Forward March
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on November 18 that gay and lesbian couples have a right to marriage under the state constitution, the predominant mood among liberals was not jubilation, as one might have expected, but a sense of foreboding that George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the spin doctors of the…
Queer and Present Danger?
On May 17, gays and lesbians in Massachusetts will gain the right to marry, thanks to a 4-3 ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In July, the Democratic presidential nominee, presumably John Kerry of Massachusetts, will triumphantly accept his party’s nomination, also in Massachusetts. Seemingly, it would be hard to contrive a better symbol…
Speech Impediments
For a lesson in how the right uses language to shape political perceptions, consider the television ad that the archconservative Club for Growth ran during the Iowa caucuses. An announcer asks a middle-aged couple leaving a barbershop what they think of “Howard Dean’s plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year.” The man…
The E-Word
One of the most revealing passages in the late Paul Wellstone’s political memoir, The Conscience of a Liberal, is his criticism of the decision that he made during his first year in the Senate to hold a press conference on his opposition to the Gulf War within sight of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “I wanted…
On God and Democrats
Shortly before the 2000 presidential race started, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the aging Athena of neoconservatism, found herself struggling to express what she felt were the core values differences between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. What she came up with was that America had become “one nation, two cultures.” “One is religious, puritanical, family-centered, and somewhat…
Liar, Liar
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right By Al Franken, E.P. Dutton, 379 pages, $24.95 The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception By David Corn, Crown, 337 pages, $24.00 The Book on Bush: How George W. Bush (Mis)leads America By Eric…
Reclaiming the Air
This spring, if all goes according to plan, a new radio network with programs modeled after Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart will make its debut. The viewpoint of the venture is the big news. Air America Radio, as it’s now being called, promises to be the first commercial network with…
Rogue Whale
The white whale of American finance has returned. In January 2004, JP Morgan Chase & Co. acquired BankOne for $58 billion. This merger is the latest reflection of a two-decade reversal in public policy, which invites enormous conflicts of interest within banks. It was this deregulation that led to scandals of insider trading and investor…
The Umpires Strike Back
It takes a lot to rile up the federal judiciary. By virtue of their training and temperament, judges don’t often whine, complain, or show anger in public. And they almost never air their grievances in the court of public opinion. So it is extraordinary to see some life-tenured jurists so upset these days about a…
One China? Two Headaches
Backing both the favorite and the underdog in a boxing match might win points for evenhandedness, but it would leave sports fans scratching their heads. In the battle of affections between China and Taiwan, though, the Bush administration has done just that. Both countries have been led to believe that they are enjoying the best…
Joker in Chief
As federal deficits mount to record levels, President Bush now tells us there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Not a bright light, mind you, but he does claim that his new budget plan, despite more huge tax cuts, will get the government’s books halfway to balanced within five years. There are, however, a…
Books: Getting Naked in Print
The art of the high-brow confessional.
Ideas: The Gentle Jihadist
If French President Jacques Chirac thought he’d burnished his reputation in the Muslim world for having opposed the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, he must have been surprised to find himself recently vilified in public squares, mosques, and universities from Cairo to Tehran. The proposed ban on the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, from French state…
The New Case for Marriage
Marriage is undeniably a changed institution, because wedlock is no longer obligatory on the old patriarchal terms. For women this has been a hard-won, historic victory. Divorce became easier starting with the first wave of feminism in the early 1900s, and the second wave, beginning in the 1960s, obtained for women more kinds of work,…
Contesting Values
In his State of the Union address, President Bush told a rapt nation and the assembled government of the United States that our nation faces grave threats and must live up to its “great responsibilities,” which include defending the “pillars of our civilization”: our “families and schools and religious congregations.” What is more, he warned,…
Offshore Thing
George W. Bush seems to have the Democrats fiscally stymied. They can try to rescind most of his tax cuts, but as responsible fiscal stewards they would need that money to close his huge deficits — and could forget about addressing public needs. Alternatively, they could try to restore social outlay and take a lot…
Trading Down
While it is still unclear how large the trade problem will loom in the presidential election, there is surely plenty to be worried about. On several occasions under George W. Bush, the monthly trade deficit has exceeded the total annual deficit — $41 billion — in the entire last year of his father’s administration. Of…
Democracy How?
It was a run-of-the-mill weekday in Samarra, Iraq, a large town in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Guerrilla land mines had exploded that morning in several locations, leaving no U.S. casualties but several Iraqis killed by the American soldiers’ return fire. The Americans said the dead Iraqis were guerrillas, townspeople said they were innocent…
Wake-Up Time
Are our national media — schoolyard silly during campaign 2000, by turns somnolent and sycophantic ever since — starting to rouse themselves from their long torpor? It’s still way too early to answer that question with a “yes,” but if that’s what the answer turns out to be, the first week of February may have…
Prospects
Money corrodes democracy in multiple ways. It influences who gets into politics. It allows the wealthy to speak with a louder voice. It compels candidates to spend inordinate time cultivating donors rather than speaking to voters. The money-and-politics dilemma has a partisan aspect as well as a civic one, because the people with the most…
Judicial Overreach
(February 10, 2004) It’s not clear who should have been celebrating when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in early February that the state has to provide gay couples the right to marry and nothing less. The decision barred the Massachusetts legislature from adopting a law authorizing “civil unions” in which “spouses” would have “all…
