Columns, pieces and posts
So the controversy over NBC doing a drama about Hillary Clinton: How will they play it? How will they draw her? It’s hard to believe they’d do bald propaganda but hard to believe they won’t. NBC is a cultural entity of the left, or you might say the soft left. She is a political figure […]
I can’t shake my dismay at Gov. Chris Christie’s comments, 12 days ago, on those who question and challenge what we know or think we do of the American national security state. Speaking at an Aspen Institute gathering attended by major Republican Party donors, a venue at which you really don’t want to make news, […]
Bits and pieces: I like everything Pope Francis is doing because he’s trying to shake things up. The minute popes become popes they become insiders. They are inside the Vatican, inside the curia, inside the papal apartments, daily presented with inside information on the operation of the church. But Francis seems to be preserving his […]
In all the day-to-day of the IRS scandals I don’t think it’s been fully noticed that the overall reputation of the agency has suffered a collapse, the kind from which it can take a generation to recover fully. In the long term this will prove damaging to the national morale—what happens to a great nation […]
The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel. That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in […]
What a scandal it was. It had everything—beautiful women, spies, a semi-dashing government minister married to a movie star, a society doctor who functioned, essentially, as a pimp. And the backdrop was an august English country estate where intrigue had occurred before. Unlike modern political sex scandals, which are cold and strange, it was what […]
Point one: Daniel Ellsberg yesterday in the Washington Post, in a piece on the Snowden case, referred to what might, surprisingly, be called the more easygoing legal climate of 1971, when he gave the Pentagon papers to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. For 13 days, while he distributed copies, […]
The air is full of the Battle of Gettysburg, whose 150th anniversary this week marked. Those who love history are thinking about Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, Culp’s Hill and the Peach Orchard, and all the valor and mistakes of men at war. The mystery of them, too. How did Joshua Chamberlain, a bookish […]
After the passage of the Senate bill on immigration reform, which may or may not die in the House, I went back and reread some of my immigration columns from 2006 and 2007, when the last big bill came up. What is striking to me is that the basic facts and arguments haven’t really changed. […]
“Documents Show Liberals in I.R.S. Dragnet,” read the New York Times headline. “Dem: ‘Progressive’ Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS,” said U.S. News. The scandal has “evaporated into thin air,” bayed the excitable Andrew Sullivan. A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, […]