are lame...

When Karl Rove relinquished the position of deputy White House chief of staff earlier this year, supposedly in order to concentrate full-time on retaining the Republican majority in this year's congressional elections, the most prevalent Washington reaction was that the move constituted a demotion...

Every so often I retreat to the privacy of my cerebrum to debate the following proposition: Resolved, that the sole reason the United States remains democratic in character at the national level is the election of its president every four years, the Congress of the United States having become a dysfunctional and decadent institution...

Just about a year ago at the United Nations, leaders at the world summit embraced a principle that amounts to a revolution in moral consciousness, the "responsibility to protect...

We are all Americans,"Nous sommestous Americains," was the headline in France's Le Monde five years ago today, as the world began to take stock of the shocking attack the day before...

Suppose, five years after September 11, 2001, you had to assign yourself a single adjective to describe how you feel and what you think in relation to the events of that day...

Do you need to know who a party's presidential nominee will be before you can say anything about who its nominee for vice president will be…

Some of the key considerations in selecting a vice presidential running mate, as followers of our summer seminar in this space know, are part unity, ticket balancing, electoral advantage and plausibility as an eventual successor to the Oval Office…

There are two kinds of presidential candidates: those who actually aspire to the nation's highest office and those who are running to elevate their profile or push an ideological agenda…

The 2008 presidential election is a wide-open contest, and Democrats, as we saw here last week, have responded with a broad field…

The 2008 presidential election will be a wide-open contest. Democrats are responding to this fact with gusto, as a gaggle of serious candidates has already come forward…

Apparently, Israel didn't get the memo about the inefficacy of military force as revealed by the difficulties of the United States in Iraq…

The bottom line is this: Are we going to finish the job in Europe, or are we going to turn our backs on those who haven't yet made their way in from the cold…

When I was a kid, on the Fourth of July, Dad and I used to drag the stereo speakers out onto the back porch in the morning and treat the neighborhood to a rousing full-blast rendition of "The Stars and Stripes Forever …

When you see your opportunity, you take it…

The failure of the European Constitutional Treaty in referenda in the Netherlands and France last year led to a determination among European leaders that the time had come for a "moment of reflection…

Every so often appears a piece of writing that just takes your breath away for the way in which it encapsulates the vacuous self-centeredness and resentment into which our world of unprecedented convenience and comfort invites the human personality to dissipate…

Engage or confront…

Democrats have a mantra they trot out from time to time when they fall to squabbling among themselves: You can always count on Republicans to march in lockstep, whereas Democrats just can't keep from arguing with each other…

With conditions in Haiti growing worse by the hour, the Obama administration has pledged $100 million and is sending 5,000 troops to help in relief efforts there. . . .

Obama signs a treaty with the Russians and he established limits on using nuclear weapons. Also, why drop "Islamic radicalism" from list of terror terms?

President Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize...

In the new online volume, Future Challenges in National Security and Law, members of the Hoover Institution’s Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and Law and guest contributors offer incisive commentary on the controversies that have erupted over national security law in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, laying the foundations for understanding such future issues...

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: As we mentioned earlier, another presidential nominee is in the spotlight this week, Sonia Sotomayor...

Sorry, GOP: Research Shows Nation No Longer Leans Right...

Tod Lindberg, editor of Policy Review, is author of The Political Teachings of Jesus. Lindberg recently talked to National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez about Jesus and 2008...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Tod Lindberg, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of its Washington D.C.-based journal Policy Review...

Glad to join a discussion of what seems to me, approaching this question from a political point of view that is a bit of an outlier at the Cafe, is nonetheless an idea whose time has come: a concert of democracies...