David Keene
Columns by David Keene
Extra security is a loss for liberty
It was 2001 not long after the twin towers had fallen and the nation's politicians were running scared. George W. Bush was in the White House and John Ashcroft was attorney general. Published May 11, 2017
Campus free speech must be protected
The traditional belief that free speech and unfettered debate underpin a free society is wounded and dying among many in this country. This is particularly true among the students and faculties at the nation's elite colleges and universities and within the ranks of the leftist "progressives" who dominate today's Democratic Party. Published May 8, 2017
Donald Trump still underestimated at 100 days in
Last week has to be counted as President Trump's best since his election and inauguration. It was a week that should have shocked his detractors who have been assuming as a matter of faith that whatever momentary fit of public madness catapulted him into the Oval Office has passed. Published May 1, 2017
Rob Quist socialist leanings make Montana victory unlikely
Fresh from special election defeats in Kansas and Georgia, Democratic professionals and activists alike are focusing on the election to fill Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's Montana congressional seat as one more chance to chip away at the Republican majority in the House. Published April 25, 2017
Venezuela civil war may be imminent
As American public attention has been focusing on terror attacks in Paris, the crisis in Syria and the nuclear-armed lunatic running North Korea, Venezuela to our south is about to explode into violence and civil war with incalculable consequences in our own hemisphere. Published April 24, 2017
Woodrow Wilson legacy tainted by racism, attacks on Constitution
As a college undergraduate some decades ago, I was assigned an essay on the three most evil men of the 20th century. Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were obvious choices, and most of my fellow students chose from that group. I agreed on Hitler and Lenin, but felt that Stalin and Mao were just additional manifestations of the evil Lenin embodied. My third choice was Woodrow Wilson, which upset my professor at the time, but which I stand by today. Published April 10, 2017
Susan Rice lies will haunt liberals
Most reasonable observers believed or at least hoped that the nation would finally be spared having to listen to the Clinton and Obama administrations' go-to liar after last November's election. In the normal course of events, National Security Advisor Susan Rice would have simply packed her bags and vanished into well-paid obscurity at a "progressive" university or think tank. But it was not to be. Published April 5, 2017
Russia scandal also may touch Democrats
Washington and the national media are all about double standards. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the sort of Russian "ties" used to condemn Republicans as possible agents of Moscow are dismissed as irrelevant when Democrats are revealed to have deeper, stronger and far more remunerative connections to Russian banks, oligarchs and institutions than any Republican currently being banished to the outer darkness by Democratic "progressives." Published March 28, 2017
Sanctuary state Maryland may be misguided
Maryland is quite a place. The state's voters elected a Republican governor in 2014, but control remains in the hands of the same "progressives" who enjoy veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature on most issues. They vote as if former Gov. and presidential wannabe Martin O'Malley is still ruling the roost in Annapolis. Published March 22, 2017
A gun-crime tool that works
President Trump threatened last week to send the "feds" in to clean up Chicago if the city doesn't do something to reduce the escalating murder rate that has made the gang-infested Windy City among the most dangerous metropolitan areas in the world. What the president doesn't seem to realize is that he has the tools to deal with the crisis without so drastic a step. Published January 30, 2017
Communities should decide if schools need guns
Members of the Senate committee grilling Betsy DeVos last week were shocked at her response to a question from Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy. Mr. Murphy, an ardent supporter of gun control, asked the prospective secretary of education whether "guns have a place in or around schools." Published January 23, 2017
A taste for authentic liberalism
Nat Hentoff, who died Saturday at age 91, was a champion of a classical liberalism that is no longer in vogue. He believed, above all, in freedom, the individual and the free speech guarantees found in the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights. He was in many ways the conscience of the First Amendment at a time when everyone from the left to right at least professed to believe in the right of those they disagreed with to speak their piece. Published January 9, 2017
Confusing Vladimir Putin with the old Soviet threat
We seem prepared to believe any evil of Vladimir Putin's Russia, which has with its second-rate military establishment and failing economy somehow morphed in the minds of many Americans into a greater threat than the old Soviet Union. Published January 2, 2017
Campus radicals can be beaten by conservatives
The University of Wisconsin in Madison has always been a bit strange. I ought to know. I was there during the wave of radicalism that crested in the Sixties. Published December 26, 2016
‘Fake’ news has its moment in the sun
Scurrilous and "fake" news has been around since the penny tabloids of an earlier era when politicians actually subsidized newspapers and paid journalists to spread lies about their opponents to what they hoped was a credulous public. Published December 12, 2016
Donald Trump’s secretary of state list narrows
President-elect Donald Trump is having a heckuva time deciding on who to nominate as secretary of State. It began with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's insistence that he wanted and deserves the job as payback for the yeoman work he did for candidate Trump when many leading Republicans were, shall we say, less than enthusiastic in their support of his fellow New Yorker. Published December 1, 2016
Democrats ‘A pack of sore losers’
It was election night 1960 and as the votes trickled in, those surrounding Vice President Richard Nixon were convinced Democratic vote fraud in Illinois and Texas were about to cost their man the White House in the closest presidential election since 1840. Published November 28, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s election would mean saying goodbye to guns
Earlier this year when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre addressed the NRA's annual meeting both claimed that if she ever becomes president, Hillary Clinton will do all in her power to eviscerate or, in Mr. Trump's words, "abolish" the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Mrs. Clinton and her supporters called the charges lies and claim there is no evidence that she wants to do either. Published November 1, 2016
Election offers controversial choice
Former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld once said that when a nation goes to war it must by necessity rely on "the army it has rather than the army it wishes it had." Anyone contemplating the political struggle in which the nation, the Republican Party and America's conservatives find themselves in today should think about those words because in a political campaign voters have a choice between not the candidates they might have wanted, but the candidates on the ballot. Published October 16, 2016
Preserving the ‘genius’ of the Constitution
The success of the American Republic is directly traceable to the wisdom and work of the 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a constitution designed not so much to empower government, but to limit that power. Forrest McDonald, perhaps the most influential of historians on the intellectual origins of the Constitution, claimed it could not have been written by any other 55 men at any other time in history. At fewer than 8,000 words, it's a short document when compared to the fundamental documents of other nations and it has, in spite of its critics, stood up remarkably well since its adoption in 1789. Published September 12, 2016
