My last Washington Times oped of the year is here:

Soon there was a growing pile of pictures of newer Christmases, but fewer and fewer from home. These were images from distant lands, small trees propped up with small ornaments in his drab quarters in Korea, Vietnam, Panama. My grandmother was in more of them, pale and smiling next to his tanned features. A handmade book from the end of their first year of marriage, full of notes and doodles drawn for her benefit, told how much time they’d spent apart and how much he loved her. A blurred picture of the two of them entwined and smiling in their old trunks on some unnamed Caribbean beach showed more heartfelt affection than I ever recalled seeing them demonstrate in public. In another, she posed against one generous gift, a gray Studebaker parked on the dusty road of a military base, her arms outspread with pride.

I hope you’ll take the time to read it.

I have an oped in today’s Washington Times on conservatives contending for the youth vote.

I also have a post over at RedState on Rod Blagojevich and President-Elect Obama’s short honeymoon, which happens to be today’s AOL Political Machine poll question (the poll isn’t live yet as I’m sending this out, but it will be later).

Here’s my latest Washington Times oped, on Joe Wurzelbacher’s questioning of Obama, and how it shows McCain’s limits. The closer:

“The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not reason,” G.K. Chesterton mused a century ago. “The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.” America’s electoral choice in 2008 is no longer based on reason, on the whys and wherefores of established fact, or on the citizen — the plumber — expressing his view. It is based on the new unshakeables of feeling and sentiment, on a state of mind expressed eloquently in Mr. Obama’s surprisingly honest slogan — no, not the ever-present affirmation of “Yes we can,” but the bastardized Latin of his hubristic presidential seal: “Vero Possumus.” Literally translated, it is an exclamation with all the balance and reason of a toddler stamping his feet: “I do it!”

And soon enough, barring a thousand more Joe the Plumbers brave enough to withstand the assault, he will.

Read it all here.

My latest op-ed over at the Washington Times concerns the dueling perspectives of John McCain and Barack Obama on our economic woes - and how both fail the test:

So, here’s a story to tell the grandkids around some future autumn kitchen table. Once upon a time, the American people, facing the greatest global economic crisis in a generation, headed to the polls to choose the next leader of the free world and custodian of the formerly free market. Their options were limited to the dashing young lawyer and the battle-tested combat pilot, two men who for all their appeal had never run a state, a town or a business - large or small.

It’s shocking to consider how Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama come to the challenges of the day with such little economic knowledge of their own. If both won their respective primaries thanks in the largest part to their positions on security issues - Mr. McCain elevated by his undeniable vindication on the Iraq troop surge, Mr. Obama fueled by a vibrant antiwar upsurge that now seems like little more than postwar bitterness and should change little about the outcome of the conflict - neither comes to the fray knowing more about the economy than what others tell them. And for advice, one has the banking lobby whispering in his ear while the other has the corrupt handmaidens of Fannie and Freddie holding his purse strings.

Read it all over at the WT website.

My latest oped in The Washington Times seems to be suffering from a CMS-based problem that cuts off the first sentence. Thankfully, if you got the paper on Monday, you know what it says. But in case you didn’t, here’s the lede:

The news last week that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor had been contacted for vetting purposes by the Vice Presidential selection committee of John McCain’s campaign was met with one of two reactions: a whispered “now that would be interesting,” from conservatives who are quite familiar with Rep. Cantor’s history and capabilities – and from all other parties, the sound of one giant cacophonous “Who?”

Yet while Cantor is not the household name among Republicans of other potential veep choices, such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, in many ways choosing the young Virginian would be in keeping with McCain’s unique style of principled risk-taking, a throwback to his maverick origins, and one that might just cinch the election in November for the GOP.

Since I wrote my column, an initial attack on Cantor from the Democratic National Committee has been released. Oddly, for such a brief attack, the word “Jewish” appears five times, including the line “Both Abramoff and Cantor are Jewish.” That’s apparently the best they can do.

Read the rest of the oped here.

My most recent oped over at the Washington Times concerns Barack Obama’s rapid political evolution on the issues of gun rights and the death penalty. An excerpt:

The second case, of which the Beltway population is very well aware, concerned the first decision in over a century that determines the scope of the Second Amendment´s protection for an individual right to keep and bear arms. On this matter, Sen. Obama had been equally definitive. Just this November, when asked by the Chicago Tribune about their candidate´s opinion, the campaign responded that “Sen. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” In the Illinois State Senate, he voted to ban gun shows, supported limiting citizen´s right to purchase guns, opposed allowing retired police officers to have the right to concealed carry, and opposed protecting homeowners who fire upon an intruder in self defense from lawsuits. To this day, he supports overriding state laws with a nationwide federal ban on concealed carry permits.

On this matter as well, Sen. Obama evolved. In this case, the word the campaign chose to use was “inartful.” “That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,” spokesman Bill Burton told ABC News.

Barack Obama, it appears, does not know the Barack Obama who believed the DC gun ban, the most extreme in the nation, to be constitutional.

>> My latest oped, on the Flight of the Obamacons, is over at the Washington Times. An excerpt:

Mr. Kmiec and his small band of Obamacons are the new Lotophagi, the “Lotus Eaters” of Homer’s Odyssey. When landing on the territory of the cult-like Lotophagi, Ulysses’s crew was given a flower to eat “which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus Eaters without thinking further of their return.”

Mr. Kmiec and others like him can munch on the flowery prose of Mr. Obama for as long as they want, drifting along on the wafted air of Hope and Change, fooling themselves into forgetting the principles that they once professed to believe. Don’t mourn the Obamacons in their current state, fellow conservatives: We can safely leave them to their happy way which will only bring them heartbreak when they wake up to a world with Supreme Court Justice John Edwards and a whole mouth of grass-stained teeth.

>> You can read my latest Washington Times oped here: it’s on the continued mistakes of the House Republicans.  Surprisingly, it’s less than 40,000 words.