Columns, pieces and posts
A great scholar of Yale’s history department writes to a friend this morning of the failure of the current generation of Washington political leaders to fully apprehend “how awful” America’s longer-term fiscal situation is. America would, he notes, be in an even worse mess if it weren’t for the problems we see in China, India […]
This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions. The big story of 2013? Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead. A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — […]
This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions. The big story of 2013? Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead. A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — that will put […]
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 […]