David Keene
Columns by David Keene
Orrin Hatch deserves a Medal of Freedom
Last week, President Trump awarded Sen. Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Senate Republican ever, the Medal of Freedom. In doing so, Mr. Trump emphasized the high personal regard in which he holds Mr. Hatch, but the medal was deserved not just because the president likes the senator, but because Orrin Hatch deserves recognition as a Senate great at the end of a distinguished career. Published November 20, 2018
Confirming Aurelia Skipwith
Last April, Aurelia Skipwith, the new deputy assistant secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks arrived at a hotel for a speech. When she asked the desk clerk for directions to the ballroom, she got not only the directions she sought, but the observation that "you must be an Obama holdover." Published October 29, 2018
Gosnell the murderer revisited
When Philadelphia police obtained a search warrant and raided Dr. Kermit Gosnell's clinic eight years ago, they were seeking evidence of illegal prescriptions for opioids and other addictive drugs. Gosnell would later be sentenced to 30 years in prison for running an illegal prescription mill, but they found much more. Published October 22, 2018
Montana voters don’t like politicians who tell them one thing and do another
Spending a little time in a state like Montana is enough to convince anyone that Washington is not the center of the universe. President Trump carried the state in 2016 by some 20 points and has been back here twice in the last month in an effort to help Republican State Auditor Matt Rosendale beat back Democratic Sen. Jon Tester's bid for a third term. Published September 23, 2018
Adrift in the age of #MeToo
The other day as my old friend Adam Walinsky and I were lamenting the craziness of the current political atmosphere, he asked me what earlier period I believe was as bad as the one we are living through today. Adam, a former speechwriter and aide to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, once ran as the Democratic candidate for attorney general in New York and is a close student of history. I asked in return if he was thinking of the McCarthy era, Published September 18, 2018
Weaving a ‘blue wave’ from impeachment fantasies
Democrats are convinced that the "blue wave" they've been counting on to set the stage for President Donald Trump's impeachment in a House of Representatives they control is out there and building. They continue to enjoy a four to six point "generic" advantage in the polls, and there is evidence that their voters are more anxious to turn out and vote than their Republican counterparts — two indicators that combine with the media's continuing effort to demonize Mr. Trump to give them more than a fighting chance to take the House. Published September 11, 2018
Chuck Todd’s call to arms masks his own bias
NBC's Chuck Todd has taken to the pages of The Atlantic to call on his fellow journalists to take down Fox News, charging that Fox News founder Roger Ailes has waged a concerted 50-year campaign to divide the American people and demonize legitimate journalism. Published September 9, 2018
John Brennan’s supporters cry foul, but revoking security clearances is nothing new
Former CIA Director and current MSNBC commentator John Brennan's intelligence service cronies have taken to the airwaves in their disgust at President Trump's decision to revoke Mr. Brennan's security clearance for what they claim is a first-time-ever act of vengeance by an out-of-control president. Published August 22, 2018
Venezuela demonstrates why socialism leads to totalitarianism, not relief
The tragedy that is Venezuela, a case study in the suffering and lack of freedom woven into the very fabric of Marxist socialism doesn't receive the attention it deserves at a time when last week's Gallup poll shows that Democrats view socialism more favorably than capitalism. Published August 14, 2018
Reforming the criminal justice system
On May 22, the House of Representatives managed to pass the First Step Act prison reform by a vote of 360 to 59, an unheard of margin in today's deeply divided Congress. The bill is a long-overdue attempt to at least begin to reform the way those caught up in the criminal justice system are treated while in prison and how they are prepared to live once they have paid their debt to society. Published August 8, 2018
How China uses Western greed to get Western business to do its bidding
Western business has lusted after the Chinese consumer market for hundreds of years. The dream of a billion or two Chinese consumers buying one's products is as intoxicating today as when British textile makers yearned for the Chinese to keep their mills humming forever, but until recently the Chinese consumer market existed more in their dreams than in reality. Published August 7, 2018
Donald Trump is not the first president to sit down with a foreign adversary
The outrage over President Donald Trump's demeanor during his Helsinki sit-down with Russia's Vladimir Putin resembles in many ways the reaction to the visit of another U.S. president to the capital of a foreign adversary. Published July 25, 2018
Supporting Judge Kavanaugh
Once one buys into a conspiracy theory everything makes sense because everything can be explained in terms of the conspiracy. Published July 23, 2018
How Russia and China intrude on their neighbors
That, however, was then. In today's world others are not as willing as they once were to tolerate the sort of overt aggression that took place during the days when Nazis and Communists were running amok, forcing aggressor nations to find subtler ways of taking over their neighbors. Published July 17, 2018
How the American Civil Liberties Union loses sight of its First Amendment mandate
Chuck Morgan headed the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office in the mid-1970s. He worked with conservatives and liberals on free speech issues and became a friend to many on both sides of the political aisle. Published June 26, 2018
With midterms approaching Democrats might note that caution is better than giddiness
The giddy optimism of late last year that had Democratic leaders salivating at what many saw as a coming midterm "blue wave" that would decimate their opponents, give them control of both the House and Senate, and leave Donald Trump a toothless lame duck who would be lucky to escape impeachment even before voters would have a chance to boot him out in 2020, has vanished. Published June 19, 2018
Dominion Power foolishly selects a site for its compression station that threatens residents
Hundred and perhaps thousands of Calvert, Charles and Prince George's County citizens in Maryland have been battling Dominion Power and state regulators to stop Dominion from building what's called a "compressor station" on the Charles County/Prince George's County line. Published June 7, 2018
Donna Edwards puts ambition before principle
When Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland retired two years ago, Rep. Donna Edwards gave up her safe Prince George's County congressional seat to take on her House colleague, Montgomery County's Chris Van Hollen, in the Democratic primary. Ms. Edwards lost by nearly 13 points, in part because a supportive outside group ran a negative and wildly inaccurate ad in the final weeks of the campaign that backfired on her. Published May 21, 2018
How Democrats created a Don Blankenship ‘surge’ that never was
Democrats continue to insist in spite of a complete lack of evidence that the Russian government, Russian corporations or at least individual Russians with ties to Vladimir Putin colluded with the Trump campaign to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign, thereby denying their candidate the White House. Published May 13, 2018
Senate Democrats are waging all-out war against nominees, Ronny Jackson paid the price
Adm. Ronny Jackson, President Trump's choice to head the Veteran's Administration, learned last week that in today's Washington, character assassination is the name of the game. Republican senators looked the other way as Democrats, led by Montana Sen. Jon Tester, leaked unsubstantiated charges from unnamed accusers claiming the decorated veteran as an incompetent pill pusher, bully and uncontrollable drunk. By week's end the admiral, knowing that he was never going to be confirmed anyway, removed himself from consideration. Published May 1, 2018
