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Tuesday, October 24, 2006 06:43:45 PM
Everybody is predicting big gains for the Democrats in November. If they succeed in taking the House of Representatives, that means that Nancy Pelosi is in our future. There is a lot about her that is distinctive, notably that she would be the first woman serving as speaker of the House, which incidentally would put her second, after the vice president, in line for the presidency. Exit Bush and Cheney simultaneously, enter President Nancy Pelosi, oh my God.
Friday, October 20, 2006 06:42:55 PM
At mighty events, little happenings can take on major life, as I was reminded on Thursday evening when I found my pants falling off. I was talking to a stranger dressed in white tie and tails, which was the uniform for dais guests. He beckoned to his wife, who quickly came and extended a maternal hand to my trousers at hip level. "That's exactly what happened to Bill at our son's wedding last week," she said, endeavoring a cure.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 06:43:18 PM
Some years ago, at the outset of the age of e-mail, I was lunching with three or four media moguls, and the discussion turned to security. Specifically, how to guard A from B's gaining access to A's correspondence. The late A.M. Rosenthal, at that time the executive editor of The New York Times, told how he had addressed the problem at his place of work. "I called in the senior staff and said, Look, we don't read each other's mail, do we? Well, for the same reason we don't do that, we will not look at other people's e-mail."
Friday, October 13, 2006 06:24:27 PM
Kim Jong Il never lets us down. When President Bush, reacting to the nuclear test, announced that he would seek further sanctions against North Korea, Kim replied that he would interpret any such move as an act of belligerency warranting a declaration of war against the United States. This would be opera bouffe, the equivalent of Monaco announcing that it would bring down the Federal Reserve -- except for the item that calls Kim Jong Il to the world's attention, namely the possibility that he has a nuclear warhead gestating or even actualized.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006 06:45:32 PM
When Dear Leader sat his counselors down, the radio turned on, instant translator at hand, they listened to hear the repercussions of their bulletin about the nuclear test. Kim Jong Il's thought is never immediately decipherable, even to his intimates. They sat, looking at the screen on which the translations were being shown. There were reports from all over the world. There was a murmur after Tokyo's measured statement of disapproval. But Kim raised his finger and there was instant hush. "Wait," he said, "for Moscow and Peking."
Friday, October 06, 2006 06:24:32 PM
Democrats concerned about the 2008 elections will of course be looking closely at the midterm elections one month away. Hard thought upon the upcoming elections tells us interesting things, salient among them that there is no policy extant, among Democratic leaders, on which strategic political building can be done with any confidence.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006 07:04:22 PM
One may be in favor of all the corrective and punitive things that have been done and are in prospect of being done to former congressman Mark Foley. Still, we should draw breath and ponder a couple of destabilizing points:
Friday, September 29, 2006 05:43:20 PM
The categorical opponents of the detainee bill should spend an unhappy hour reading the new book by Mary Habeck. She is a scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, and her book, "Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror," is published by Yale University Press. The book undertakes to tell the reader things about the jihadist offensive that we should know about, properly concern ourselves with, and take into account when weighing legislative initiatives.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 06:43:47 PM
The question most frequently asked in Connecticut of right-wing voters is: Whom do you intend to vote for on Nov. 7? There are only two patriotic answers to that, but hang on as the drama unfolds.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 06:43:40 PM
Members of the voting public who have slogged their way through the difficulties of Virginia's Sen. George Allen in the past month have found it heavy going. What stopped this breathless spectator was the final exchange between Mr. Allen and his mother. But let's rehearse that relationship for just a minute ...
Tuesday, September 19, 2006 06:03:03 PM
The talk over the weekend concerning the pope's blunder had to do with his under-instruction in diplomacy. Several matters were cited, among them that he had, for lack of intelligent concern, dispatched his principal Arabist to Cairo on a trivial diplomatic mission. The assumption is that if His Holiness had had his ship in order, somebody would have told him that the little paragraph about Islam in his forthcoming speech at the University of Regensburg would bring on a major diplomatic foofaraw.
Friday, September 15, 2006 06:44:48 PM
The divisions on the question of how to deal with terrorist suspects reminds us that there is confused reasoning in town. This is not unexpected, but this time around it gives especially interesting paradoxes.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006 06:23:32 PM
George W. Bush radiates singular American strengths when especially taxed. The flashbacks of 9/11 included the fateful scene in the schoolroom in Florida when Andrew Card, his chief of staff, approached his ear and -- we would learn later -- advised the commander in chief that two aircraft had crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, inaugurating a terrorist war.
Friday, September 08, 2006 06:22:47 PM
President Bush has eight times (someone is counting) struck the theme that the war we are in is a decisive ideological struggle. Anyone who is killed today, in Afghanistan or Iraq, will certainly subscribe to the proposition that his death was a decisive act. But we are nevertheless left wondering whether it was an ideological act, of the kind the White House is speaking of.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 06:43:54 PM
The keenest immediate question, in our war in Afghanistan, is: What to do about the poppy trade? It is up about 50 percent, on a recent reckoning. And this makes Afghanistan the producer of 92 percent of the world's opium poppies.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006 06:48:48 PM
"And one day," Grandma said, "when the phone rings, it will be for you."
Tuesday, August 29, 2006 08:00:17 PM
The wires are heavy with the question of Iraq. The defeat of Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut was a call to outright defiance by Democrats running for re-election. They have been warned now, by the unforgiving, that they must reject the war in Iraq and labor with the single end in mind of returning American troops and dissolving U.S. commitments.
Friday, August 25, 2006 08:01:01 PM
Returning vacationers will not be without a security story, and I am no exception. At the little country airport were five functionaries, two of whom, as it happened, knew me and my work but -- a curious exercise of formalism -- required me at flight time to fish out yet again my driver's license, so that they could pretend to focus on the photo reassuring them that the gentleman they had been talking with was not an impostor faking a passable resemblance.
Friday, August 11, 2006 06:44:06 PM
It's no wonder that so much time is being given to the Democratic primary in Connecticut, and that so many voices are being heard. The ideological triumphalists proclaim it a great renewal in the Democratic Party, beginning with the glorious purge of Sen. Joseph Lieberman. There are, of course, difficulties with this reading.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006 06:24:27 PM
I have many times quoted, in my years at bat, the wry judgment of the Viennese critic: "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists." I'll probably say it yet again before I go, but how to ignore those words in the week of Mrs. Brooke Astor? Her husband died in 1959, and she settled down in her apartment in New York and disbursed $200 million to people and institutions in need.
Friday, August 04, 2006 06:42:18 PM
The threats and counterthreats mount, as also dazed questions that attempt to segregate loyalties. Some are saying that sectarian divisions are distractions and that they will soon give way as transcendent concerns assert themselves.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006 06:05:33 PM
The old injunction about minding your own business has always been a little problematic, because carried to formal lengths it distresses other laws, laws that have to do with being one's brother's keeper. From large-scale national perspectives, there are the laws that translate into maintaining balances of power. You can try to ignore it when you hear that Hitler has ultimate solutions about how to deal with Germany's Jews, but meanwhile it makes sense to maintain your fleet in good condition, never mind if regulating German Jews is other people's business.
Friday, July 28, 2006 08:00:46 PM
Fifty years ago, Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois appeared in the Senate chamber lugging a huge manuscript. He plopped it on the rostrum and -- wept. Yes, he actually cried. Tears ran down his face. When he recovered, he addressed his colleagues.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006 08:00:11 PM
Every day there is a headline or feature on the Lieberman-Lamont primary contest in Connecticut, today's being that Lamont is in a dead heat with the incumbent, and that Bill Clinton has come to town to declare for Lieberman.
Friday, July 21, 2006 06:26:11 PM
When I was very young I would play with my younger sister weighty moral games. I remember one of them which said ... Suppose by pushing down just here (I touched my thumb down on a spot of grass) we could kill one Chinese at the other end of the world and we'd get $1 million. Should we do it?<P> Tuesday, July 18, 2006 08:26:24 PM
So we incline to support Israel, which is understandable, but which raises, also, questions.
Friday, July 14, 2006 06:43:08 PM
President Bush is a victim of his idealistic certitudes. These have their place. It is hard to imagine how Great Britain would have survived the year 1942 without Churchill's apocalyptic reassurances, never mind that when they were spoken, they must have been the cause of laughter in the Nazi high command, which brought them in via radio antennas sitting on top of the Eiffel Tower. The problem has been that without Bush's high calls for global political reform, the American public would have gone along only reluctantly with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And enthusiasm for these wars is now flagging because we have assured ourselves that we aren't there to choke off nuclear arms development. We are there to save the locals from the kind of government they would have if left to their own resources.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006 06:43:17 PM
Eyes do not wander from the orimary race in Connecticut, kicked off by a debate between the incumbent, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and the challenger, Ned Lamont. Commenting on the race, David Brooks, a seer and a columnist for The New York Times, has ventured that it foretells what may be a remarkable divide. If Lamont beats Lieberman, the message to voters across the United States will be that the Democratic tent is on an exclusivist roll. None may feel at home in it who tolerated, let alone encouraged, the war in Iraq over which President Bush has presided.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006 07:26:19 PM
I was thinking, gee whiz, maybe I am one of the reasons Sen. Joe Lieberman is having such a tough time running for re-election in Connecticut. Here's the story:
Friday, June 30, 2006 06:24:18 PM
These are vexing days for those who (a) want to press the war against terrorism, and (b) want to maintain the usual protections against unnecessary accretions of state power. The recent headliner in this carnival is the Supreme Court ruling on Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. What was challenged was the legality of the "military commission" that put him on trial at Guantanamo, denying him access to his accusers or to the evidence presented to the judges (military) by the prosecution.
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