Columns, pieces and posts
Why has the JetBlue flight attendant story captured everyone’s imagination? Because the whole country wants to take the emergency chute. You know the story: A steward named Steven Slater, after a difficult flight, apparently got fed up, grabbed the intercom, cursed out passengers, and made a speedy and unauthorized exit, activating and sliding down the […]
It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year’s day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But […]
Back when the rather radical and ill-thought-through movement known as the John Birch Society—they thought, among other things, that Dwight Eisenhower was perhaps a communist—was still famous and controversial, conservative Ronald Reagan was running for office. A group of Birchers, surveying the field, said that of all those running his stands seemed most congenial, so […]
She was smeared by right-wing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama administration. It wasn’t pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod. And maybe something good can come of it. The thought occurred to me after reading her now-famous speech, which is about the power of grace and the possibility […]
We start with the president’s dreadful numbers. People in politics in America are too impressed by polls, of course, and talk about them too much. In this we’re like a neurotic patient who constantly, compulsively takes his own temperature. We are political hypochondriacs. But polls offer the only hard quick data there is, and when […]
Much has happened in the dense and shifting political landscape of the past 18 months—the quick breakdown along partisan lines in Congress; continuing arguments over spending, the economy and immigration; the big Republican wins in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts; the Gulf oil spill; falling poll numbers for the president and his party. But the […]
The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced. It was July 1, 2 ,3 and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its […]
Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s greatest contribution to the war in Afghanistan may turn out to be forcing everyone to focus on it. The real news there this week was not Gen. McChrystal’s epic faux pas and dismissal but that 12 soldiers were killed on June 7-8, including five Americans by a roadside bomb, making that “the […]
The president is starting to look snakebit. He’s starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t Mr. Carter’s fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in “Pippin,” the Broadway show of Carter’s era, who spoke of “the […]
The most important overlooked story of the past few weeks was overlooked because it was not surprising. Also because no one really wants to notice it. The weight of 9/11 and all its implications is so much on our minds that it’s never on our mind. I speak of the report from the inspector general […]