Walter Moss: In the aftermath of the “shameful day” we have just experienced, where among any of the Senate nay-voters is conscience, ethics, integrity, morality? Gutlessness, not courage, seems triumphant.
Let’s Rethink Presidential Debates
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Charley James: Voters are not becoming better informed and candidates get away with saying almost anything that pops into their heads. It was especially bad this year when Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan simply lied at every chance.
Romney Still Fails to Make the Sale
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Gil Troy: In a country that loves to see candidates grow and evolve, with a media primed to write the redemptive campaigning comeback story, Romney never seems to get better as a candidate, never has that turnaround moment.
How Obama Can Win Big
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Brent Budowsky: Obama 2.0 is singing on key to the real America, talking about matters they care about, battling for policies that will better their lives, championing the American notion of fair play and taking to voters a narrative that is clear, consistent and compelling.
Effects of Agent Orange
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James Rhodes: As President John Kennedy said in the 1960s, regarding the inhumane treatment of the people of Berlin, “We are all Berliners.” Today, the world should say, “We are all Vietnamese.”
The Peace Corps at Fifty
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Tom Hayden: It is time for Obama, and more Americans, to read their Eisenhower and begin again.
Feting a Fetid War
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Ivan Eland: The U.S. government’s inability to distinguish between al-Qaeda, with global ambitions, and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with their local goals, has merely made more enemies, including those who would begin attacking the United States. How are Americans being made safer by this war?
The Lessons from History on Health Care Reform
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The ideal of universal care has revolved around two poles. In the 1930s, liberals imagined a universal right to health care tied to compulsory insurance, like Social Security. Johnson based Medicare on this idea, and it survives today as the “single-payer model” of universal health care, or “Medicare for all.” The alternative proposal, starting with Eisenhower, was to create a market for health care based on private insurers and employers.
The March of Folly, Continued
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To understand what’s up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. The March of Folly, by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things – how [...]
Obama’s Surprising First 100 Days
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Barack Obama is the first candidate I have supported at any level of government whose first 100 days greatly exceeded my expectations. What has Obama done differently from the rest? First, he did not spend three months learning how to get things done in his new job. Second, he did not follow his swearing in [...]
From Kennedy to Obama: Recapturing America’s Greatness
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by Tom Hall – The day after the election, another lawyer in my office asked, “Is this what it felt like in 1960?” When did I get old enough that people think of me when they want the wisdom of the aged? But it’s a fascinating question.
Testaments: John F. Kennedy
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This week, John Peeler will present “Testaments,” a series of poems that take the form of valedictory statements by each of the postwar presidents, in the poetic manner of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. John F. Kennedy Nixon was a fool to debate me. I was no fool to take Lyndon:Texas made me President. [...]
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Ross Douthat’s Hit Job on JFK
Joseph Palermo: Douthat practices the weird tactic, common among contemporary right-wingers, of criticizing whatever Democrat or “liberal” who is in their crosshairs from both the right and the left at the same time.