Will real conservatives please stand up? (10/25/06)
Almost from the first, President Bush has acted as if there would never be another election. That's the main thing adepts of the cult of personality surrounding this arrogant, befuddled little man love about him. "As his supporters saw him," Sidney Blumenthal writes in his bracing new book "How Bush Rules" (Princeton University Press), "his simplistic rhetoric was straight talk, his dogmatism fortitude, his swagger reassuring, his stubbornness made him seem a bulwark against danger, and his rough edges proof that he was a man of the people.". ...

Republican damage control failing (10/18/06)
Only weeks ago, GOP campaign officials were breathing smoke and fire. According to Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, R-N.Y., the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, hapless Democrats had no idea what they were up against. Relentlessly negative TV commercials funded by the party's $50 million war chest were about to bury Democratic candidates under an avalanche of charges dug up by so-called opposition research -- unpaid student loans, late tax payments, bankruptcies, embarrassing lawsuits, etc.. ...

Scandal by the numbers (10/11/06)
About that "October Surprise" White House political impresario Karl Rove's been promising Republican congressional candidates: It better be a doozy. If any American political party has had a more farcical interlude than the GOP, it could only be the Whigs, who self-destructed over slavery during the 1850s. That's not a prediction. Never underestimate the capacity of American voters to be distracted by baubles and bright, shiny objects...

Clinton turns the tables on Fox News (10/04/06)
Something shocking and unusual happened recently on "Fox News Sunday." A prominent Democrat took issue with host Chris Wallace's cheap-shot interview techniques-- made him look foolish and completely out of his depth, and left him whining about his subject's bad manners. Unfortunately, that prominent Democrat was former President Bill Clinton, whose political career is history...

Election year stunt goes awry (09/27/06)
Generally speaking, the more people tell you how tough they are, the harder they're working to convince themselves. George W. Bush is no exception. The president's authoritarian impulses, on display during an amazingly petulant Rose Garden press conference, so clearly derive from his own fundamental weakness of mind and character that it's become increasingly embarrassing to watch him perform. The more strenuously Bush struggles to hide his Inner Punk, the more clearly it emerges...

Challenge the Godfather, expect the shiv (09/20/06)
Because journalists are almost as prone to flatter their audiences as politicians, the staggering ignorance of the American public about matters crucial to democratic self-governance is discreetly ignored. Get this: According to a Zogby poll conducted early this month, almost half (46 percent) of respondents agreed that "there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks." Among Republicans, fully 65 percent believe that Iraq played a role in al Qaeda atrocities...

Defending "The Dog Whisperer" (09/13/06)
"What mighty contests," wrote 18th-century satirist Alexander Pope, "rise from trivial things." The poet had sex in mind, although something similar could be said about Americans and their pets. If you think people get worked up about politics, say something "controversial" about dogs or cats. Then prepare for action...

An unsurprising "October Surprise" (09/06/06)
A minor hazard of opinion writing is that some readers imagine you take dictation. Because this column generally finds Democrats less objectionable than Republicans, I'm often warned that my wrongheadedness will doom my party's candidates. I got that a lot after criticizing Israel's blundering attack on Lebanon, less so now that 62 percent of Israelis say Prime Minister Ehud Olmert should resign...

Marketing hysteria (08/30/06)
Sometimes, distance lends clarity. I've spent much of August at an old friend's Montana ranch, in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains 17 miles from a town of 200. It's as far from the everydayness of American life as it's possible to get without sleeping on the ground...

TGI Maddux: My summer segue from the world (08/23/06)
For serious baseball fans, the game provides a daily sanctuary, a saga with more characters and subplots than Leo Tolstoy could manage. Every day since the latest Middle Eastern war began, my friend Bill B. has taken to e-mailing me accounts of games he knows I've already seen. We've got somewhat different views about the fighting, but not about the game. In the comment line, Bill always writes, "Thank God for baseball."...

Neocon recipe for Mideast? Burn it all (08/16/06)
In politics, it's crucial not to be overwhelmed by irony. Nobody knows what will happen in the Middle East. But if the United States and France, working through the U.N. Security Council, can negotiate a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, the temptation will be to make jokes. How long ago was it that a (pardon my French) rapprochement with France would have been deemed suspect by all hairy-chested, God-fearing Americans?...

Fanaticism drives Middle Eastern debate (08/09/06)
NOTE: The third paragraph alludes to language that may be sensitive to some readers. Many journalists pretend that getting abuse from persons on both ends of the political spectrum proves their even-handedness. No, it doesn't. Besides, this column makes no pretense of neutrality, only factual accuracy. Even so, it's hard to ignore the irony of being denounced as an agent of the International Zionist Conspiracy one week and an unrepentant anti-Semite the next...

Connecticut Senate race stirs strong feelings (08/02/06)
Herd the livestock inside the gates, raise the drawbridge and man the parapets: There's a populist rebellion gathering force in Connecticut. Armed with pitchforks and flaming torches, the rebellious peasants of the nation's wealthiest state are reported to be marching on Sen. Joe Lieberman's castle...

Fanaticism dominates the Middle East (07/26/06)
News bulletin: Israel is a foreign country. Foreign countries have their own interests, which aren't necessarily those of the United States. It's not our obligation to fight their battles, particularly when their actions are brutal, rash, foolhardy and appear calculated to force a wider war that's definitely no good for Americans, nor, ultimately, for Israelis...

'An Inconvenient Truth' (07/20/06)
Friends who knew Al Gore in college still talk about their surprise that he ever went into politics. The son of a U.S. senator (Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Sr.), he seemed to know too much about the personal costs of public life to find it appealing -- particularly the loss of privacy, the play-acting and the constant pandering to uninformed opinion...

White House mass markets fear (07/12/06)
The key thing about the infamous New York Times scoop that's drawn the theatrical wrath of the Bush administration is the last thing you'll hear from the newspaper's embattled editors: how little real news it contained. Nobody who's paying attention could be surprised that U.S. agents monitor international money transfers. Bush has been patting himself on the back about it for years...

Confronting the country club Napoleons (06/29/06)
Instead of running for majority leader if Democrats take control of the House in 2006, maybe Rep. John P. Murtha ought to run for president. He may be 74, but the man knows how to handle himself in a fight, a skill too many genteel Democrats appear to have forgotten...

Let's play 'Oddball.' (06/21/06)
This time, Ann Coulter has set herself up for the kind of personal attack that's her specialty. In her latest frantic bid for attention, the right-wing pundit set her claws into the "Jersey Girls," Sept. 11 widows whose civic activism helped the nation find its bearings after the terrorist attack...

White House flirts with reality (06/14/06)
The latest gambit by a floundering White House is that President Bush has decided to give not so much peace a chance, as he is adulthood. It could be a ruse; merely another elaborate fake-out like Bush's forgotten vow to seek a U.N. Security Council vote about Saddam Hussein's phantom WMDs in 2003, immediately before commencing the "shock and awe" bombing campaign...

The "Chicken Little" syndrome (05/31/06)
So here's the big Republican agenda for the 2006 elections: Other people's sex lives (aka gay marriage), flag-burning, illegal Mexican immigrants, tax cuts and Chicken Little. There's no surprise about the first few. A GOP campaign resembles a traveling tent show. White House sideshow barker Karl Rove hopes the rubes who line up every two years to see the two-headed calf and the bearded lady will fall for flag-burning again...

Beware the dark-eyed stranger (05/24/06)
Bad news for Republicans: the Know-Nothing faction of the party base has already forgotten the "War on Christmas" and other chimerical dangers. As memories of Sept. 11 fade, they may even be losing vigilance in the "War on Terror." The latest threat to the purity of our precious bodily fluids is brown-skinned Meskins. If we're not vigilant, those swarthy fellows mowing your neighbor's yard are apt to rise up and sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish...

Beltway pundits: We are not amused (05/17/06)
In my experience, there's no bigger bunch of crybabies in American public life than the fops and courtiers of our Washington press corps. If Comedy Channel satirist Steven Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner did nothing else, it surely proved that...

Democrats getting their act together (05/10/06)
With the Bush administration floundering in opinion polls, Democrats appear characteristically divided. Some are so confident of victory in 2006 congressional elections that they've begun to fantasize about investigations and even impeachment -- not so much enumerating unhatched chickens as fantasizing about imaginary eggs. Others worry that timid national Democratic leaders will find a way to snatch defeat from jaws of victory yet again...

Sleepwalking into disaster (05/03/06)
We hear a lot about "madmen" taking power in far-off lands -- most often lands with large oil reserves. A few pertinent questions: Has the White House lost its collective mind? Do the president and his minions believe that Americans can be stampeded into another needless war to save his party from the consequences of the catastrophe in Iraq? Is the Bush administration seriously thinking of bombing -- possibly nuking -- Iran for political purposes? Is it actually possible, as has been reported, that Bush believes himself to be on a divine, messianic mission?. ...

Not every crisis equals World War II (04/26/06)
In the age of mass media, political propaganda imitates TV melodrama. Particularly in the United States, the discussion of foreign affairs -- crucial questions involving the lives of millions -- follows the conventions of the action/adventure film: an idealistic American hero, a villain with his wicked henchmen, a dramatic "crisis," redemptive violence, and, after an imagined resolution, order and tranquility restored...

Nuking Iran: Wild speculation or election-year scare? (04/19/06)
Here we go again. With a congressional election looming in November, President Bush's support continues to erode. Fully 47 percent in a recent Washington Post/ABC poll "strongly disapprove" of his leadership. Even the White House's warmest supporters concede that Democrats stand an excellent chance of regaining the majority in the House and/or Senate. With the majority comes subpoena power...

Jill Carroll, American hero (04/12/06)
Few events have been more revelatory of the nation's poisonous political climate than the ordeal of Christian Science Monitor's Jill Carroll. Kidnapped off a Baghdad street last January during an effort to interview a Sunni politician, the winsome 28-year-old reporter saw her Iraqi translator murdered before her eyes. ...

Blaming the messenger can't change the message (04/06/06)
Let it be known that the White House's latest campaign to redeem its lost honor in Iraq began with a thunderous falsehood. In a made-for-FoxNews moment during a recent press conference, President Bush took a question from Hearst columnist Helen Thomas for the first time in years. Like an aging actress taking a curtain call, the 85-year-old doyenne of the White House press corps performed exactly as expected...

Squabbling Democrats fear demagoguery (03/29/06)
Recent bickering among Democrats about Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold's motion to censure President Bush over illegal, warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps of American citizens reminded me of one of my favorite "The Far Side" cartoons. In it, a nuclear mushroom cloud looms above a city skyline. ...

Banish Bonds? Too late now (03/22/06)
In the pagan cult of celebrity worship some suggest is America's real religion, San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds appears to have entered the destruct cycle. As recently as 2004, the 41-year-old left fielder seemed destined to become what baseball calls, with no seeming irony, an "immortal." Long one of baseball's premier outfielders, a perennial all-star and "five tool" athlete, Bonds experienced an astonishing late-career metamorphosis that caused many to describe him as maybe the greatest player in the game's history -- others as merely its greatest cheat.. ...

Dumb questions get get dumb answers (03/15/06)
Every generation seems to need its own universal Theory of Everything, reducing all human experience to a handful of easily memorized slogans. What with astrology, Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in eclipse and Rush Limbaugh on drugs, the latest psuedo-scientific fad to capture the attention of the credulous appears to be evolutionary psychology. ...

Personality cult encounters reality (03/08/06)
Tell me again about President Bush's fabled intuition, his born leader's gift for choosing the right course of action by natural instinct. Oh, and yes, the peerless political genius of Karl Rove. Because if you didn't know any better, it would appear that the administration's grandest schemes have gone badly awry, confronting the White House with a political crisis seemingly beyond its control...

Cheney's own actions caused his problems (03/01/06)
My first inclination upon hearing the news was to give Deadeye Dick Cheney's hunting accident a pass. It's not as if there aren't more important things to think about. Unless a plausible case could be made that the vice president harbored a grudge of some kind against the Texas attorney he'd mistaken for a quail, everything sounded fairly straightforward...

Will the real conservatives please stand up? (02/22/06)
The longer the Bush administration remains onstage, the more it resembles the Theater of the Absurd: something by the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, perhaps, the Frenchman Eugene Ionesco, or the American Homer Simpson. Consider this exchange between Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during recent Senate hearings about the National Security Administration's unconstitutional eavesdropping on American citizens...

'Brokeback Mountain' art, not propanganda (02/15/06)
The inability to tolerate ambiguity defines the authoritarian mind. To control freaks, there's no such thing as art, only propaganda. Every story must have a didactic message, the simpler the better. In that regard, self-styled "Christians," in the politicized sense, are much like Marxist advocates of "Socialist realism."...

Bush's cinematic war on terror (02/08/06)
Why do Republican-oriented pundits spend so much energy lashing out at Hollywood for its sins? Professional jealousy. Partly because so many Americans imagine the world beyond Wal-Mart as a movie set, the Bush administration does its best work in the realm of illusion...

Addicted to power (02/01/06)
It's symptomatic of the current political situation that many appear willing to give bogus desperado James Frey a pass. For the uninitiated, Frey's the author whose best-selling memoir of booze and drug addiction "A Million Little Pieces," turned out to be more like "A Thousand and One Falsehoods." Few of the checkable facts examined by SmokingGun.com proved true. Frey's melodramatic confession was largely imaginary...

Desperado daydreams (01/25/06)
Some years ago, a magazine asked me to write about the Texas Prison Rodeo. Never having visited a penitentiary, I asked the only college professor I knew with a Marine Corps tattoo for etiquette tips. Should I ask convicts about their crimes? If I didn't, he said, they'd take me for a coward...

A purely Republican scandal (01/18/06)
American politics offers few spectacles quite so diverting as the pious hypocrite unmasked. For your entertainment dollar, nothing beats Congress in full scandal mode. Particularly, it must be said, a Republican Congress. So brazen and nefarious were the schemes of former GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for example, that it appears "The Hammer," might with more accuracy have been dubbed "The Chisel."...

Do Americans still have the guts for democracy? (01/11/06)
Every time George W. Bush gets caught in a tight spot, he does the same thing: he plays the Sept. 11 fear card, wraps himself in the flag, emits jaw-dropping falsehoods, and all but accuses his critics of treason. So it is with the stunning revelation that the White House has ordered the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in brazen defiance of federal law and the U.S. Constitution...

Why do the heathen rage? (01/04/06)
At year's end, here's a question worth pondering: Self-styled conservative Republicans dominate Washington. They currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. With the Sam Alito Supreme Court nomination pending, they've got good chance of turning the U.S. Supreme Court into a veritable right-wing star chamber. So how come they and their media enablers are acting like such soreheads and crybabies lately?...

Police state tactics no answer for terror (12/28/05)
Anyone who rationalizes George W. Bush's illegal use of secret, warrantless wiretaps against American citizens is no friend of democracy. They may call themselves "conservatives." But they might with equal accuracy dub themselves Martians or Zoroastrians...

Torture serves tyrants, not democracies (12/21/05)
The Associated Press recently administered a political I.Q. test, and 61 percent of the American public flunked. Needless to say, they didn't call it that. "Poll Finds Broad Approval of Terrorist Torture," the headline read. More than three out of five Americans surveyed "agreed (that) torture is justified at least on rare occasions," although the article never hinted what those occasions might be...

Garden Sate bear hunt (12/14/05)
Perhaps inspired by an episode of "The Sopranos" where a bear shows up on Tony's patio, scaring the fool out of the mobster's teenaged son, New Jersey recently held a licensed six-day bear hunt. About 5,000 sportsmen and a smaller number of animal rights protesters showed up for the hunt, limited to the state's three rural northwestern counties. ...

Scapegoating no remedy for moral failures (12/07/05)
Some years ago I had an unsettling interview with the pastor of a gravel road fundamentalist church in deep East Texas. A magazine had dispatched me to cover a passionate controversy the fellow had stirred up among the local citizenry. The preacher had taken to delivering sermons on an AM radio station denouncing the local VFW post for serving alcoholic beverages...

Intelligent design is not scientific theory (11/30/05)
To me, the most heartening election result this November took place in Dover, Pa. There, citizens in a Republican town in a traditionally Republican congressional district voted to replace virtually the entire local school board with moderates running as Democrats. Although the tally was close, with fewer than two percentage points separating some contestants, it was also decisive. Every incumbent Republican lost; every Democratic challenger won...

Doubling down on a bad bet (11/23/05)
Seemingly stung by polls showing 57 percent of Americans now believe that he "deliberately misled" the nation into war with Iraq, President Bush did what a successful con man always does in a tight spot: he doubled his bet, resorting to falsehoods so brazen as to invite citizens almost to doubt the evidence of their senses. Who are you going to believe, your president or your lying eyes?...

Queen of the Washington Heathers (11/16/05)
Everywhere you look, there's the Shyest Woman in Washington, demurely avoiding the spotlight. That would be Maureen Dowd, the acerbic New York Times columnist promoting her new book, "Are Men Necessary?" An excerpt in the Sunday Magazine was illustrated by a photo of the author perched elegantly on a barstool, wearing basic black, red stiletto pumps and fishnet stockings. She gazes coolly into the camera as if to say: "Forget it, Big Boy. You can't afford me."...

White House schemers too clever by half (11/09/05)
Fortunately, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has a second career to fall back on. He'll need one. The recently indicted White House aide's first novel, "The Apprentice," was published in 1996. Set in Japan, it came billed as a creepy political thriller with exotic sexual overtones. Some reviewers found the sex creepier than the intrigue, but that's a matter of taste...

Mr. Dilbert goes to Washington (11/02/05)
So now they tell us. With the Bush administration spiraling into political free fall, conservative elder statesmen have suddenly begun speaking publicly about the regime's manifest failures. Meanwhile, aides whisper to reporters that the president's losing it, pitching temper tantrums, lashing out at junior staffers, and blaming everybody in the White House for his problems except himself...

'Little Miss Run Amok' (10/26/05)
With everybody in Washington anticipating dramatic, possibly melodramatic, developments in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation, it's worth noticing what it reveals about the appalling state of American political journalism. As one with first-hand experience of the odd blend of arrogance, high-handedness and sheer professional incompetence in high places at The New York Times, very little in that newspaper's coverage of self-dramatizing reporter Judith Miller surprises me...

Deeper mess (10/19/05)
On Fox News Sunday, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, cautioned the Republican faithful of hard times to come. Citing criminal defense lawyers "friendly to the administration," he predicted indictments of "senior administration officials" in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation. "I think it's going to be bad for the Bush administration," he added...

Autumn leaves (10/12/05)
One of the oddest spectacles in contemporary celebrity journalism took place when New York Times reporter Judith Miller recently showed up on television to celebrate her release from prison. Miller had been jailed for 84 days at the behest of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald due to her refusal to testify in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. ...

Political correctness, GOP-style (10/05/05)
The most telling description of the Bush administration to date may have come from a White House aide who used the term "reality-based" as an insult. According to journalist Ron Suskind, who described the incident in a 2004 article, the aide mocked the stuffy, pedantic, presumably liberal view "that solutions [to political problems] emerge from ... judicious study of discernible reality."...

Compassionate conservatism returns (09/28/05)
If you can believe it, "compassionate conservatism" is back. Knocked sideways by public anger at the government's inept response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush delivered a televised speech promising the moon to Gulf Coast residents left homeless and jobless by the storm. He added heartening words about the role of racism in the region's enduring poverty...

An equal-opportunity disaster (09/21/05)
You know things are upside-down when President Malaprop makes sense about race. A reporter asked Bush about talk that "there was a racial component" to who got no immediate help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "My attitude is this," the president said. ...

Feckless ideology has a terrible cost (09/14/05)
At a time like this, many feel an instinctive wish to rise above politics. With bodies still emerging from the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, partisan bickering ought to be the last thing on anybody's mind. But acknowledging our common humanity shouldn't blind us to the reality that much of the devastation wrought by the storm is as much a consequence of human folly as nature's wrath. It does no honor to the dead to pretend otherwise...

Democrats show signs of life on Iraq (09/07/05)
Don't hold your breath, but Democrats may be showing signs of life in the national debate over Iraq. For most of three years, including Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, party leaders have appeared fearful of challenging George W. Bush's belligerent bungling. They haven't wanted voters to mistake them for George McGovern, the WWII bomber pilot and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who made the mistake of being right about Vietnam too soon...

Weighing in on presidential fitness (08/24/05)
Having voted in my last junior-high student-council election long ago, I am normally unmoved by suggestions that this column adopt a more upbeat perspective regarding President Bush. I can think of no good reason either to feign school spirit or pretend enthusiasm for the administration's manifest failures, foreign and domestic...

Diamond's 'human comedy' shines (08/17/05)
Among the most persistent delusions is the myth of a bygone Golden Age, when human beings were superior to the sorry specimens around us. Classical literature is filled with tales of heroes and demigods whose exploits dwarfed those of puny contemporaries. Even Homer's "Iliad" tells of an earlier time when giants walked the Earth...

Cookie-cutter press criticism (08/10/05)
If there's anything you'll never read in this column, it's a categorical defense of the news media. One way or another, my last three books have been about the terrible harm done to individuals and the country by slipshod and dishonest reporting. Among those criticized most vigorously have been some of the major so-called "liberal" news organizations--broadcast and print...

Let's declare victory and bring troops home (08/03/05)
Sooner or later, somebody's going to have to be irresponsible enough to suggest a sane way out of Iraq. The futility of expecting the Bush administration to acknowledge its epic bungling is obvious. The president speaks in tired formulas that no longer even seem calculated to persuade. "The only way our enemies can succeed," Bush said recently "is if we forget the lessons of Sept. 11--if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi."...

Propaganda machine encounters reality (07/27/05)
For years, the Republican media machine has dominated national politics. Through a combination of ideological certitude, message discipline and bullying, the right often succeeds in defining issues its way. Outfits like Fox News, the Washington Times, and Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts, serve as propaganda organs of the Republican National Committee...

Journalists are citizens, too (07/20/05)
In an age of celebrity journalists, it's hardly unusual to see our esteemed national press corps display upside-down priorities. Like the Hollywood luminaries they resemble, some turn into big crybabies whenever their prerogatives are questioned. Even so, the recent caterwauling on behalf of jailed reporter Judith Miller has risen to new heights of absurdity. To hear the high panjandrums of The New York/Washington media tell it, we are not a nation of laws but of editors...

Getting revenge, Washington style (07/13/05)
People who write about politics are often accused of being too cynical. Truth is, it's hard to be cynical enough to keep up with the professionals. Take that contemptibly dishonest speech White House apparatchik Karl Rove gave recently accusing Democrats of wanting to offer "therapy and understanding" to the 9/11 terrorists. This in the face of 420-1 and 98-0 votes in Congress to make war on Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies in Afghanistan...

White House smear campaign (07/06/05)
Ask Karl Rove for an apology? Not me. Apologies are appropriate for foolish remarks made in the heat of argument. Rove read from a script. The White House handed out copies. Besides, what would an apology from that flabby little apparatchik be worth? He's the human equivalent of a fear-biting dog: His Master's Voice...

One party government, lap-dog press (06/29/05)
No recent issue better exemplifies the paralysis of one-party government than the so-called Downing Street memos. For readers who have been either vacationing on Mars or getting all their news from the so-called mainstream media, those are minutes of the British government's July 2002 deliberations about its then-secret agreement with the Bush administration to invade Iraq...

The sun is setting on dreams of empire (06/22/05)
For the longest time, all the Bush White House had to do to answer critics of the war in Iraq was to unfurl Old Glory. The time for flag-waving, however, appears to be ending. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, almost six in 10 Americans think the United States should start bringing the troops home ASAP. ...

Creating an American aristicracy (06/15/05)
One virtue of American-style capitalism is the way it has sustained democracy by transforming the lust for power into the quest for cash. You don't need to know much about the biographies of 19th century robber barons like John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, for example, to be glad they stuck to commerce instead of politics. Not that the two are ever completely separate, but we're better off with the control freaks in the counting house instead of the White House...

The soft porn queen of our times (06/08/05)
Like it or not, Paris Hilton has turned herself into the "It" girl of the Bush II era. Through a shrewd combination of shameless self-promotion and self-promoting shamelessness, the hotel heiress, "reality" TV personality, horror film actress and home-video porn star gets more attention from the E! Network and Us magazine sector of the news media than Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice combined...

The Iraq war debate slipping into silliness (06/01/05)
With respect to the Bush administration's "war on terror," our administration appears to have entered the Monty Python stage of debate, where extreme silliness trumps all competing values. I refer to the inspired scene in "Life of Brian" in which a cabal of toga-clad revolutionaries styling itself the "Judean People's Liberation Front" meets in a Roman coliseum to argue strategy...

A convenient diversion (05/25/05)
The latest orchestrated furor over Newsweek's bungled story about prison guards at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet comes at a convenient time for the White House. So convenient that conspiracists might suspect the anonymous Pentagon official who fed the allegation to ace reporter Michael Isikoff yet recanted after rioting in Afghanistan deliberately set the magazine up for a fall...

Real men don't kiss princes (05/18/05)
Color my neck red, but was I the only one flabbergasted to see President Bush at his Texas ranch holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? No wonder his poll numbers are tanking. In Texas, "real men" hold hands only in football huddles, if ever. Not to mention that to the GOP "base," the United States is at war with all A-Rabs. That's how they were tricked into thinking that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were the same guy...

Don't be fooled by the good cop (05/11/05)
Very shrewdly, President Bush beat a tactical retreat on the role of religion in politics during his recent White House press conference. Speaking soon after "Justice Sunday," a closed-circuit telecast in which certain of the Republican Party's more fervid theologians decreed that Democrats had shown their enmity to "people of faith" by rejecting a handful of his judicial nominees, Bush was asked if that struck him as an appropriate characterization...

Ann Coulter's vaseline-covered closeup (05/04/05)
The idea of "liberal media bias" has long been the most useful propaganda tool of the Republican right. For believers, it's a magical balm rendering invisible all inconvenient facts. Did it first appear in, say, The New York Times or on network television? Then it's a lie concocted by elitists who think they're better than you...

Man overboard: decrying the 'man date' (04/27/05)
Attention, hayseeds: An official trend has been decreed, and once again you're behind the curve. According to the Style section of The New York Times, the hippest, most voguish, up-to-the-minute thing is something called a "man date." According to one Jennifer 8. Lee, a man date consists of "two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman."...

The reconstructionist attack on the Constitution (04/20/05)
Does it strike you as odd that persons calling themselves Christians are furious that the U.S. Supreme Court found executing juveniles unconstitutional? Do you find even odder that such individuals describe themselves, straight-faced, as adherents of the "culture of life"?...

The pope's death and the 'culture of life' (04/13/05)
If everything you knew came from cable TV news, you'd think the nation's predominant religion was a pagan cult of celebrity worship: a never-ending Dionysian spectacle of sexual transgression, violence and redemptive sentimentality. We create celebrity-gods, it seems, largely to destroy them...

Moral exhibitionism (04/06/05)
Am I the only person in the United States getting fed up with moral exhibitionism? And no, I'm not really talking about the Terri Schiavo spectacle playing out 24/7 on the cable news channels. Turning the poor woman's tragedy into a carnival sideshow became inevitable once Congress and the brothers Bush decided there was political advantage in taking sides in a grave and intimate family quarrel...

Bush a pied piper fo democracy? That's a howl (03/30/05)
Some years ago, I owned a beagle named Leon. A handsome, lemon-colored dog, Leon had a terrific nose. Turn him and his brother Otis loose in a thicket, and if those boys didn't chase a rabbit out, then no rabbits lived there. Alas, Leon also did a lot of "cold-trailing," baying down scent lines so old that the rabbits that left them probably existed only in the form of coyote scat. ...

Whose team is your senator on? (03/23/05)
With many Americans entering NCAA college basketball betting pools this week, it occurred to me that C-SPAN might get a ratings boost if U.S. Senators wore brightly colored uniforms and numbers on their backs. Think about it. Sports fans who can't tell a match-up zone from a no-parking zone are wagering good money on teams they've never seen, wondering whether the Opossum State Marsupials' chances of upsetting the Fighting Toll Booth Collectors of New Jersey...

Facing down the Republican attack machine (03/16/05)
Many Democrats still don't grasp what they're up against in today's Republican Party. Naive souls, they prefer to see national politics as a giant PTA meeting, and to comfort themselves with civics-text bromides about the virtues of compromise and bipartisanship...

Dean: A good fighter for Dems (03/09/05)
Back when former Gov. Howard Dean appeared likely to win the Democratic presidential nomination, I thought he'd make a terrible candidate. I admired his straightforward style, but I doubted the Vermonter could win a single Southern state. Gay marriage alone would sink him. It wouldn't matter that Dean had brokered a compromise in Vermont favoring "civil unions." By the time Republicans got done demagoguing the issue, most "red state" voters wouldn't notice the distinction...

'Outing is ignored by liberal meeting' (03/02/05)
Citizens, it's finally happened. An alleged former male prostitute has been unmasked among the White House press corps. If this comes as a surprise, don't blame liberal media bias. For once, there's a Washington sex scandal our fastidious "mainstream" press mostly wishes to avoid...

Who won the Iraqi election? Not us (02/23/05)
By my count, recent TV euphoria over the Iraqi elections constituted the fifth American victory celebration in fewer than two years. First came the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in April 2003, followed by President Bush's swaggering "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier photo op. ...

Bush's magical mystery reforms (02/16/05)
Every successful politician is part actor, and every successful actor part confidence man. Some fake piety, others humility, compassion, courage, etc. The list of make-believe character traits essential to winning elections is potentially endless. Opponents always think they see through the act, but there's real danger only when the mask slips while everybody's paying attention...

The snake-oil pitch for Social Security (02/09/05)
I swear if I hear one more 20-something in a power suit smugly assure a TV interviewer how much better they can handle their money than (snicker) Social Security, things could get ugly. Lately, I've been fantasizing about storming a Starbucks armed with fully automatic banana cream pies. "Eat this, yuppie scum!"...

Playing cards in the house of Bush (02/02/05)
I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.--Mark Twain Never mind the Republicans' objections to "affirmative action" and "quotas." When it comes to the politics of personal identity, nobody plays the game better than the Bush administration. ...

The triumph of tribalism (01/26/05)
"A foolish consistency," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is the hobgoblin of little minds." Emerson, an otherwise unreadable 19th century essayist who has driven more students out of American lit courses than James Fenimore Cooper and Alice Walker combined, became the patron saint of opinion columnists everywhere with that happy thought. (A hobgoblin is a malicious ghost; like Ann Coulter with a sense of humor, I suppose.)...

Journalistic transgressions go beyond '60 Minutes' (01/19/05)
Funny, but the last time CBS' "60 Minutes" broadcast an unsubstantiated, ultimately discredited story embarrassing to the president of the United States, there was no investigation and nobody got fired. Well, let me amend that. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated star witness Kathleen Willey's allegations against Bill Clinton to a fare-thee-well before concluding what any halfway skeptical reporter would have suspected from the first: that she was an unreliable, self-dramatizing person with a habit of embroidering her own history.. ...

Two awful tragedies: the Tsunami and Iraq (01/12/05)
It may have taken an earthquake, a tsunami and a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, but George W. Bush finally changed his mind. In so doing, the president helped Americans show the generosity, compassion and know-how for which we've long been admired around the world...

Creationism creeps back into high school science (01/05/05)
"It is my supposition that the Universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine." -- geneticist J.B.S. Haldane In the popular imagination, influenced by a thousand Hollywood "sword and sandal" epics inspired by Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," great nations perish through moral decay. ...

A sucker's bet for Social Security (12/29/04)
In making President Bush its "Person of the Year," Time gushed that he had successfully "reframed reality to match his design." Ponder that phrase. A cynic might think it a backhanded way of calling him a particularly accomplished liar. Indeed, Bush prevailed in November largely because many Americans simply cannot believe that their president would deliberately mislead them about matters of life and death...

The Social Security reform sham (12/22/04)
Here we go again. Yet another stage-managed "crisis" has arisen requiring the heroic intervention of George W. Bush, the action-figure president. This time, it's Social Security, the most successful government program in U.S. history, that has been singled out for the now-familiar Bush treatment...

Athletes aren't the only problem with today's sports (12/15/04)
Like many sports fans, I see games as a refuge. A refuge from what? Well, what have you got? Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq war, traffic jams, Rush Limbaugh, Antonin Scalia, Michael Moore, The New York Times, FOX News, CNN, telemarketers, televangelists, telephones, e-mail, the Internet, the IRS, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Do I make myself clear?...

Your show of shows (12/08/04)
There really are only two ways to avoid becoming a partisan in the "culture wars" being fought on the nation's talk shows and editorial pages: Either get rid of the TV altogether or, equally unlikely in a nation of soreheads, tighten up that pouting lower lip and enjoy the comedy...

Bush tax reform: reward for the rich (12/01/04)
After eking out a three-point election win, President Bush claimed a mandate and announced plans to "reform" the tax code and Social Security. Almost needless to say, those reforms conform to the reverse-Robin Hood ideal of giving to Bush's wealthy benefactors while taking from wage-earners everywhere. I say "almost" because, hypnotized by the president's folksy drawl, many don't realize that they're about to be conned out of even the minuscule tax cuts Bush delivered during his first term...

Ecclesiastical con men are riding high (11/24/04)
To hear the TV preachers tell it, the Lord ordained George W. Bush's election over Sen. John Kerry. Fundamentalist divines and their media accomplices haven't sounded this smug since Prohibition. Indeed, possibly not since 1928, when Herbert Hoover crushed "blue state" Roman Catholic Democrat Al Smith of New York. (Ironically, Deep South states loyal to segregationist Democrats supported Smith when even his home state did not.) Anyway, we all remember how well that worked out...

Color most of America purple (11/17/04)
"The men American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." --H. L. Mencken Oddly, supporting the winner of the presidential election seems to have made some people angrier. ...