Columns, pieces and posts
As I watched “The Irishman” a few weeks ago in a Manhattan movie theater I felt an ache, a kind of grief sneaking up on me, and toward the end I thought I knew why. I realized: I am watching John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn.” I am watching a great artist say goodbye to a world […]
Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they […]
A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate. He was a child during that scandal, I in college. I said no, Watergate had the feeling of real drama, it was a reckoning with who we were as a people; it felt grave. This is more like the Clinton […]
It is all so very grave, yet it feels only like a continuation of the past three years of fraught and crazy political conflict. But impeachment of the American president came much closer this week. I believe retired Gen. John Kelly, President Trump’s former chief of staff, when he told the Washington Examiner that he […]
I was writing a rather stern column about the mess in Washington, but I got kind of swept Thursday by the beautiful bipartisan tribute to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, in Congress’s Statuary Hall, a ceremony held just before his burial back in Baltimore. I want to get beyond the merely sentimental. Everyone seems to have […]
Things are more fluid than they seem. That’s my impression of Washington right now. There’s something quiet going on, a mood shift. Impeachment of course will happen. The House will support whatever charges are ultimately introduced because most Democrats think the president is not fully sane and at least somewhat criminal. Also they’re Democrats and […]
One thing I think I’ve correctly observed about the U.S. military in the 21st century is that its leaders tend to be the last to want to go to war and the last to want to leave it. Political figures operate under public pressures and shifting geopolitical needs and goals; they’re surrounded by people who […]
We have grown used to the daily bedlam, the nonstop freak-out that is the Trump White House. Nevertheless it should be noted the president’s language and visage this week were especially wild. It’s “treason,” it’s “a coup,” it’s a “hoax” and a “fraud,” the whistleblower’s information came from “a leaker or a spy,” it’s a […]
Every time I imagine Elizabeth Warren debating Donald Trump, I picture him rumbling onto the stage like a big white bear—roaring “Grrr grrrr,” towering over her, paws flailing, claws extended. She’ll stand there looking up at him in the lights, and you’ll wonder if she’s trembling, cowering, because clearly she’s about to be crushed. And […]
Here are the reasons, in no certain order, that the accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh will never stop and his foes on the progressive left never let up. Because progressives have to prove they were right to advance the sexual-assault accusations of Christine Blasey Ford. They lost that battle; Justice Kavanaugh sits on the court. […]