Columns, pieces and posts
Friday morning Henry Kissinger took questions at the annual corporate conference of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The room was packed. Kissinger of course is an iconic figure in the history of foreign affairs, a statesman and historian of statesmanship. He will be 90 soon but he’s taken the opposite of the […]
Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institute pushes back against Sam Tanenhaus’s recent New Republic essay on the roots of modern conservatism. I’d add only that in almost 40 years of talking about politics and political philosophy with conservative journalists, writers, intellectuals, political practitioners, gadflies and activists, I have never heard anyone say “As Calhoun said . . .,” […]
Everyone has been wondering how the public will react when the sequester kicks in. The American people are in the position of hostages who’ll have to decide who the hostage-taker is. People will get mad at either the president or the Republicans in Congress. That anger will force one side to rethink or back down. […]
Look at this Politico story. Republican presidential hopefuls are trooping into Wall Street, just as Democratic hopefuls do. They meet with hedge-funders, CEO’s, billionaires. They chat, charm, discuss their efforts. It all feels like we’ve been in this place, no? We’ve seen all these moves. We can imagine outcomes. It all looks so 2008, and […]
There are a million variables in a live, three-hour television show, a million things that can go wrong that producers can’t control. Will the lines go down, will the prompter break, will the actors hit their marks, read their lines, show up sober? One of the few things you can control is the production packages […]
The president’s sequester strategy is like Howard Beale in “Network”: “Woe is us. . . . And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!” It is always cliffs, ceilings and looming catastrophes with Barack Obama. It is always government by freakout. That’s what’s happening now with the daily sequester warnings. Seven hundred thousand […]
It is disquieting, the resignation of the pope. “We are in uncharted territory,” said a historian of the church. An old pope is leaving but staying within the walls of the Vatican, and a new one, younger and less known, will come before Easter. In a week’s conversation with faithful and believing Catholics, I detected […]
What a bombshell. “Pope Resigns” is probably not a headline you ever thought you’d see. When I first heard, in a phone call at about 6:30 this morning, I literally had to shake my head to get the words understood. The announcement seemed jarring, out of the natural order of things: Popes don’t resign, God […]
So many people this week mentioned Dodge’s great Super Bowl spot, “So God Made a Farmer,” from a 1978 speech by the late Paul Harvey. Here are some reasons it was great: • Because it spoke respectfully and even reverently of others. We don’t do that so much anymore. We’re afraid of looking corny or […]
I’m reading Mitch Daniels’s book “Aiming Higher: Words That Changed a State.” It’s a collection of his speeches as Indiana governor, and in the introduction he talks about the writing of them: “The most perceptive statement I ever read about the task of writing was, ‘Writing is easy. I just sit down and write what […]