It’s the oddest form of echo. Not a retort. Not a reasoned rejoinder. The only way we can describe it is in terms of speech pathology. Listen, and explain it to me. Fox News host Geraldo Rivera says the issue in the Trayvon Martin tragedy is the hoodie he wore. So compelling is…
It says something that we haven’t a proper term for what likely caused Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to do what he is accused of doing over there — the land where we sent him to war. If we just call it insanity, we risk implicating war itself. And that can’t…
“We don’t need a government health-care plan to be able to solve the problem,” quoth Rick Santorum. “What we need is a process in this country where people will have an opportunity to go out and use their resources.” Tell that this couple, Mr. Ex-Senator. A few years shy of Medicare, the…
President Obama made one too few phone calls last week. The one he made was smart and important, offering support to Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke in her courageous stand for smarter policies about women’s health. Obama’s next phone call should have been to Rush Limbaugh, just to say thanks, and to…
“I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance.” — Socrates At his next U.S. Senate debate, should Craig James pledge to Socrates’ humble oath, I’ll change my opinion of him. At the expectation that, should James read this and rush to his Bible, I’ve beaten him to it, and to 1…
Rick Santorum has laid down the challenge. It’s time someone took on that challenge. About godliness, that is. About who’s more godly. That would be Rick Santorum, he says, in contrast to Barack Obama, who has no coin in said fountain. Before discussing the most recent…
In sitcoms, it’s called “Jumping the Shark.” In politics, I’m introducing a term for a political party that loses contact with its essence and forgets its audience. It’s called "passing the ladle." Ladle — as in bearer of a beverage with arsenic sweetener. Suddenly, in the presidential nominating process, it appears…
Where have they been? Where will they be tomorrow? Let’s hope they are in the political discussion for the long haul, countering the incessant propaganda that has placed their health — mothers’ health — under the rolling pin of anti-abortion politics. Women who understand the stakes of reproductive…
“Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement.” Hands now: How many of you wish that voters had taken President Herbert Hoover up on the words above, shared with Congress in 1930? Matters would become so bleak, that depression earning a capital D, that Hoover’s Republican predecessor,…
“I wonder what his ex-wife is thinking, knowing she put him over the top in South Carolina.” My wife, who said this, wasn’t being serious, of course. Who could profit from his ex-wife telling a national audience about him making a teensy weensy request: to mess around on her? This just before…