Among the most revealing aspects of life during the Obama presidency is the panoply of responses to a black family in the White House. What made so many of us proud of our country on Jan. 20, 2009, has increasingly provoked expressions of hatred from the far right. That is troubling, but not Read More
No recent controversy has so plainly revealed the hollow values of the American right than the effort to prevent the construction of a community center in Lower Manhattan because it will include a mosque. Arguments in opposition range from a professed concern for the sensitivities of the 9/11 victims’ families to a primitive battle cry Read More
The outpouring of tens of thousands of classified military documents by WikiLeaks is not precisely comparable to the publication of the Pentagon Papers-but in at least one crucial respect, it may be more valuable. While the Pentagon Papers revealed the duplicity of American policy makers in the senseless Vietnam War, their release came Read More
Back in the bad old days of the cold war-when mutual nuclear annihilation was a policy option-a culture of secrecy arose in Washington. What wise observers understood even then was that while governments tried to keep secrets from each other, their chief concern was to keep secrets from their own people. Considering what Read More
The headline for the latest poll says that public confidence in President Obama has sunk to a new low, with a majority of Americans saying they don’t trust him to make the best policy choices, especially on the ailing economy. These same voters, surveyed by The Washington Post and ABC News, are even more disdainful Read More
So often are the certitudes and pronouncements of the chattering class simply mistaken that they must always be treated with deep skepticism. That is especially true when anything important is at stake-from the arguments for invading Iraq several years ago to today’s economic stagnation. Whatever the conventional wisdom tells you must be true Read More
Dar es Salaam, TANZANIA-What would the wealthy nations of the West (and their rising rivals in the East) do if they actually wanted to prevent catastrophic warming? Here in Africa, the obvious answer is that they would find the ways and means to discourage deforestation-the ruinous practice of clear-cutting for timber, charcoal and arable land Read More
If the right-wing chorus insists that the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is “Obama’s Katrina,” then let us hope the president will make the most of that slogan. The comparison between the utter failure of the Bush administration and the missteps and errors of the Obama White House is fundamentally Read More
Torture is no longer a pressing concern for the American public, if it ever was. The country’s attention has understandably turned to lost jobs, costly health care and spilled oil. Most Americans probably agree with President Obama that rather than dwell on the secret abuses of the Bush-Cheney regime, we ought to be Read More
The government of Israel is supposedly run by the Jewish state’s toughest and most ardent defenders, but so far they have inflicted worse damage on its security and its future than its enemies ever could. By treating a Gaza-bound aid flotilla as a military threat, killing nine civilians and imprisoning hundreds more, that government achieved Read More
