Construction: Tunnel Vision
Boston’s Big Dig, officially known as the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, is a massive, budget-busting effort to reshape the city’s traffic infrastructure by the year 2005without generating any more gridlock than Boston drivers are already resigned to. The basic idea is to replace the city’s eyesore of an elevated highway with a multilane tunnel fit for…
The Germ Front:
See Sidebar: “Undermining International Bioweapons Controls” With one Florida man dead of anthrax and another exposed, frightened Americans want to know if something even worse than the horrific events of September 11 now lies ahead of us. Could terrorists loose bioweapons of mass destruction upon us: anthrax and smallpox, botulism and plague, invisibly…
Comment: No Ordinary Time
All of us find ourselves shocked to be living, abruptly, in a wholly new era–and none were more shocked than the Bush administration. Globally, the White House is now pursuing a feverish multilateralism, a reversal of the Powell Doctrine to avoid “shooting wars” that we can’t easily win, and even may soon embrace yesterday’s conservative…
Repeal Bush’s Tax Cut:
One of the impressive feats of intellectual tenacityin recent times is the Republicans’ ability to sustain their faith in large taxcuts for the wealthy despite repeated battering from reality. When George W. Bush first proposed this early in 2000, his justification wasthat our economy was so strong that it was producing far more revenue than…
Diffident Democrats:
A recent widely noted New York Times article recounted the many difficulties that Democrats are having getting their preferred candidates to run in key races in 2002. Many prospective candidates are backing off from running because they believe that the current war against terrorism will make it too hard to run a strong campaign. The…
How to Be Tough on Terrorism
The righteousness of our cause shouldn’t prevent us from asking why so many people around the world who aren’t terrorists hate America and from seeking ways to reduce their hatred. Recognizing America’s past failing in this regard isn’t justifying terrorism. Finding means of ameliorating the hatred isn’t appeasing terrorists. Rather, it’s looking at terrorism’s larger…
Patriotic Dissent
I don’t imagine that he welcomed it, but September 11 was not a bad day politically for George W. Bush. It marked his transformation from a relatively unpopular, arguably unelected, and widely unrespected president to a “leader” with practically unanimous support. At least for the short term–and no one knows how long that will be–Bush’s…
Back to Church
Hawkish conservatives today must secretly reserve a special affection for the late Idaho Democrat Frank Church; after all, he provided them with the cudgel they’ve since used to batter liberal critics of the U.S. intelligence community. As chair of the Senate’s 1975 intelligence investigation, Church famously characterized the Central Intelligence Agency as a “rogue elephant…
Supply-Siders Go to War
When Abraham Lincoln faced the dissolution of the nation in the early 1860s, he imposed new taxes on the wealthy to help pay to save the Union. When Franklin D. Roosevelt took America to war against the Nazis, he sharply increased taxes on businesses and the rich to help fund that crusade. Now George W.…
Full Employment at Risk
Even before the World Trade Center tragedy struck a blow at the economy, the national unemployment rate had begun to rise in recent months–and comments like these began appearing in the press: “The economy is moving to a more normal, sustainable unemployment rate after a period of rapid growth” (Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit…
Pox Americana
Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad. Simon and Schuster, 382 pages, $27.00 A day after the September 11 attack on the United States, a man who had escaped the collapsed World Trade Center declared: “We are all Israelis now.” He was, of course,…
The President as Potentate
President Nixon: Alone in the White House By Richard Reeves. Simon and Schuster, 672 pages, $28.00 No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam By Larry Berman. Free Press, 334 pages, $27.50 Liberals may wish it weren’t so, but the last president not to give a let’s-rein-in-big-government State of the Union address was…
Wealth of Spirit:
“Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.” –Red Hot Chili Peppers The September 11 attack produced plenty of collateral damage, but one largely unnoticed casualty is the impending harm to the nonprofit sector. The 1990s were boom years for the sector, in no small part because the value of…
The Mind of the Married Man
It would be interesting, wouldn’t it, to watch oneself watching TV, to see the muddy mirror that the face offers the screen, the weird and slavish half-reactions flickering across it, the shadows of infant anxiety and sudden, twitchy brightenings–like a dreamer with his eyes open. I’d like to have had a camera trained on my…
Bombs and Butter
By night, we drop bombs; by day, we drop peanut butter and jelly. Our daytime rounds, at least at the outset of the campaign, seem more symbolic than our nightly ones; the amount of food we’re delivering from the sky does not make up for the amount of food that no longer can be delivered…
