June 10, 2002, the day John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, marked a low point in Ashcroft's career as Attorney General.
The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level.
Al-Qaida is a cult of martyrdom.
Back when the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were one great intellectual hodgepodge, proving the existence of God was a relatively commonplace exercise. To the modern mind, however, science and religion talk past each other.
There is no doubt in my mind that Article II limits to a considerable degree the application of the obstruction statutes to the president when he is acting in his capacity as chief law-enforcement officer of the country.
We should never again have an attorney general capable of saying virtually nothing as the law of major intelligence programs and the integrity of his department's work in overseeing these programs are assailed over a protracted period of time.
In general, liberals fear conservative judges far too much. In almost all areas, in fact, they dramatically overstate the stakes.
I generally favor permissive abortion laws.
I understand that a lot of people who use phrases like #resistance have found my work valuable. But my job is to look at difficult problems of national security in ways that may be useful to policymakers and the public.
For those who support same-sex marriage - and I support it without reservation - the ideal of equality and the belief in the dignity of same-sex relationships necessarily makes the issue seem a great deal like the civil-rights struggles of the past.
One effect of Roe was to mobilize a permanent constituency for criminalizing abortion - a constituency that has driven much of the southern realignment toward conservatism.
Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.
I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.
We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.
The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah - itself a set of five books of limited length - contains literally all truth.
It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'
