Columns, pieces and posts
With the DeLay indictment and another Supreme Court nominee soon to be announced, the subject has moved on from Hurricane Katrina. But I’m still thinking about it. News reports and common media wisdom this week suggested Katrina was actually a smaller story than we thought—fewer dead than had been feared, more hype than was helpful. […]
George W. Bush, after five years in the presidency, does not intend to get sucker-punched by the Democrats over race and poverty. That was the driving force behind his Katrina speech last week. He is not going to play the part of the cranky accountant—“But where’s the money going to come from?”—while the Democrats, in […]
If you lived through 9/11 in New York you have nothing worthy of the city, its people, and the event worth saying that has not already been said, or, if you do opinions for a living and are relatively sane, has not been said by you. I will tell you only this. For something like […]
The e-mail came from a reader, U.S. Marine Corps, retired: So, I was driving down I-20 from NE Columbia [S.C.] toward the city when I began to pass this huge convoy of Army trucks, Humvees, etc. The convoy was in the right lane. I was driving in the left. The convoy vehicles were loaded with […]
Katrina is a huge and historic story. The human cost, the financial cost, the rendering uninhabitable of a great and fabled American city—all of it amazing. A quick look at the good, the bad, and the let’s-shoot-them-now. The governors. Political leadership in times of crisis is a delicate thing. You have to be frank about […]
The federal government is doing something right now that is exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It is forgetting to think dark. It is forgetting to imagine the unimaginable. Governments deal in data. People in government see a collection of data as something to be used, manipulated or ignored, but whatever they […]
Newt and Hillary pose on the Capitol steps showing a teasing delight in each other’s company as they back, together, a new health-care scheme. John McCain and Hillary pose laughing with reporters and showing bipartisan closeness as they leave together on a fact-finding trip to Alaska. I saw the latter picture yesterday on the news, […]
In New York right now the sun is soft, not searing; the humidity just high enough that you feel like you’re walking through pleasantly warm gelatin as you walk along the streets. A good time for a general political overview, I say. Let’s start with the Bushes. President Bush is under pressure from various parts […]
It’s summer, the country’s traveling, and the great pleasure to be had from leaving home is meeting and falling in love with a place you’ve never been to. I end that sentence with a preposition to segue into my favorite story this summer of cultural tensions and differences as navigated by two American women. A […]
What’s wrong with them? That’s what I’m thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington. A few weeks ago it was the senators who announced the judicial compromise. There is nothing wrong with compromise and nothing wrong with announcements, but the senators who spoke referred to themselves with such flights of vanity […]