Bruce S. Thornton

Facts, Democrats and the JFK Legend

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine  The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy in the 50 years since his death has verified the adage in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The JFK legend recycled all these years is of a liberal icon, the glamorous martyr whose violent death has validated […]

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Don’t Forget the Other Entitlement Monsters

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine  The continuing attention devoted to the blunders, incompetence, and lies surrounding the Obamacare rollout is much deserved. But we shouldn’t forget that the President’s health-care monstrosity is merely the latest and biggest of scores of government entitlement programs suffering from the same flawed progressive assumption––that government “experts” armed with

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The Political Debate We Need to Have

Today, we treat politics as a sport, but it’s really a conflict of ideologies between federalists and technocrats. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas  The media and pundits treat politics like a sport. The significance of the recent agreement to postpone the debt crisis until January, for instance, is really about which party won and

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For Obama, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine  Rasmussen reported last Friday that 52% of likely voters approve of Obama’s job performance. This number is both astonishing and depressing. The avalanche of Obama’s failures both domestic and foreign should have buried this presidency months ago. Yet despite the slow-motion implosion of Obamacare now catching the attention of

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ObamaCare and the Techocratic Abyss

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The continuing disaster of the Obamacare website, like the law itself, illustrates one of the biggest bad ideas of the Progressive movement, one that reflects a central assumption of modernity: that new knowledge is now available that will allow an elite of technicians to order society more justly

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Barack Obama and the Bad Ideas of Progressivism

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine  Barack Obama’s serial gross incompetence has elicited all sorts of explanatory theories. He’s a closet socialist, an Alinskyite radical, a secret Muslim, or an anti-American internationalist. Though some of Obama’s words and deeds give support to all these speculations, I prefer a simpler explanation. Obama is a Progressive––not a

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Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney

Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013 · Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a research fellow at the Hoover

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Prestige and Power in Statecraft

History teaches us that nations must always respond vigorously to an enemy’s challenge, a lesson the U.S. should remember in Syria. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas President Obama, responding to widespread criticisms that his handling of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was clumsy and ad hoc, said, “I’m less concerned about style points, I’m

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Rich, Arrogant, and Stupid

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine  The modern West demonstrates a phenomenon unknown in history––unprecedented wealth, technology, and access to information combined with abject stupidity. Wisdom once known by every village explainer and cracker-barrel crank has been discarded and replaced with phony “sciences” making claims about human nature and behavior that are based on nothing

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What Would the Founders Think of Defunding Obamacare?

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine  A few days ago CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin, speaking about the Republican House bill defunding Obamacare, commented, “Certainly not the way the Founding Fathers maybe drew this thing up.” It’s certainly a surprise to hear an anchor on CNN, an organization biased in favor of progressives, appealing to the

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