I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.

[A] re-elected McConnell, with a Republican majority, would, he says, emulate his model of majority leadership - the 16 years under a Democrat, Montana'€™s Mike Mansfield. He, like McConnell, had a low emotional metabolism but a subtle sense of the Senate's singular role in the nation's constitutional equilibrium.

Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.

Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right.

(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.

When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.