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Byline: Charles Krauthammer - - - This column is excerpted from Charles Krauthammer's 2017 essay 'The Authoritarian Temptation,' published in his posthumous book, 'The Point of It All.' The book [...]

Byline: Charles Krauthammer I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I'm afraid I must tell [...]

Byline: Charles Krauthammer The U.S. shoots down a Syrian fighter-bomber. Iran launches missiles into eastern Syria. Russia threatens to attack coalition aircraft west of the Euphrates. What is going on? [...]

Byline: Charles Krauthammer 'Whom the gods would destroy, they first tempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.' -- Irving Kristol The quixotic American pursuit of Middle East peace is a perennial. [...]

Byline: Charles Krauthammer Under the dark gray cloud, amid the general gloom, allow me to offer a ray of sunshine. The last two months have brought a pleasant surprise: Turns [...]

Byline: Charles KrauthammerIn October 1981, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated, the networks ran over to Cairo and began covering the events all day and all night. The only [...]

For months Mitt Romney has been matching President Obama small ball for small ball. His only momentum came when he chose Paul Ryan as his running mate and seemed ready [...]

* Given the state of the economy, Barack Obama should be 15 points behind Mitt Romney. Why is he tied? The empathy gap. On 'caring about average people,' Obama wins [...]

To say all individuals are the product of society is banal. President Obama rises above banality with fallacy: equating society with government, collectivity with the state. The most formative, important [...]

* Yes, presidents have no control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The 'fuel of the past,' he calls [...]

* President Obama faces two massive problems--jobs and debt. They're both the result of his spectacularly failed Keynesian gamble: massive spending that left us a stagnant economy with high and [...]

The turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and our muddled, gridlocked, [...]

Byline: CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER WASHINGTON - Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead. The 1,000-page monstrosity that emerged in various editions from Congress was done in by widespread national revulsion not just at […]

WHEN President Obama returned from his first European trip, I observed that while over there he had been 'acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating' between America and [...]

'Apart from the time restriction [a truce that lapses after 10 years] and the refusal to accept Israel's existence, Mr. Meshal's terms approximate the Arab League peace plan ...' -- [...]

A $14 TRILLION economy hangs by a thread composed of a) a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, b) a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration and c) $165 million. That's $165 million [...]

EXCEPT for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman leaves office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman's rehabilitation took decades. Bush's will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. [...]

IN MY previous life, I witnessed far more difficult postmortems. This one is easy. The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 -- caught in the rubble when the roof [...]

FOR THE LAST 150 years, most American war presidents -- most notably Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt -- have entered (or re-entered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George Bush. Not [...]

THE DEMOCRATS are in a panic. In a presidential race that is impossible to lose, they are behind. Obama devotees are frantically giving advice. Tom Friedman tells him to 'start [...]

GAS is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela [...]

America's sudden change in car-buying habits makes suitable mockery of that absurd debate Congress put on in December on fuel efficiency standards. SO NOW WE KNOW: The price point is [...]

BEFORE SENDING Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Dr. Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition [...]

JUST four months after 9/11, George Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the 'axis of evil' and declared that defanging these rogue regimes was America's most urgent national [...]

MITT ROMNEY declares, 'Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.' Barack Obama opens his speech at his South Carolina Oprah rally with 'Giving all praise and honor to God. [...]

WHEN Mitt Romney's father ran for the presidency 40 years ago, his Mormonism was not an issue. When Mo Udall was a major challenger for the Democratic nomination in 1976, [...]

SOMEONE'S GOTTA DO IT. No one's gonna do it. So I'll do it. Your Honor, I rise in defense of drunken astronauts. You've all heard the reports, delivered in scandalized [...]

YOU MIGHT NOT have noticed, but we broke another space record last month when astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria logged 67 hours of spacewalking. If you consider that the equivalent of the [...]

IS THERE ANYTHING more depressing than yet another promise of energy independence in yet another State of the Union address? By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the [...]

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic stem cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. [...]

BORAT' is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a runaway moneymaker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as [...]

WHEN JUST A WEEK AGO Barack Obama showed a bit of ankle and declared the mere possibility of his running for the presidency, the chattering classes swooned. Now that every [...]

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union [...]

IN HIS TELEVISED Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not 'leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with [...]

IN THE AUSTRALIAN House of Representatives last month, opposition member Julia Gillard interrupted a speech by the minister of health thusly: 'I move that that sniveling grub over there be [...]

IT WAS ANOTHER one of those pictures that goes instantly around the world. A young Palestinian, whaling in wretched sorrow, grieving over her dead father, stepmother and five siblings, killed [...]

I DO NOT DOUBT the president's sincerity in wanting to humanize and regularize the lives of America's 11 million illegal aliens. But good intentions are not enough. For decades, the [...]

I am no great fan of the death penalty. I oppose it in almost all cases, though not on principle. There are crimes high, monstrous and rare that warrant the [...]

MANY of the hundreds of thousands of Hispanic demonstrators who poured out into the streets last week may not know much English, but they've learned the language of American politics: [...]

EVERY SENSIBLE immigration policy has two objectives: 1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters, and 2) to find a way to [...]

AND NOW, polygamy. With the sweetly titled HBO series 'Big Love,' polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline 'Polygamists, Unite!' Newsweek informs us of 'polygamy activists emerging in [...]

NOTHING TELLS YOU more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign film is 'Paradise Now,' a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best [...]

I'M JUST GLAD he didn't shoot Scalia. Well, everyone's entitled to one Quailgate joke, so that's mine. Although the best one, occurring at the Monday White House news briefing, was [...]

THE STROKE suffered by Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could prove to be one of the great disasters in the country's near-60-year history. As I write this, Sharon's condition remains [...]

2005 WAS already the year of the demagogue, having been dominated for months by the endlessly echoed falsehood that the president 'lied us into war.' But the year ends with [...]

LEST YOU GET carried away with today's good news from Iraq, consider what's happening next door in Iran. The wild pronouncements of the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have gotten [...]

OF ALL the mistakes that the Bush administration has committed in Iraq, none is as gratuitous and self-inflicted as the bungling of the trial of Saddam Hussein. Although Saddam deserves [...]

BECAUSE we Americans tend to gauge Middle East success by White House signing ceremonies complete with dignitaries, three-way handshakes and pages of treaty provisions, no one seems to have noticed [...]

BECAUSE every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise [...]

THANK GOD for $3.50 gasoline. True, we had it for only a brief shining moment, and there is not much good to be said about the catastrophic hurricanes that caused [...]