Not long ago, I watched a panel of noted literary scholars conclude a conference at Yale. The professors were just putting away their papers and wrapping up when, somehow, they started passionately debating the case of James Yee, the Guantanamo Bay chaplain accused of espionage. To explain the government’s charges, they hauled out whatever lingering […]
Article
Posted inArticle
Arianna’s Game Plan
Arianna Huffington, columnist and author of the bestselling Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America, lives in Los Angeles with her two daughters. Here she discusses her latest book, Fanatics and Fools, and other matters. Your new book, Fanatics and Fools, is a compendium of George W. Bush’s ideologically […]
Posted inFeatures
Lyndon Agonistes
As Democrats flock to Boston to nominate John Kerry for president, few surprises will await them at the Fleet Center. Today’s political conventions stay relentlessly “on message,” and they serve as mere heralds of the home stretch of a seemingly endless presidential campaign. A key part of that unwavering message is a recounting of party […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Based on a True Story
My Life By Bill Clinton • Knopf • 957 pages • $35.00 Presidential memoirs are among the worst of all literary genres. That is not because they are invariably self-serving and less than wholly honest. Even the greatest memoirs are both. It is because they are relentlessly inauthentic. One can read the memoirs of virtually […]
Posted inArticle
Re-Slicing the Economic Pie
Marketplace, July 14, 2004 The American economic pie is growing at a solid pace. The odd thing is howthe pie is now sliced between the portion going to profits and the portiongoing to wages. According to the Commerce Department, the wage slice is nowsmaller than it’s been in 38 years, while the slice going to […]
Posted inArticle
And God Made Box Turtle
I noticed in Newsweek last week, on a different page from that interesting tale about how we might not have elections this fall, a truly important story about how America’s hardworking ecdysiastical class is offering free lap dances at certain establishments as long as the customer agrees to register to vote. At last, I thought, […]
Posted inArticle
True Values
The Senate Republicans still can’t pass a budget, and the 26 judicial nominees on whom both parties have signed off remain unconfirmed. But as the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and in the White House see it, the chief duty of Congress is to frighten the religious right to the polls in November. And so […]
Posted inArticle
Problem Children
Congressional Republicans are hoping to pass yet another budget-busting tax cut this summer and manipulate Democrats into voting for it by using poor children as the bait. In 2001 and 2003, Congress passed legislation providing a child tax credit for the middle class that gradually rose to $1,000 per child, but Republicans excluded working-class children […]
Posted inArticle
Crazy Like FOX
Arianna Huffington watches the Golf Channel. OK, maybe not. But the self-described “former conservative who saw the light” was only half-joking this week when she said she was about ready to give up on cable news. That FOX News Channel is in the pocket of the Republican Party is not a revelation. But when news […]
Posted inArticle
Purple People Watch
Colorado. In a debate taped Monday for broadcast on Friday, the two contenders for the GOP Senate nomination in Colorado, conservative Pete Coors and more conservative Rep. Bob Schaffer fell over each other to prove their fealty to the president’s Iraq policies. According to Schaffer (though not to actual intelligence professionals or Middle East analysts), […]