The Swarthmore Conservative

“What difference does it make why they did it?” Chris Matthews said on his eponymously named MSNBC show Monday night. Matthews was referring, of course, to Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Attempting to avoid injecting religion into the discussion, Matthews showed exactly why the motivation behind the bombings is so important for us [...]

Judging by conversations online and on campus, Swarthmore’s community appears the most divided I’ve witnessed since I arrived on campus three years ago. One supposed controversy after another has infected campus dialogue with anger and vitriol. Our community has descended into a madness that is almost unexplainable. When I read the comments on the Daily [...]

Over the last week, the College’s decision to invite former World Bank President Robert Zoellick ’75 to deliver a graduation speech and receive an honorary degree has become the latest campus controversy this semester. Although selected by a predominantly liberal faculty, some of my fellow students question having an individual they call “one of the [...]

Fighting Bob Woodward is an undertaking no administration has attempted. Few journalists garner the admiration and respect Bob Woodward enjoys from the New York-Washington media axis. Journalism graduate students sit in class salivating over Woodward’s work, hoping one day to stumble upon their own Watergate. Woodward has defined the investigative journalism of our age, no [...]

Over the last week, debates over Greek life have revealed the intense divide between those for and against the institution. The Phoenix’s staff editorial last week calling for a referendum to ban all Greek life opened the floodgates. Within a day after the editorial was published, a formal petition began circulating online. By now, we [...]

Writing for The Corner on National Review Online last week, NRO media editor Eliana Johnson criticized President Obama for calling the Holocaust “senseless violence” in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. She wrote that “the idea that all violence is ‘senseless’ violence is one that has taken deep root on the left; it’s also, [...]

In the weeks since the devastating Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings last month, debate over gun rights has taken center stage in American political discourse. It has proven difficult to turn on the news without hearing about Vice President Biden’s commission on guns or seeing a supposedly objective reporter gushing over the newest gun control [...]

Over the last few weeks, pundits and politicians have taken to the airwaves to offer hundreds of explanations for the Republican losses on November 6th. Some insist it was the Hispanic vote, others say it was the Republican turnout operation, the messaging, or the candidate at the top of the ticket, Mitt Romney. Each person [...]

Governor Romney’s loss Tuesday night gave me time to step back and think about why I care so much about politics. I was devastated by Romney’s loss, and my state of disbelief clouded my more rational senses. I came to see politics as some sort of irrational obsession of mine, rather than as an institution [...]

The first presidential debate produced a clear winner in Mitt Romney. Obama’s campaign failed at trying to spin the debate any other way, and even the President admitted he “had a bad night.” Romney was clear and forceful, and most importantly, presidential. The two other presidential debates, including the one on Monday night, are difficult [...]