Columns, pieces and posts
What is emerging right now is the real “new world order.” Twelve years ago when the Soviet Union fell, the first President Bush declared it had arrived, but it is this President Bush on whom it has come to call. Old alliances fall, new ones rise. The 21st century takes its shape. The “old West” […]
At this point Iraq is, for each of us, a gut call. We probably have as much information and hard data as we’re going to get. There are different ways to interpret the evidence, to understand the peril. No one can prove containment will work in the future, for instance, and no one can prove […]
What did you think of President Bush’s Columbia speech? It hit the spot, did what needed to be done. The bible references were pure Bush. Only question was why it wasn’t given in the Oval Office. I think I am correct in observing that modern presidents shy away from the Oval for addresses. But why? […]
“The Columbia is lost. There are no survivors.” Blunt words spoken softly by President Bush this afternoon. He spoke of how easy it is for all of us to “overlook the dangers of travel by rocket. . . . These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly.” He spoke of why “mankind is […]
You always hope a State of the Union address will be a sleek and handsome ocean liner cutting through the sea. Often they start that way and then turn, inevitably, into a greasy old barge riding low in the water, weighed down by policy cargo. It blows its horn proudly but the sound is more […]
Nothing is more beautiful, more elevating, more important in a speech than fact and logic. People think passionate and moving oratory is the big thing, but it isn’t. The hard true presentation of facts followed by a declaration of how we must deal with those facts is the key. Without a recitation of hard data, […]
It is now 30 years since the Supreme Court, in its Roe v. Wade vision, blew down the barriers to abortion on demand, using as the essential rationale a constitutional right of privacy that the court had discovered less than eight years earlier. Since 1973 roughly 40 million abortions—that seems to be the generally accepted […]
In 1988 Roger Ailes, then an advisor to Vice President George Bush in his presidential campaign, watched a television debate among the Democratic candidates and said of eventual nominee Michael Dukakis: “He looks like a guy thinking about what he’s going to have for dinner.” He didn’t mean Mr. Dukakis looked hungry, but preoccupied. His […]
I thought I’d start the year with some thoughts on George W. Bush, for he soon reaches his two-year mark as president, and we have learned some things about him. Some people I love, mostly Democrats but some Republicans, have taken to asking: Why do people like Bush? They know the obvious reasons—9/11, an administration […]
At the end of each year I think about what I’ve learned or come to look at in a new way. In 2002 I sometimes mused on the following: Everyone says money can’t buy love, but I’m not sure that’s precisely true. Say a 43-year-old woman who’s been working for years and is starting to […]