Hardly a Soul Blinked

After the Congressional Special Election down in Georgia, President Trump exclaimed, Great victory. (He meant for Trump.) At the same time the Democrats were saying the same thing: They said they’d won a great victory. And defeated Trump. Somebody wasn’t telling the truth. And Sean Trende, of Real Clear Politics, put his finger on who:…

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Four years on

Four years ago this week, an extraordinary young woman I had come to know was brutally murdered. Stabbed to death in her own home. By a man she and her husband had befriended and helped. Four years on, I still struggle with the monstrous evil here. We know that human beings do cruel, senseless, horrible…

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Is That All There Is?

This is a great bill, he said. There’s a great plan… the plan gets better and better and better, and it has gotten really, really, really good. It was like listening to a high-school boy urging a girl to go to the prom with him: This will be great. Really great. It just gets better…

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Looking Over His Shoulder

Watching Sean Hannity’s like watching a celebrity say the same thing over and over – it wears out quickly. But somehow, Bill O’Reilly wasn’t hum-drum – he had a knack for entertainment. So, did O’Reilly’s sins catch up with him? Fox News says Yes. He’s guilty and gone. O’Reilly says not so – that the…

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Hillbilly Elegy

Gary told me, Read Hillbilly Elegy – it’ll make you see things you’ve been staring at for years in a different light. The story – a memoir – starts when a pregnant thirteen-year-old girl marries a sixteen-year-old boy and moves from Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains to Middleton, Ohio in the late 1940’s. He went to work…

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A Welter of Echoes

Each roar lasts a second. But the echoes last days. Mexico wins. We lose. China wins. We lose. Wall Street wins. We lose. Washington Politicians win. We lose. Each had mantra-like precision. Each echoed across twitter, cable news, and newspaper headlines. Once, when Obamacare repeal failed, two mantras collided head-on. The President tweeted: The Democrats…

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Old Virtue

He was born a gambler. And he worked hard. He made a fortune, lost a fortune, and made another bigger fortune. Most men in his profession – he built skyscrapers – shunned the lime-light but he enjoyed celebrity and accepted an offer to star in a reality show and found he had a unique talent:…

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Tricks

In Donald Trump’s world whatever he says cannot be wrong. He’s infallible. Because as Trump says, I know how life works. And, if you ask, Trump will give you proof of his infallibility: He’ll explain how he predicted the outcome of the Brexit vote in advance and how he predicted – a hundred times –…

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Unraveling

Day in and day out for years I sat in meetings watching and listening to men who lived and breathed politics and, almost to a man every one looked on telling a lie (or, more precisely, being caught telling a lie) as a risk they dreaded. A lie was like a cancer. It could grow…

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Rolling Downhill

It’s peculiar: My memory is far from perfect but I can’t recall either Jesse Helms or Jim Hunt spending taxpayers’ money to sue another politician – but these days it happens all the time: We’ve got packed courtrooms where one group of government lawyers are battling another group of government lawyers in front of judges…

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