Barton Swaim

1 week ago | wsj.com | Barton Swaim

Hyperactive, magnetic and eager to debate: William F. Buckley wasn’t very easily forgotten. Sam Tanenhaus is the author of a superb biography of the onetime communist mole and later conservative journalist Whittaker Chambers. Soon after the publication of that book in 1997, word circulated that Mr. Tanenhaus had been chosen by William F. Buckley Jr. to write his own biography.

2 weeks ago | jp.wsj.com | Barton Swaim

サウスカロライナ遊説の際、彼が任に堪えないことは誰の目にも明らかだった 民主党候補が敗北した2024年米大統領選について、同党の幹部やメディア番組の司会者が必死に犯人捜しをしているのを見るのは、つらいが愉快でもある。2期目を目指し、それを務めるのに十分な知的鋭敏さと体力があると断言したジョー・バイデン氏に責任があるとの見方で、バイデン家以外の誰もが一致している。しかし、スタッフが真実を隠し、世間に知られないようにしたのだろうか。議会などの場所にいた民主党幹部には、米国民に対して、バイデン氏の再選に向けた取り組みを支持できないと公然と表明する義務があったのだろうか。...

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Barton Swaim

I saw him campaign in South Carolina. Anybody with eyes and ears could tell he wasn’t up to the job. It is painful but also amusing to watch high-ranking Democrats and media personalities struggle to find culprits for their loss in 2024. Everybody but the Biden family agrees that the fault is Joe Biden’s for insisting that he possessed sufficient mental acuity and physical strength to seek and serve a second term. But did staffers hide the truth from the world?

3 weeks ago | wsj.com | Barton Swaim

The Supreme Court made legalized sports gambling possible in many states. Lawmakers neglected to think through the consequences. “There have always been Americans driven to ruin by gambling. But never have so many been driven to ruin so easily, and never has government done so much to enable them to gamble.” So writes Jonathan D. Cohen in “Losing Big,” an incisive and efficiently written account of the slow rise and sudden ubiquity of legal sports gambling in America.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Barton Swaim

Russia’s dictator, steeped in myth, couldn’t care less that ‘too many people are dying’ in Ukraine. The ugly truth is at last dawning on the White House—or let’s hope it is—that Vladimir Putin has no interest in settling for a tie in Ukraine. The administration has spent weeks lamenting the pointlessness of the war. “Stop the killing” and “stop the bloodshed,” President Trump has said repeatedly to the combatants in press gaggles and on social media. The phrases, coming from him, sound disingenuous.