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…
Why the Midwest Can’t Catch a Break
Published July 7, 2017 in Washington Monthly Beyond de-industrialization and consolidation, GOP politicians have dismantled the public infrastructure of the heartland. When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, Summit County, Ohio was ranked second among all the counties in the United States by median household income. All four of the major…
Must They Have So Little Dignity?
Published in BillMoyers.com Reince Priebus’ fall is a sad metaphor for Trump’s America. Must They Have So Little Dignity? Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is considered one of the great political novels of the last century, but it is also very puzzling. Why does Rubashov, the loyal old Bolshevik, confess to capital crimes he did not commit?…
The Trump Era: No One Can Stay Above the Fray
shed in Moyers & Company (link to article) Trump debases the country, and we will all have to get our hands dirty. Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion. — T.S. ELIOT, THE HOLLOW MEN (1925) It has been six years since I last saw Capitol Hill and the Republican Party in the rearview…
Hobby Lobby Meets Indiana Jones
Published July 7, 2017 in Washington Monthly ( link to article) How stolen art fuels Middle Eastern terrorism. By now, everyone has heard of Hobby Lobby and its founder, Dave Green. Green is a fake Christian who uses his business as a vehicle to bully women and generally make a public nuisance of himself. Aside from lending credence…