Columns, pieces and posts
We make presidents crazy. They receive endless encomiums from friends and staff telling them of their brilliance, their courage, their foresight. “God sent you to lead us.” And the authors of such statements aren’t always or even usually sucking up. They mean it. They’re excited, fervent, full of belief. All a president has to do […]
I think I know what White House aides are thinking. They’re thinking: This is the part of my memoir where we faced the daily pounding of our allies. They’re thinking: This is the “Churchill Alone” chapter. They’re thinking: He was like a panther in the jungle night. For five years he sat, watchful, still as […]
It all depends on the hearings. Barring a withdrawal of her nomination, it’s going to come down to Harriet Miers’s ability to argue her own case before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If the American people decide she seems like a good person—sympathetic, wise, even-keeled, knowledgeable—she’ll be in; and if not, not. What everyone forgets about […]
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, […]