NDAs have become the legal workaround for rich people like Donald Trump to prevent exposure of their potential misdeeds. Published in Washington Monthly ( Link to article) Almost lost amid each successive round of shocking, but unsurprising news about our president has been the fact that his lawyers are yet again enforcing non-disclosure agreements against revelations…
Donald Trump Isn’t the First Leader With a Personality Cult
White House staffers create an over-the-top image of Trump that is plainly at odds with reality. It’s eerily similar to the cult of Joseph Stalin. Published in Washington Monthly ( Link to article) By now, anyone not vacationing on the Greenland ice sheet is familiar with the major themes of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s…
Will Conservatism End in Nihilism?
Disaster lies not in Trump, but in the conservative dream fulfilled. Published in Washington Monthly Jan. 3, 2018 link to article Any examination of American conservatism in the age of Trump runs smack up against the question, whose conservatism? Who gets to define it? A typical analysis is to name the supposed essential characteristics of…
Republican Experts
America has become a laboratory to test whether its institutions can weather the present flood of Republican “expertise,” writes a former career congressional staff member. For the GOP, Incompetence Is a Feature, Not a Flaw Published in BillMoyers November 18, 2017 ( link to article) It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb…
Did ISIS escape Raqqa with Trump’s connivance?
Published in Washington Monthly 11/16, 2017 link to article Remember Benghazi? How could you forget? There were nine separate investigations into the attack, and dozens of hearings. The major one, a House Select Committee investigation chaired by Trey Gowdy, cost $7 million and produced nothing of substance on the incident. There was so much interminable blather that…
Laura Ingraham’s Phony Populism
The Trump-loving radio host’s latest book masks what her ideology is really about. Published in .theamericanconservative.com/ October 31, 2017 During the Paleolithic pre-Internet age when I was a young operative on Capitol Hill, a favorite putdown of Democrats was to call them limousine liberals. The incongruity of rich people professing concern for the poor seemed…
The Devil’s Pact: Putin, the Alt-Right, and the Long Shadow of History
Published in BillMoyers.com The Russian president’s claims of “historical victimhood” in World War II try to justify his country’s present-day destructive behavior. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of…