A Brit writing in a British literary journal has put his finger precisely on the pulse of Barack Obama’s rhetoric. “Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening,” Jonathan Raban proclaims in the London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk):
“The light in Obama’s rhetoric—the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, Read More
One sure sign that a president has reached his sell-by date–in addition to the collapse of his domestic agenda, the recruitment of friendly intellectuals for brainstorming sessions, and a steady trickle of subpoenas and jail sentences for his trusted henchmen–is the beginning of a "place in history" debate on newspaper op-ed columns. Read More
So what is a New York City Democrat supposed to do?
For the first time in the history of Greater New York, two Republican Mayors have won back-to-back terms, meaning that this supposed bastion of liberal Democratic politics will have had a Republican Mayor for 16 consecutive years. The last time a Democrat won a Read More
The latest edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations contains 46 gems from the pen or throat of Winston Churchill. Of these, among the best known is his 1939 characterization of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma.”
Churchill’s neat tripartite apothegm fairly flew into my mind the other day as I Read More
Historical falsification, when spoken by the President of the United States to slander one of his greatest predecessors, should not go unanswered. In a display of the extremist ideology that drives politics and policy in his administration, George W. Bush chose a platform in Latvia to repeat an old right-wing slur against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Read More
How perfect, for starters, that the surname be Churchill. How many of us, in the aftermath of 9/11, to the extent we could think at all, thought of Winston Churchill during Britain’s grim days and longed for his steely words.
But we had our own Churchill: Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University Read More
WASHINGTON-Unlike most of the elderly men who assembled in this city for Memorial Day and the opening of the World War II Memorial, 84-year-old John R. Pennington of Orangeville, Ga., didn’t have much to say about the horrors of the battlefield. He served in Panama for most of the war, and when it was time Read More
New Year’s Eve 2003 started like most others at B.S. and Christina Ong’s private island resort Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos. Bruce Willis, who some call the West Indies retreat’s de facto mayor, was going table to table meeting and greeting, while Demi and Ashton and the Willis/Moore kids and a hundred or Read More
George W. Bush is no Woodrow Wilson, let alone Winston Churchill. Yet in his speech last week at the National Endowment for Democracy, Mr. Bush said much that deserved saying. He also left out a lot that was worth saying, as American politicians almost always do when they talk about democratic values.
In urging Read More
Suddenly, the debate over invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein has taken a literary turn, with the news that George W. Bush is reading a book. This significant clue to future policy appeared in the last line of a dispatch by Scott Lindlaw of the Associated Press, recounting an engaging tour of the President’s Texas Read More
