Columns, pieces and posts
This was a great election year, and every political writer in the country was one way or another in the fray. “South Carolina just may go Santorum,” they’d say, or “From the turnout at the rallies it looks like Gingrich has a good chance.” Columnists, bloggers—they’re all trying to understand what’s happening pretty much in […]
What I keep thinking when the subject turns to Newtown is that childhood is often remembered as a time of joy and innocence, but it’s a time of terrible fears and great frights, too. The young are darkly imaginative. I knew a 5-year-old girl who was so afraid of ET that when she saw a […]
We’re all talking about the cratering of the Republican party. Actually a number of us are talking about the long-term collapse of the Republican model within American politics, and ways the party might revive itself. Here’s James Kurth with a smart, sobering look at what he sees not as the collapse of the party but of modern conservatism itself. […]
What are some things president Obama might say if he were to talk to the entertainment industry about what it has done and is doing to American culture? He might take some inspiration from what Hillary Clinton said at an industry gathering in Los Angeles, in the autumn of 1999. It was not long after […]
I’ve read it twice and I think it is. It’s actually kind of a masterpiece. It’s George Will at Washington University in St. Louis, on December 4, 2012. The language, vocabulary, diction, the assumption that the audience knows things and is capable of following a line of argument, even when that argument takes turns or doubles […]
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 […]