The Truth About The Senate
The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate by Lewis L. Gould (Basic Books, 416 pages, $27.50) During last spring’s fight over the proposed “nuclear option” banning judicial filibusters, it was slightly troubling to hear the Democrats’ repeated paeans to the sacred majesty of the Senate and its anti-majoritarian features…
Follow The (Dear) Leader
In Team America: World Police, the puppet-film satire of the global war on terrorism made by Matt Stone and Trey Parker (of South Park fame), North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is gleefully depicted as an oddball Bond villain: outsized glasses, Elmer Fudd lisp, a streak of maudlin solipsism, and a team of lackeys including al-Qaeda…
Sorry, Not Buying
Not long ago, William Bennett — former education secretary, self-styled moralist, and gambler — philosophized, “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” A few beats later Bennett reminded himself and his radio…
Shots in the Dark
On a frigid day in Alaska last winter, a rocket, designed to simulate an incoming missile launched at the United States, blasted out of the ground. Fifteen minutes later, an interceptor rocket was to be deployed from a site in the Marshall Islands, knock down the deadly missile, and save America. That was the early…
Death By Dilution
In Graham Greene’s 1949 thriller classic, The Third Man, Harry Lime — “the dirtiest racketeer who ever made a dirty living” — peddles diluted penicillin through the sewers of occupied Vienna. During the film’s famous scene atop the city’s Great Wheel, Harry’s friend Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotten, asks, “Have you ever visited the…
Open Doors, Closed Minds
By all accounts, Jim Bill Lynn bled Wal-Mart blue. His friend Darrell Altom, who worked with Lynn at Wal-Mart’s Searcy, Arkansas, distribution center in the days before Lynn traveled the nation and the world on Wal-Mart’s behalf, recalls that at the Monday-morning warehouse meetings back in the mid-’90s, “A lot of managers didn’t want to…
Big-Time Trouble
As far as we know, Vegas isn’t taking odds yet on whether Dick Cheney will remain vice president until noon on January 20, 2009. But Cheney is increasingly under siege from a variety of separate but interrelated lines of inquiry, and of all the hot seats in the administration right now, “Big Time’s” is arguably…
He’s Done
Things change fast, when they finally do. For more than two years, the daily reports of American casualties and car bombs in Iraq, questions about how the White House had led the country into the Iraq War, and the torture memos and “extraordinary renditions” — with their subterranean narrative of an almost wholly undebated U.S.…
Homeward Bound
“Choice feminism” claims that staying home with the kids is just one more feminist option. Funny that most men rarely make the same “choice.” Exactly what kind of choice is that?
PART-ing Shots
This February in North Carolina, George W. Bush told a giddy crowd, “I’m here to talk about an issue that is going to be an interesting experience in dealing with the Congress [laughter]. And that is Social Security — formerly known as the third rail of American politics [laughter]. That meant, if you touched it,…
One Step Forward …
Over several days this fall, an estimated 1,500 sub-Saharan Africans tried to enter Europe by scaling the wire fences that separate the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla from the rest of Morocco. In the midst of this attempt, on September 29, Morocco’s prime minister, Driss Jettou, signaled in talks with Spain’s president, José Luis…
Net Effects
It’s not exactly rare to see the blogosphere in an uproar. But the recent row between supporters of Paul Hackett and backers of Representative Sherrod Brown, who are vying for the Democratic nomination for senator from Ohio, was a bit odder than most. In this fight, the “netroots,” the term for the blogosphere and the…
The Two Darwinisms
The conservative movement is now mounting a full-throttled attack on Darwinism even as it has thoroughly embraced Darwinism’s bastard child, social Darwinism. On the face of it, these positions may appear inconsistent. What unites them is a profound disdain for science, logic, and fact. In The Origin of Species, published 150 years ago, Darwin amassed…
This Is Simplification?
There are many things to criticize about the recent report from President Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. Personally, I’m appalled at the report’s call for adding $7 trillion more to the deficit over the next two decades — a catastrophe the panel weirdly styles as “revenue neutral.” If that’s not bad enough, the…
The Right Fight
Many Democratic strategists contend that a battle to block Samuel Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court is the wrong fight at the wrong time. The Bush presidency is in trouble on so many other fronts: the deceptions that misled the nation into war, the disastrous war itself, the spreading stain of corruption, the bungling of…
Dossier: The New New Orleans
New Orleans’ population before Hurricane Katrina was 462,269 … Today, 138,026 households, or two-thirds of the 2000 census population, are still forwarding their mail to new addresses … The city’s budget for 2004 was roughly $16.8 billion … It operated a deficit that year of approximately $600 million … According to the 2004 Current Population…
