Columns

WASHINGTON -- She burned the tapes. Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate. Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned.

The media have developed a predictable and equally annoying habit every presidential election cycle. We hear the Republicans are going to be crushed by pandering too much to conservatives. The Democrats are firmly moderate and need a push from the left so they don't forget their "compassion."So it was with Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter 35 years ago. So will it be in 2016, no matter who is nominated.

It has become conventional wisdom that Republicans are blessed with a talented crowd of potential candidates this cycle. Fine. But here's my case for why only one of them is likely to win the general election.

On Wednesday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the case challenging the IRS's decision to pay subsidies to lower-income health insurance buyers in states with federal insurance exchanges -- even though the Obamacare legislation authorizes subsidies only in states with exchanges "established by the state."

If anyone had any doubts that most members of Congress oppose the Obama administration's proposed nuclear deal with Iran, they can put them aside after viewing the response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress Tuesday.

Eric Holder's Justice Department has completed its investigation into whether Ferguson cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in cold blood for racist reasons when he shot the black teenager last August.

WASHINGTON -- Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress was notable in two respects. Queen Esther got her first standing O in 2,500 years. And President Obama came up empty in his campaign to pre-emptively undermine Netanyahu before the Israeli prime minister could present his case on the Iran negotiations.

On Inauguration Day 2009, the White House website declared President Obama's administration would become "the most open and transparent in history." By the end of the next day, Obama had issued high-profile orders pledging "a new era" and "an unprecedented level of openness" across the massive federal bureaucracy.

"Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," wrote Robert Kagan in "Of Paradise and Power," published in 2003, just as the United States went into Iraq. Americans, he wrote, see themselves in "an anarchic Hobbesian world," where security and a liberal order depend on military might, while Europe is "moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation."

Random thoughts on the passing scene:When President Obama keeps talking about "violent extremists" in the abstract, you might wonder whether Presbyterians are running amok.

In reflecting on relations between the United States and China, Henry Kissinger in his 2011 book, "On China," notes that since he and Richard Nixon ventured to Beijing more than 40 years ago, "Eight American presidents and four generations of Chinese leaders have managed this delicate relationship in an astonishingly consistent manner, considering the difference in starting points."

Here we are again in the second week of "The Dean's List" -- an Ed Dean-style look at who Florida's political achievers were (and weren't) in the last seven days. What you see here is strictly my opinion, not necessarily the editor's or the rest of the staff at Sunshine State News.

Gov. Scott Walker has leapt to the top of polls in Iowa. As day follows night, he has moved to the center of the liberal press's crosshairs. This is the world we inhabit: When a Democrat is perceived as popular, the press discovers layers of humor and elan we never suspected. When a Republican is gaining strength, the press sharpens its bayonets.

WASHINGTON -- A sunset clause? The news from the nuclear talks with Iran was already troubling. Iran was being granted the "right to enrich." It would be allowed to retain and spin thousands of centrifuges. It could continue construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. Yet so thoroughly was Iran stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that just last Thursday the IAEA reported its concern "about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed ... development of a nuclear payload for a missile."