Columns, pieces and posts
John Kerry’s stance and statement in Kiev today were good—clear, strong and calibrated. He made U.S. sympathies clear. He didn’t bluster. He was plain about the facts on the ground as he ascertained them. “It is clear that Russia has been working hard to create a pretext for being able to invade further,” he said. […]
What a great, myth-destroying statement from Marco Rubio, on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday afternoon, on the facts about Cuba and their connection to events in Venezuela. We have pressed in these parts for American political figures to speak clearly and with moral confidence about American sympathies in various international disputes. Rubio’s speech […]
A great confusion has set in about what American political figures should and should not say when confronted with violent political events in other countries. Exemplifying the confusion, as he does on so many issues, is President Obama. Kiev is in crisis. Protesters have taken up arms to fight the government, whose security forces fire […]
Watching Season 2 of “House of Cards.” Not to be a scold or humorless, but do Washington politicians understand how they make themselves look when they embrace the show and become part of its promotion by spouting its famous lines? Congressmen only work three days a week. Each shot must have taken two hours or […]
This afternoon there’s nothing to do but snow haiku. My attempts at 5, 7, 5: Full fat flake fell far To sleep on the rude pavement. Grraaawwwr. The shovel. Run! Snowflake: distinctive, Unique. Liquefies, blends. A Loss, but less lonely All New York today Is slush. Slip, fall, “Have a hand!” We shyly love mess […]
All the Northeast is covered in snow, and the sound and clamor of Washington is muffled. The federal government took a day off; the news is full of weather. Not a bad time to ponder why people do what they do—more specifically, why witnesses to history often take notes on what they see and hear, […]
Welcome to my obsession. It is electricity. It makes everything run—the phone, the web, the TV, the radio, all the ways we talk to each other and receive information. The tools and lights in the operating room—electricity. All our computers in a nation run by them, all our defense structures, installations and communications. The pumps […]
The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year’s innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It […]
So the president’s State of the Union address is Tuesday night, and it’s always such a promising moment, a chance to wake everyone up and say “This I believe” and “Here we stand.” The networks are focused and alert, waiting to be filled with a president’s excellence and depth. It’s a chance for the American […]
It is astonishing and cannot go unremarked that Mississippi’s Gov. Frank “Boo” Burnham, the conservative who won a 2011 landslide, gave an interview Friday in which he demonstrated all that is wrong in American politics—all its division, its intolerance, its ignorance and sickness. Burnham damned and removed from the rolls of the respectable everyone in […]