Columns, pieces and posts
I am on my way from Los Angeles to Dallas, where tomorrow I will appear on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which will come live out of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. I can’t believe I’ll be inside that place, from which, 50 years ago next week, at a corner window on the sixth floor, Lee Harvey […]
Congress right now has a historic chance—really, it could wind up in the history books next to the stopping of FDR’s court-packing scheme in 1937—to hold back ObamaCare. Congress can delay it, or pass a law mandating or allowing insurance companies to continue insuring everyone they just threw off coverage. Heck, they could try to […]
Republicans should stop taking the boob bait of the press. The story of the day is ObamaCare and the pain it is causing the Democrats. That story is not being fully explored. We are not seeing pieces on Captol Hill Democrats rethinking their four-year-long lockstep backing of a program that is failing massively and before […]
All my friends in politics on the Republican side are feeling dour, angry, frustrated, furrow-browed. That’s understandable. Progressivism may look tottery at the moment, but Republicans don’t know how to knock it down and are at odds over what to replace it with. Interparty friction is high: The GOP is a bird with a lot […]
Washington It is a month since the government shutdown and a day after the election. The minority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, longest-serving senator in Kentucky history (1985 to the present, up for a sixth term in 2014), is seated in his office talking about the stresses, strains and estrangements that mark the […]
Years ago John McPhee wrote a great book about Bill Bradley called “A Sense of Where You Are.” I keep thinking about that title. You have to know where you are in time and space, you have to know who you are and what you’re doing, you have to be able to locate the moment […]
Former White House press secretary Dana Perino has good, commonsensical advice for Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who’ll be questioning Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on ObamaCare tomorrow. Boiled down: Can the theatrics, know your stuff, we don’t need re-enactments of constituent rage, be serious and sober. If members take […]
President Obama says he didn’t know the U.S. government was tapping Angela Merkel, and you know, maybe he didn’t. I have come to wonder if we don’t have what amounts to a deep state within the outer state in the U.S.—a deep state consisting of our intelligence and security agencies, which are so vast and […]
We should not lose The Headline in the day-to-day headlines. This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it […]
Oh what it was like. “Mission Control, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” “America on the moon.” “Godspeed, John Glenn.” “Come on and light this candle.” “A-OK.” “Four 3, 2, 1, and liftoff, we have liftoff.” Oh, we did. Those are words and phrases of America’s space program, especially the Mercury program, one of […]