Columnists: Michael A. Walsh

Michael A. Walsh

Michael Walsh is a journalist, author and screenwriter. He has worked for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and Time Magazine. He is also the author of eleven books, including the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints, Hostile Intent and Early Warning. Under the name "David Kahane," he wrote Rules for Radical Conservatives. He lives in rural Connecticut.

Latest Columns

• Wheels coming off

  With a little more than a month to go before a crucial national election, the wheels are coming off the Obama administration’s national-security credentials. The coordinated attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi,...   October 01, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Holder’s not in the ‘Furious’ clear

  Even if we put the best possible face on the Inspector General’s report about the “Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal — and assume that embattled Attorney General Eric Holder knew nothing, nothing about a cockamamie...   September 22, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• From Cairo to Cairo

  ‘A New Beginning”: That’s what President Obama called his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo back in June 2009.  Speaking at al-Azhar University, an ancient seat of Muslim scholarship, Obama called for a fresh start...   September 14, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Leadership? not now

  With the nation fixated on the Democrats’ convention in Charlotte, half a world away the United States is frittering away its twin victories in the Middle East. The latest indication of US weakness: Iraq is allowing...   September 06, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• It’s a battle for America’s heartland

  To see why the choice of Clint Eastwood as the surprise guest speaker at last night’s close of the Republican Convention was so brilliant, look at the electoral map. The Democrats, thanks to their dominance of the big...   August 31, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Trash-talking veep’s Tampa tantrum

  In an electoral season of appalling gutter politics, the Obama campaign is about to test a new bottom. Contrary to tradition — which dictates that Democrats and Republicans respectfully lie low during their rivals’...   August 24, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Yes, vote fraud’s real

  The vote of one idiot can cancel out the vote of a single genius — such is the glory of our one-man, one-vote system. But what about the vote of an illegal alien? The deceased? Or a convicted felon? Should they be...   August 09, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• First, the ‘fast & furious’ small fry

  Yesterday’s report on the Fast and Furious fiasco was just the first shoe. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose House Oversight Committee has been spearheading the investigation, promises two more. Shoe No. 1 blames five...   August 01, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Dependency Nation

  The economy grew at an anemic 1.5 percent rate last month, unemployment remains over 8 percent and some economists are now predicting a double-dip recession — but don’t worry. In Colorado, you can still buy a lap dance...   July 28, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Bam’s brave new world

  ‘If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen”: President Obama’s words last week are likely to haunt his campaign and possibly cost him the election.  The line insulted millions of...   July 21, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Eric Holder’s war

  The president was a no-show, Joe Biden exhorted the crowd to stick with Obama and Mitt Romney gave a frank address to the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization in which he vowed to repeal ObamaCare. But the most...   July 14, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• A land of bounty

  West of the truck stop at Fort Stockton, Texas, and all the way to El Paso, there is almost nothing but mashed-potato hills, scrub brush and the open road. The speed limit is pretty much whatever you want it to be, and...   July 04, 2012 12:00 AM

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• Deserved contempt

  Unless circumstances radically change, the House of Representatives will vote today by a large majority to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. He’d become the first sitting Cabinet member ever to...   June 28, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Why ‘Fast and Furious’ matters

  Pssst — heard the one about the lethal scandal that reaches to the upper levels of the Obama administration and may turn out to be bigger than Watergate? A crime in which two American agents have been killed, and which...   June 24, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Is this the end of Eric Holder’s games?

  Bait-and-switch? Or breath-taking chutzpah? Either way, Eric Holder is in big trouble. The embattled attorney general destroyed what little is left of his credibility yesterday afternoon when he failed to turn over 1...   June 20, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Holder’s last days?

  After more than a year of half-truths, stonewalling, obfuscating and outright lying to Congress about the “gunwalking” scandal known as Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder now finds himself trapped in a box...   June 14, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• To prevent the future

  ‘Science fiction,” said Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, “is the art of the possible. I imagine the impossible.” And the great American writer did give us impossible worlds in which telepathic Martians...   June 07, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Wisconsin end game

  Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election is much more than a local contest between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett; it’s the climax of a prolonged guerrilla war...   May 31, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• The sacrifices we salute

  The cemetery in Normandy, just above Omaha Beach, is among the most sacred of places. In a reverential stillness broken only by nature, row after row of white crosses and Stars of David mark the final resting places of...   May 28, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Allies betrayed

  So that “CIA coup” in Yemen against another al Qaeda underwear bomber turns out to actually have been a joint Saudi-British intelligence operation — which apparently was prematurely terminated thanks to flapping lips on...   May 17, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• ‘Undie’ Indiscretions

  Let’s stipulate that the CIA’s discovery a fortnight ago of yet another underwear-bomber plot, this one originating with al Qaeda in Yemen and aimed at an American airliner, was a splendid feat of intel tradecraft....   May 10, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Terror war follies

  Psst, have you heard the news? The Global War on Terror is finito. So an unnamed senior State Department official recently told a National Journal writer: “The war on terror is over. Now that we have killed most of al...   April 26, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• SEALs with a kiss

  After a string of anti-war, anti-military (and arguably anti-American) war movies, Hollywood finally gets it right. The Navy SEAL drama “Act of Valor” opens tomorrow in theaters nationwide. Starring active-duty members...   February 23, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Looking for Jihad in all the right places

  There’s a reason New York City has not been hit by radical Muslim terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001, and its name is the New York City Police Department.  Closely watching wannabe jihadis not only at home but across the...   February 20, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• It’s time to return Holder’s contempt

  ‘Contempt of Congress” is a pretty strong term, and one with tangible legal consequences, but how else to describe Attorney General Eric Holder’s continuing obstructionism in the burgeoning Fast and Furious scandal? It...   February 16, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• As Romney flags . . .

  Mitt Romney’s twin wins over the weekend in the Maine caucuses and the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual straw poll leave the GOP presidential-nomination race right where it’s been all along — in trouble...   February 13, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Attack on civility

  A specter is haunting America — the specter of violence that challenges the notion of civil discourse and threatens our democracy. Embodied by the Occupy Wall Street rabble and its imitators, and shamefully abetted by...   February 11, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• Gutting the middle ground on abortion

  When the abortion wars flared up last week, partisans of both sides rushed to the barricades — but the real lesson may be for the countless Americans in the middle. A private charity devoted to breast-cancer research,...   February 06, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• A failed ‘Fast and Furious’ whitewash

  Today’s Capitol Hill hearing on the “Fast and Furious” mess promises drama that may well rival the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings or gangland chieftain Frank Costello’s memorable 1951 testimony in front of Sen. Estes...   February 02, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists

• A Fast & Furious fib

  It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, goes the old Washington cliché. In the case of the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, it’s both.  As Attorney General Eric Holder gets ready to face more congressional grilling...   January 30, 2012 12:00 AM

  From Oped Columnists