Columns, pieces and posts
You’re on a busy city street in the morning when everyone’s going to work. The sidewalks are filled, people are rushing by. You don’t know what’s in their heads or hearts. You don’t even know what’s in their briefcases. Probably the usual—memos, papers, smartphone, business cards. Yesterday just after 9 a.m. a young man in […]
In a blog post this morning for the New York Times, Paul Krugman attempts, mischievously in my view, to score some ideological points. Yesterday he and I were on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and when the show had ended but the panelists were still seated together I said I’d just had one of those […]
The Obama administration has an implementation problem. More than any administration of the modern era they know how to talk but have trouble doing. They give speeches about ObamaCare but when it’s unveiled what the public sees is a Potemkin village designed by the noted architect Rube Goldberg. They speak ringingly about the case for […]
Acrimony, insults, the government shut down. Time to talk to a wise man, someone from the days when government worked. I turned to the famous Mr. Baker—James A. Baker III, U.S secretary of state (1989-92), secretary of the Treasury (1985-88) and White House chief of staff under Ronald Reagan (1981-85) and George H.W. Bush (1992-93). […]
Tom Clancy was a great gentleman, generous and kind. He gave a lot of money away to medical research, and if you wanted to hear him get excited you talked about what doctors were doing to make the world better. They were his heroes. He loved America and worried about her. Our friendship over the […]
The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years. That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership […]
Washington An accomplished American diplomat once said that there are two templates of American foreign-policy thinking. The first is Munich and the second is Vietnam. When America does not move militarily as some people wish it to, they say, “This is another Munich”—appeasement that in the end will summon greater violence and broader war. When […]
Here’s the Starbucks gun request the company made today. The company, which has some 10,000 stores and 160,000 employees in the U.S., is asking customers who carry handguns in open-carry states to please not bring their guns into the store. It’s hard to believe this will be taken as controversial or as anything other than […]
He twisted the knife and gloated, which was an odd and self-indulgent thing to do when he was winning. Vladimir Putin, in his essay in the New York Times, may even to some degree have overplayed his hand, though that won’t matter much immediately. As a public posture, grace and patience would have brought him […]
I wrote a blog post a while back about how sometimes after a column goes up a reader writes and states, more succinctly than you had, your essential point. People find the essence of what you’re saying and give it to you more clearly than you’d given it to them. With today’s column a variation […]