Jeff Jacoby

In a demonstration that the more things change, the more they remain the same, Senator Ted Kennedy called last week for expanding the public sector at the expense of the private one. His speech at the National Press Club in Washington drew a lot of media attention...

“It’s hard not to notice that political discussion over the last decade has increasingly degenerated into name-calling,” Brian Anderson wrote in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal last year. “The insults most often come from the left:...

Some of the world’s most offensive contemporary fiction is being produced by the government of Saudi Arabia. Consider the mainstream Saudi newspaper Al-Jazeera, which recently asserted that terrorism against the United States does not stem from Islamist...

A common misconception about Arab terrorism against Israel is that it is committed in an effort to derail the “peace process.” President Bush echoed that fiction on Sunday when he commented on a wave of ghastly attacks that had just killed 26 Israeli...

It isn’t the case that the parents of John Walker — the Marin County child of privilege turned Taliban terrorist — never drew the line with their son. True, they didn’t do so when he was 14 and his consuming passion was collecting hip-hop CDs...

Last month, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni began a visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the latest in a depressingly long line of US envoys sent to nudge along the Israeli-Arab “peace process.” Zinni’s mission, it is safe to say, will...

To hear Prince Bandar tell it, Saudi Arabia is devoted to the United States. “Our role,” the Saudi ambassador said in a CNN interview some weeks ago, “is to stand solid and shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends, the people of the United...

If nothing else, the Microsoft case showed how ferocious federal prosecutors can be in fighting “monopolistic predators.” Let a company try to stifle competition, let it be accused of obstructing the market or blocking other companies’ access to...

A lot of liberals hate Rush Limbaugh — or the caricature that they think of as Rush Limbaugh — but even the most doctrinaire Bolshevik had to feel at least a twinge of sympathy when the nation’s preeminent radio personality announced last month that...

Jonathan Franzen liked it when Publishers Weekly dubbed his new novel, “The Corrections,” a “masterpiece.” He liked it when his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, sent advance copies of the book to reviewers with a note from the...

To what do journalists covering this war owe their loyalty? The Journalism 101 answer is: to the story. But what happens when getting out the story means jeopardizing the legitimate war aims of the United States — or the lives of American soldiers? The answer to...

“I assume I’m talking to a big fan of rail,” says Michael Dukakis with a laugh. “Right?” To tell the truth, I have no strong feelings about train travel one way or another. But Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and now...

Of the five countries described below, can you identify the one(s) excluded from the US-led coalition in the war on terrorism? Country A is free and democratic, a steadfast ally of the United States. Its citizens know what it means to be victimized by terrorism, and...

It began three years ago in an ugly encounter between a motorist and the police. It ended earlier this summer in a dreadful opinion by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. And as the noted civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate observes in a characteristically...

This was George Bush’s warning to the international terrorists and their sponsors: “The United States will be firm with terrorists. We will not make concessions…. If we find states supplying money, weapons, training, identification, documents,...

Of the five countries described below, can you identify the one(s) excluded from the US-led coalition in the war on terrorism? Country A is free and democratic, a steadfast ally of the United States. Its citizens know what it means to be victimized by terrorism, and...

In the summer of 1997, a young Israeli art student named Tatiana Susskin drew a caricature portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a pig and tacked up copies of it on Arab storefronts in Hebron. She could hardly have devised a more inflammatory insult. The crude leaflets...

Free trade across international borders is not just good for business or good for job-creation. It is good — period. So said President Bush in a remarkable speech earlier this year, when he made the case for free trade on unabashedly moral grounds. “Open...

Like many other people, Bud Welch lost a member of his family — his daughter Julie — when Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Unlike most of the others, Welch opposes the death penalty, even for McVeigh, and is willing to say so...