Growing up Hip Hop
The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture By Bakari Kitwana. Basic Books, 230 pages, $24.00 At a meeting I attended several years ago, a man who did not look all that much younger than me turned in my direction and announced that my generation had made a mess out of…
Organ Rejection
In the film John Q., Denzel Washington plays a working-class dad who holds a hospital emergency room at gunpoint to get a heart transplant for his nine-year-old son. The film’s critique of health care in the United States is hard to miss: The poor lack the funds and often the insurance coverage needed for organ…
Book Review: Inventing America
What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States. By James F. Simon. Simon and Schuster, 348 pages, $27.50. Ten years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Shockoe Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, where John Marshall is buried. Our little party — two law clerks and a federal…
Book Review: Big John
Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Reader Edited by Michael Streissguth. Da Capo Press, 352 pages, $26.00 When I was eight or so, I asked my stepfather what the difference was between Johnny Paycheck and Johnny Cash. As far as I could tell, they could be the same guy — or related, anyway. “Big,” my…
Book Review: Masterful
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate By Robert A. Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, 1,040 pages, $35.00 The year 1952 was a potentially dangerous one for the NATO alliance. Western European nations were fearful of Soviet aggression and their leaders were hoping for strong assurances that the United States remained committed to their…
The Power and the Glory
Gary Bauer, Christian-right leader and 2000 presidential candidate, fully appreciates the political perils of the discussion we’re about to enter into this early spring morning. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson publicly breached the same territory shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when they suggested that liberals and gays were responsible for America’s cursed fortunes.…
Comment: The Do-Something Senate
There may be some life in the Democrats yet, especially in the Senate. They killed drilling in Alaska. They blocked a wretched judicial nomination. They sidetracked President Bush’s outrageous effort to make the tax cut permanent, which would yield endless deficits and spell curtains for decent public services. And the sky didn’t fall. They even…
Axis of Incompetence
If the administration’s foreign-policy apparat (minus the increasingly isolated Colin Powell) were placed under one roof — Rice, Rumsfeld, and Reich; Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush — what watchword would be inscribed over the door? No, not “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.” There are any number of supplicants who should not abandon hope –…
Security in the Shadows
For Tom Ridge, President Bush’s homeland-security director, the storm clouds over his relationship with Congress began gathering almost as soon as his appointment was announced nine days after September 11. From the very beginning, a bipartisan chorus was raised about Ridge’s lack of political clout and budget authority, not to mention his utter lack of…
As Children Die
My son followed me out of the apartment and caught up with me as I leaned on the fence around the playground, shaking. “What’s wrong, Dad?” he asked. He’s used to a wordy father, but I couldn’t find words, not then. I took a breath, slipped back on my journalist’s emotional armor, went inside, and…
Book Review: Ambling into Nonsense
Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush By Frank Bruni. HarperCollins, 278 pages, $23.95 New York Times reporter Frank Bruni has written an instructive, important book about the state of modern American political campaigns and American democracy. Unfortunately, he appears to have done so by accident. Bruni’s Ambling into History purports to…
The Tyranny of Triangulation
John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have a lot in common. Both went to Yale. Both are senators from the Northeast. Both are prominent, well-liked members of the Democratic caucus. And both very much want to be president someday. But when top Republicans — notably Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott and House Minority Whip Tom Delay…
Kerrey’s Quagmire
On the afternoon of Friday, March 15, the last day before spring break, New School University President Bob Kerrey made one of his periodic star turns on the Tishman Auditorium’ stage in lower Manhattan. In his last such appearance, in April of 2001, Kerrey had answered questions about The New York Times Magazine’s revelation that…
Catholic Crisis, Jewish Nightmare
The sources of moral anguish are entirely different, and some on each side may reject — and even resent — the comparison. But as Catholics confront a sex-abuse scandal in the Church and Jews agonize over events in Israel, there are striking parallels between the moral crises the two groups are experiencing. A central question…
Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work
Tax day has come and gone, and about 100 million Americans have filed their income-tax returns. For all the grumbling about complexity — fair enough, tax filing is way too complicated — most of us understand that taxes pay for defending our country, protecting our environment, building our roads, educating our children, and all the…
Lies and consequences.
“There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information,” Solicitor General Theodore Olson told the U.S. Supreme Court in March. He was defending the government’s right to lie in Harbury v. Christopher, Jennifer Harbury’s lawsuit against former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other high-ranking Clinton appointees.…
