Columns, pieces and posts
Why do people want to come here? Same reasons as a hundred years ago. For a job. For opportunity. To rise. To be in a place where one generation you can be a bathroom attendant at a Brooklyn store and the next your boy can be the star of “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour,” with everyone […]
Having watched the second Republican debate the other night, it’s clear to me the subject today is Fred Thompson, the man who wasn’t there. While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear—boxers, briefs and temple garments. He is running a […]
Who woke up Old Europe? France, Ireland and England this week showed us the future. They were the center of the new. It looked good. We can learn from them. First Ireland, which Tuesday formalized a peace that most who love that country would not have thought possible in our lifetimes. And it was barely […]
They stood earnestly in a row, combed, primped and prepped, as Nancy Reagan gazed up at them with courteous interest. But behind the hopeful candidates, a dwarfing shadow loomed, a shadow almost palpable in its power to remind Republicans of the days when men were men and the party was united. His power is only […]
This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big—400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak—and eye-catching, as would be anything that “presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America’s indigenous people by […]
I saw an old friend on the Acela on the way to Washington, and he told me of the glum, grim faces at the station he’d left, all the commuters with newspapers in their hands and under their arms. This was the day after Virginia Tech. We talked about what was different this time, in […]
On Wednesday John McCain distinguished himself with a closely argued and eloquent address in which he spoke seriously and at length of his position on Iraq. He said America faces “an historic choice” with “ramifications for Americans not yet even born.” “Many Democrats,” he said, view the war as “a political opportunity,” while Republicans view […]
I will never forget the stunning Oct. 7, 1962, Time magazine cover that showed Franklin D. Roosevelt weeping, a shining tear snaking its way down his pale and sunken cheek as he surveyed the destruction wrought by the New Frontier—tax cuts, a Republican running Treasury. What an indictment of the Democratic Party; what a dirge […]
It was a sparkling and unusual event, a dinner that was as interesting as a Democrat’s (the talk was culturally broad, if sober— “life is real and earnest”) and as handsomely done as a Republican’s (the flowers were white, crisp, so expertly arranged they seemed a natural outgrowth of the mirrored table. Life should be […]
Here is what has been said the past week or so that sparked argument: Bill Maher, on HBO, said a lot of lives would be saved if Vice President Cheney had died, and Ann Coulter, at a conservative political meeting, suggested John Edwards is a “faggot.” She was trying to be funny and get a […]