Columns, pieces and posts
Did you hear about the college commencement speaker who was almost booed off the stage Sunday because his commencement address was an anti-Bush rant? The speaker was E.L. Doctorow. The college, God bless it forever, was Hofstra University on New York’s Long Island. Newsday reported that Mr. Doctorow—or, as Newsday put it in the first […]
I notice lately everyone I talk to has a new insight or a big theory. In the past week I bumped into two journalists who with cool eyes watch the national scene. The first was in Washington. She told me she’d just been taken aside by a savvy Democratic operative who told her, “It’s going […]
I share an obsession with Tony Soprano. This startles me and makes me unhappy because it has been my experience that once my inner fears are echoed in the outer culture, some kind of grim critical mass has been achieved, and trouble ensues. (Does this sound oddly egocentric, even for a pundit? I think it […]
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: […]