Recent Politics Commentaries

The Walking Dead
“Common sense is not that common.”—Voltaire Embed from Getty Images Yup, it’s official, the Republican Party is dead! The party of Lincoln, Reagan, Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, and God Love ’em, John McCain, is dead from the neck up. On Friday, the Republican National Committee censured (formerly condemned) Republican Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney who “chose to join Nancy...
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February 8, 2022
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The Poison We Live With
“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind . . .” —Proverbs 11:29 Denial is a superb film about a lawsuit brought by author David Irving against American Holocaust scholar, Deborah Lipstadt for libel. Irving writes and speaks on Nazi Germany and much his work centers on his fervent belief that the Holocaust never happened. The basis of...
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January 28, 2022
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At the Throat of American Democracy, Part 2
On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stood before the County Women’s Republican Club in West Virginia and stated, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the...
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January 21, 2022
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At the Throat of American Democracy, Part 1
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana, American writer, and philosopher On the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, President Joe Biden made clear that “The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. . . . [and] held a dagger at...
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January 18, 2022
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The Few. The Proud. The Stupid
It’s been little more than a year since the January insurrection where Senators and House members hid from an angry mob of Trump supporters, (And yes, Republicans, a majority of rational people know this. They’re just spending too much time on the bench to take action against what’s likely to come.) Now, with the surge of the Omicron, a variant...
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January 14, 2022
Will We?
“I’m suggesting, Mr. President, that there’s a military plot to take over the government.” —Seven Days in May “People have got to understand the danger of President Trump and the danger that he posed on that day.” —Wyoming Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney Embed from Getty Images After the Cuban Missile Crisis, where America came within inches of a nuclear war...
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January 7, 2022
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What We Tolerate and Why
Twitter permanently suspended Georgia’s Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from the social media website after she tweeted, falsely, “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” After a discussion on the sidelines during last Sunday’s game, Buccaneers football wide receiver, Antonio Brown took off his gear and left the field during a game. Happy New Year and welcome to disrespectful, reckless...
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January 4, 2022
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The Cliffs of Insanity
There’s a scene in the movie, The Princess Bride, where the undaunted hero—with all the kindness, smartness, and decency required of heroes—is doing what heroes do: saving his beloved Buttercup from kidnappers. At one point, he chases them to the Cliffs of Insanity, a rocky crag so high and so treacherous it makes Yosemite’s El Capitan look like a picnic....
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December 17, 2021
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Mandate of Heaven
These are the things . . . that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. — President Donald Trump, in a tweet posted on January 6, the day of the attack on Washington’s Capitol building. “The Mandate of Heaven was...
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December 7, 2021
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Three Stories, Same Message
Three stories this week are linked by a common thread: Defiance. “I’m telling you right now,” Trump ally Steve Bannon told reporters outside an FBI field office in Washington, “this is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.” We’re “going to go on the offense,” Bannon said even as he live-streamed a...
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November 19, 2021

Read Some of the Most Recent Articles
The Latest... And Often Greatest
The Supreme Court is Broken. How Do We Fix It?
As distilled from an email update from Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down...
Leadership as a Moral Act
Britain’s King Charles III spoke to a chamber that, for a moment, set aside party labels—Democrat and Republican—and listened not as factions, but as participants...
Unity is Not a Declaration. It’s a Discipline.
How does a country move from argument to action? The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an isolated event. It is part...
When the Line No Longer Holds
There are moments when events reveal more than they intend. What unfolded Saturday at the Washington Hilton was not simply an isolated act. It was...
How High Can Leadership Rise?
What is power accountable to when it no longer accepts limits? We have seen what happens when power turns inward—when it begins to believe it...
The Burden of Command
What does leadership require when decisions send others into harm’s way, and uncertainty is shared not just by those in command, but by the nation...