Columns, pieces and posts
Thirty-one years ago, when a man named Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II, the arrest and the trials that followed were dominated by a question: Who sent the would-be assassin? The Soviets? The Bulgarian secret police? Turkish fascists? John Paul was asked if he had a view, and he said it didn’t matter. In […]
Viewed a certain way, the 2012 election can be seen as a gift to Republicans wrapped in ugly paper. The wrapping looked like a hostage note with a message scrawled in crayon: “We hate you.” But inside was a gift, and the gift was time. The party was given the opportunity, when it is still […]
In Congress they’re talking, as ever, about “means testing” Social Security and Medicare. The phrase “means testing” is a poor one because it doesn’t sound like what it means, and so normal people will neither quickly understand it nor tend to use it, which will limit its ability to take hold as a reasonable idea. […]
The Washington Post has a new Romney campaign postmortem. Pull quotes: “The Obama guys put more lead on the target and were buying their bullets cheaper,” whereas the Romney campaign “had an insular nature that left it closed to advice from the outside.” This isn’t really new, but after the ORCA debacle it’s another data […]
Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson has put fresh emphasis on a major and underlying aspect of our fiscal disputes: It’s the yoots versus the coots. The young may not be aware of it, but they’ll long bear the tax burden of the entitlement arrangements the old have instituted. Mr. Simpson’s video is both merry—he dances […]
There is nothing wrong with a former president of the United States, and former leader of a great party, coming forward to speak out on a pressing national question. In fact it’s part of a former president’s job to be serious in this way, and if he doesn’t do it every day but holds his […]
The president’s inviting Mitt Romney for lunch is a small thing but a brilliant move. It makes Mr. Obama look big, gracious. It implies the weakened, battered former GOP nominee is the leader of the Republican Party—and if the other party has to have a leader, the weakened, battered one is the one you want. […]
Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is not a great film, and people shouldn’t feel muscled, in the general approbation, into saying it is. But it’s a good one, which is always a surprise and delight these days, and it is good it’s being so widely appreciated. This is Hollywood taking history seriously, taking political history seriously, and […]
“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.” That was the acute observation of Dr. Johnson, to Boswell. It does say something about us as a people that our Pilgrims invented, Washington formalized, and Lincoln normalized the putting aside of one day each year simply to be thankful […]
We are becoming a conceited nitwit society, pushy and self-aggrandizing. No one is ashamed to brag now. and show off. They think it heightens them. They think it’s good for business. It used to be that if you were big, you’d never tell people how big you were because that would be kind of classless, […]