Year: 2014

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was […]

Why did Hillary Clinton, one of America’s most seasoned political figures, fail so spectacularly in her recent television interviews, generating negative stories with each daily installment? One reason is that she became accustomed to a foreign press corps that didn’t cover either domestic politics or personal criticisms of her. So in her first series of […]

My baby daughter has ruined me. I’m not typically known for being the most openly emotional person. On the incredibly rare occasions in which I find myself crying — typically when the last track of “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” pipes through the car stereo (why would you leave the Hundred Acre Wood, […]

PARIS — The fact that U.S. President Barack Obama is putting hundreds of boots back onto the ground in Iraq to protect American interests is the result of some bad decisions and missed opportunities to correct course. Except that Russian President Vladimir Putin had already staked out the proper course — and the Obama administration […]

“Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy.” That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to […]

Congress is rushing to pass a compromise drafted by Sens. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, which claims to rescue vets from deadly waitlists. House and Senate leaders are conferring on a final version, congratulating themselves for bipartisanship. But in truth, the bill won’t speed up health care for vets. The fine print sabotages […]

When Barack Obama became the Democratic presidential front-runner in 2008, Europeans went gaga. An estimated 200,000 turned out to hear Obama proclaim himself “a fellow citizen of the world” in Berlin. The Guardian described the speech as “a promise to end the unilateralism of the early Bush years” and said that “the crowd could not […]

The news from Iraq that Islamic terrorists have now taken over cities that American troops liberated during the Iraq war must have left an especially bitter after-taste to Americans who lost a loved one who died taking one of those cities, or to a survivor who came back without an arm or leg, or with […]

Last week, I spoke about how President Barack Obama justified his prisoner swap of five senior Taliban leaders for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by saying former military leaders and presidents, including George Washington, have engaged in prisoner of war exchange, too. Obama’s exact words were: “This is what happens at the end of wars. […]