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Mona Charen Columns category, Page 2

Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff, dies at 88
Mona Charen: Can we talk about abortion without tearing each other apart?
Those of us who have long criticized Roe v. Wade for usurping the power of legislatures to make serious policy decisions must now contemplate the reality that We the People may yet get a chance to legislate on this fraught matter. Hold the brass bands. Are we capable of discussion...
Mona Charen: Dr. Oz quacks the code of Republican politics
Sean Parnell, the Trump-anointed candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, dropped out of the race after a custody hearing that featured lurid details of his relationship with his ex-wife. Laurie Snell alleged Parnell had struck her, choked her, left her by the side of the road and hit one of their...
Mona Charen: Family, Pfizer, Zoom and other things I’m grateful for
Each year at Thanksgiving, before tucking into the feast, we go around the table and express gratitude for something. My husband often advises that mentioning family is off limits — he thinks it goes without saying that we are most grateful for our families — but this rule is flouted...
Mona Charen: Democrats, you have one job
Barring some act of God, the Democratic Party is going to get crushed in the midterms. The president’s party usually loses House seats in off-year elections. Since 1946, the average loss has been 25 seats — which is scary enough for a Democratic Party that currently holds a 221-213 seat...
Mona Charen: Welcome to the Daddy Wars
After what seems like 150 years of “Mommy Wars” in America, we haven’t solved anything. So we’re applying what we haven’t learned to a new front: We’re adding men to the fray. Welcome to the Daddy Wars! When it was revealed that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was taking four weeks...
Mona Charen: Have Democrats forgotten how to cheat and steal?
Isn’t it interesting that Democrats appear to have forgotten how to manipulate voting machines, stuff ballot boxes, engage in the wee-hour ballot dumps, collect ballots from dead people and coordinate with Chinese/Venezuelan governments to change the outcome of elections? Two-thirds of Republicans believe that’s what happened in 2020. And yet,...
Mona Charen: Why are we so awful to each other?
On Saturday morning, as I was preparing to head to our basement to use the stationary bike, I smelled something. Opening the basement door, I saw something no one ever welcomes on the floors of their homes — running water, ankle-high. Calling to my husband to get the wet/dry vac,...
Mona Charen: Will critical race theory sink McAuliffe?
There are two big reasons that Republican Glenn Youngkin shouldn’t be within striking distance of Virginia’s state house. The first is that Virginia has been trending Democratic over the past decade and a half. Joe Biden won the state by more than 10 points last year. The second and far...
Mona Charen: Robert E. Lee doesn’t deserve a statue, but Thomas Jefferson does
In New York City, a statue of Thomas Jefferson has graced the City Council chamber for 100 years. Last week, the Public Design Commission voted unanimously to remove it. “Jefferson embodies some of the most shameful parts of our country’s history,” explained Adrienne Adams, a councilwoman from Queens. Assemblyman Charles...
Mona Charen: Narcissism of small differences
Back in 2016, when formerly distinguished conservatives were suddenly lining up to issue glassy-eyed endorsements of a half-mad reality TV figure, Jonah Goldberg wrote a brilliant column comparing the experience to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” He captured the sense so many of us had that nearly an entire party...
Mona Charen: What Nobel Prizes say about national greatness
It’s Nobel Prize season. The just-announced 2021 winners in medicine/physiology are two Americans, Drs. David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, who’ve done groundbreaking research on the senses of touch, taste, heat and pain. Their joint discoveries may yield new, nonopioid treatments for pain and other breakthroughs. Patapoutian had his cellphone switched...
Mona Charen: What we lost when the GOP lost itself
In the typhoon of congressional brinkmanship we witnessed last week, one detail caught my eye that easily could have been lost in the gales. A group of 35 Republican senators signed a letter to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden about an aspect of the House...
Mona Charen: Why I’m a single-issue voter
In a few weeks, Virginia will hold an election, and I will have to make a decision. In the past, it would have been no contest. I’d have voted Republican. But now, though Terry McAuliffe leaves me cold, I will vote for him. I guess that makes me a single-issue...
Mona Charen: The future is female — is that entirely a good thing?
“Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.” So declares the opening sentence of a Wall Street Journal piece that is creating quite the buzz. Here are some of the eye-popping statistics: Women now account for 59.5% of college students...
Mona Charen: Pro-life cause deserves better than Texas law
The Supreme Court’s fateful step of judicializing abortion in 1973 effectively removed it from the political process for nearly a half-century. Americans’ passionate feelings on the matter were displaced from legislative disputes (where they belonged) to the composition of the Supreme Court, resulting in crude, openly political, circuslike nomination battles...
Mona Charen: The party of violence
A Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania gave a heated address on Aug. 29 about mask mandates in schools. Steve Lynch is tired, he said, of providing his school board arguments and data (he apparently thinks the data support letting kids go maskless), but the important thing about...
Mona Charen: Nation building was not the point
Damon Linker is one of the sharpest political/cultural observers writing today. If you’re not already reading his contributions to The Week, you should. He is also my colleague on The Bulwark’s weekly podcast “Beg to Differ.” In the spirit of our podcast, I must beg to differ with his recent...
Veronique de Rugy: When government’s foolish errands turn into fiascoes
Mona Charen is off this week. Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Another government failure, another outrage. This time the scandal is brought on by the less-than-orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the realization that 20 years of...
Mona Charen: Vaccinate the world. Now.
About six weeks ago, I wrote a piece urging that the United States take the lead in vaccinating the world. The case for doing so is even more compelling now. Yes, we’ve been scratching and clawing at one another domestically over vaccine hesitancy, vaccine disinformation, vaccine mandates, masks, schools and...
Mona Charen: Cheney and Kinzinger may be too late
I wish I could be a Cheney fan. I really do. Rep. Liz Cheney has conducted herself honorably for the past nine months. Her courage in telling the truth about the election and the insurrection of Jan. 6 has been punished by the Republican conference, which booted her from leadership...
Mona Charen: Can national solidarity solve our race problems?
On Oct. 16, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. As Edmund Morris relates in “Theodore Rex,” many Americans were pleased with this precedent-shattering dinner. But not all. Definitely not all. In the South, disgust and vitriol shook the rafters. A sample of...
Veronique de Rugy: The return of the tax gap hype
Every policy wonk will tell you that after you live in Washington long enough, you start seeing the same issues reemerge on a regular basis. Common ones are praise for the magical ability of government spending to help pay for itself during recessions and hand-wringing over the myth of middle-class...
Mona Charen: What we lost when we won the Cold War
Almost exactly 60 years ago, the newly appointed Chadian ambassador to the United States, Adam Malick Sow, was heading south on Maryland’s Route 40 toward Washington, D.C. He stopped at the Bonnie Brae diner and asked for a menu. The owner, Mrs. Leroy Merritt, sneered, “We don’t serve (expletive) here,”...
Mona Charen: What has happened to decency?
Sen. Mitt Romney recently appeared on Jake Tapper’s CNN show, and for a few brief minutes, I felt transported to a saner world. Asked about the gross things some on the right are saying about Gen. Mark Milley, he responded: “Gen. Milley is a person of extraordinary accomplishment and personal...
Mona Charen: The difference a father makes
There was a Father’s Day parade in Washington, D.C., that warmed my family-obsessed heart. It was called the Black Fathers Matter motorcade, and it featured silver and black balloons, a band serenading the crowd aboard a flatbed truck, kids singing their dads’ praises, community leaders, politicians and at the end,...


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