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Recent Articles
- A Perfect Day for Salinger - February 5, 2010
- The news of the death of J.D. Salinger recalled the famous Dorothy Parker quip on being told that Calvin Coolidge was dead: "How can they tell?" Of all the iconic...
- David Plouffe Needs a Friend - January 29, 2010
- David Plouffe is a friend of mine. Not just a Facebook friend, either, but a real friend. He writes to me, personally. "Friend," the president's chief guru wrote to me...
- Scott Brown, Just in Time - January 22, 2010
- Scott Brown arrives in Washington driving his famous truck, and he looks like a million dollars -- Jimmy Stewart playing Mr. Smith. President Obama polishes his State of...
- Can the Internet Change How You Think? - January 15, 2010
- Health care reform blah blah blah. Underwear bomber blah blah blah. Immigration reform blah blah blah. Where you read this column and other commentaries drawing on the...
- When War Is Not Metaphor - January 8, 2010
- My dinner partner at the holiday table was home on leave from Army Ranger training. He had been living outdoors, learning to be at home in the rain and the mud, eating...
- Beauty in the Beast - January 2, 2010
- The Academy Awards have expanded the number of best picture nominations to 10, and the buzz on Planet Earth is all about "Avatar." Conservatives are enraged at the...
- Feats of Clay, Exposed - December 26, 2009
- The transgression of a celebrity can be worth a thousand sermons. A lot of the gossip on the Internet and in the tabloids is cheap and irresponsible, but accurate...
- When 'Spiritual Elevation' Is the Law - December 18, 2009
- BERLIN -- The Germans are so strong on their family values they want the state to enforce them. They're debating now whether shops should be shuttered on Sunday by law....
- The Roguish Success of Sarah Palin - December 11, 2009
- The good news for George W. Bush is that the haters have just about worn out the object of their contempt. The Bush years have been remaindered to the old-news bin. The...
- Getting Down to Business - December 4, 2009
- This has been a bad year for both rich and poor, and particularly annoying for celebrities. The masters of the universe demonstrated how they can't even master Wall...
- Reflections Over the Turkey - November 27, 2009
- This is not the happiest Thanksgiving holiday. So many out of work, so many others afraid they're next, and the recession is not receding as swiftly as we were told it...
- Polishing the Palin Mettle - November 20, 2009
- Sarah Palin arouses venom from the left like Hillary Clinton from the right. On the day after her Oprah interview, Richard Cohen in The Washington Post said it was time...
- Deaf Ears, Dumb Voters - November 13, 2009
- If a photograph is worth a thousand words, a sharp newspaper cartoon is often worth the book. One Israeli cartoonist depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the...
- A Fallen Wall for Fallen Men - November 6, 2009
- Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. If Humpty Dumpty had been sitting on top of it, not Soviet soldiers, nor Stasi spies could put Humpty together...
- Home Economics Reduced to Economics - October 30, 2009
- Maria Shriver is no "wife of," even though she's married to the governor of California. She's no "niece of," although her uncle was president of the United States. She...
- An Inconvenient Rebuttal - October 23, 2009
- Ann McElhinney's low-budget documentary refuting the global warming hype and hysteria arrives in Washington just in time to break Al Gore's crystal ball. "Not Evil Just...
- The Nobler Nobels - October 16, 2009
- Enough already. Barack Obama got the Nobel Prize for Hope and Hype, and now the rest is up to him. But there are more important Nobels, and this year women won three of...
- Sense and Sexuality - October 9, 2009
- Not so long ago, rape was a capital offense, right up there with murder. When death was not decreed, convicted rapists could count on a long prison sentence. No one took...
- A Revolution Too Far - October 2, 2009
- Austin, age 13, is touching and familiar. With his helmet of short brown hair, biggish ears and sensitive eyes, he's typical of a tender age almost on the cusp of...
- When Defenses Go Down - September 25, 2009
- Autumn in Washington is often cruel. The heat and the humidity have lifted, and Congress returns more or less refreshed from summer vacation, but the pressure cooker...
- It's Multicultural, Stupid - September 18, 2009
- The attack on America on Sept. 11 set off alarms everywhere. We were shocked to discover that few Foreign Service officers were fluent in Arabic or Farsi, the dominant...
- Learning is No Picnic, Buster - September 11, 2009
- Conservatives and other parents won their point. President Obama dropped his lesson plan for the schoolchildren of America. He didn't ask what they can do for him, as he...
- No Requiem for a Twitching Corpse - September 4, 2009
- All but hidden in the fulsome eulogies for Ted Kennedy lurk a few serious ideas worthy of more than romancing history or waxing sentimental over a death in a famous...
- Obama's Bummer of a Summer - August 28, 2009
- This is everybody's bummer of a season, particularly these rough weeks for Barack Obama. You could call this a summer of discontent, but there's nothing poetic about it....
- Cheating the Least Among Us - August 21, 2009
- WILLIAMSBURG, Va. -- Colonial Williamsburg is proud of its tradesmen. You can see the carpenters walking out of the history books and down the cobblestone streets, ready...
- Reverie Beyond the Beltway - August 14, 2009
- The shorter days of late summer ushers in the melancholy prospect of autumn, the thoughts of returning to school, work and reality. Such anticipation makes the last...
- Keeping Big Brother Out of End-of-Life Decisions - August 8, 2009
- When my mother was in her late 80s, I took her to a lawyer's office one sunny day to sign her "living will." We read over the questions and her answers, and she signed...
- The Public Isn't Buying Obama's Smooth Talk - July 31, 2009
- Barack Obama was a rock star on the campaign trail and his aura went undimmed in his first few months of office. But then he began taking too many curtain calls. The...
- The Legacy of the Jewish Mother - July 24, 2009
- Before there was multiculturalism, there was assimilation. Before assimilation, there was ethnic pride. Before ethnic pride, there was fear and frustration in the old...
- When a Tweet is Not Enough - July 17, 2009
- WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- All politics may not be loco, as one famous pundit (Michael Barone) puts it, but the ancient maxim that all politics is local is demonstrably true....
- Palin Juggles Two Parties - July 10, 2009
- You took a fine time to leave us, Sarah. Can't you imagine Kenny Rogers singing about it? We've had some bad times/ Lived through some sad times/ But this time your...
- Lessons From a Past Protest - June 26, 2009
- BERLIN -- The righteous rage in the streets of Tehran is familiar to Berliners. They recall their own demonstrations that doomed the hated Berlin Wall two decades ago....
- Glass Ceilings Aren't Glass Slippers - June 19, 2009
- You don't have to be from Venus or Mars to notice that Sonia Sotomayor was appreciated more for her Hispanic roots than for female gifts. That's how President Obama...
- A Bad Week for Old Blighty - June 12, 2009
- LONDON -- This is not Britain's finest hour. The expense-account scandal has exposed rot at the core of the Parliament, where greedy members abused their perks to use...
- No Slouching Toward Confirmation - June 5, 2009
- Nothing so polarizes the nation as a nomination to the Supreme Court. Advise and consent is often more like divide and confront, rarely eliciting our best debates....
- An Appeal to Survival Ethics - May 29, 2009
- Washington is a company town, and what the company makes best is politics and policy. Sometimes the politics is "unprecedented," as certain historians called the duel...
- A Courtship for Bibi and Obama - May 22, 2009
- Diplomacy is like courtship, with its rituals to keep passions in check. Both diplomacy and courtship pose tests to see whether a meeting of the minds can turn into a...
- When Shame Yields to Resilience - May 15, 2009
- John Edwards wears the scarlet letter on his tailored Armani suits. The bold letter "A" is not embroidered with fine needlework such as Hester Prynne sewed for herself....
- Souter, Specter and a Soft Shoe - May 8, 2009
- Souter & Specter sounds like a vaudeville song and dance team, stuck in Cleveland and still dreaming of playing the Palace. You can almost hear their Peoria humor...
- The Banality of Preening From Liberals - May 1, 2009
- Hannah Arendt was wrong. Evil is never banal. Evil is fascinating, provocative and mind-focusing. Adolph Eichmann was probably a bore at a Nazi dinner party, a dull...