Columns, pieces and posts
Are reports of abuse by Americans at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison hyped and sensationalized? Probably. The world media are in the sensation-making business and it’s a world-wide story. Did the abuses occur? Obviously. There are pictures, testimony, an apology Wednesday from the U.S. general who now runs the prisons and denunciations of the abuse as […]
Every now and then you witness a small moment that is actually a big moment. Maybe it alerts you to something surprising that’s going on, or maybe it illustrates what you already know but in a new way, one that can’t be dodged or avoided. It happened to me the other day at a play, […]
(Editor’s note: This column appeared on July 12, 2002. Pat Tillman died in combat in Afghanistan yesterday.) Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don’t know because […]
I do not know precisely why President Bush’s popularity continues high despite a month of the most relentless pounding from partisans, the press, the 9/11 commission and history itself (Fallujah, etc.) No one else knows either. Professionals will read the polls through the prism of their own expertise. Media people will say it’s the cumulative […]
It is a modern political cliché that how the public perceives an event is everything. People who say this forget that reality is important too, and only in part because public opinion tends in its rough way to follow it. But as regards President Bush’s press conference Tuesday night, his third in three years, public […]
Peter Jennings: . . . a week so extraordinary, so packed with history that one hardly knows where to begin. An overview from our correspondent Jack McWethy. McWethy: Peter, what a week it was. On Thursday in Washington riveting testimony. The head of the National Security Council, Condoleezza Rice, live before the 9/11 commission and […]
The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: […]
At this week’s 9/11 hearings, the much-anticipated finger pointing between Democrats and Republicans did not really occur. There was partisan jockeying and sniping, but in general a certain politesse prevailed—Madeleine Albright understands the position Colin Powell was in, Mr. Powell understands the forces at work as Ms. Albright’s State Department wrestled with a proportional response […]
The actor James Caviezel, who plays Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” met with Pope John Paul II on Monday at the Vatican. Afterward Mr. Caviezel talked with me briefly by phone from Rome. I asked him what it was like, and transcribed what he said. “I walked into the room and I was […]
In a patriotic attempt to help make the next eight months more interesting and fun, some practical advice for both presidential contenders. First John Kerry. The Democrats this year are proving themselves bold and tough. Mr. Kerry this week has been audacious—going into Florida and warning that Republicans mean to steal it, challenging President Bush […]