Columnist.
It's not an iron law that power corrupts. But it's often a good way to bet.
In Dante's "Inferno," the first circle of hell is for the virtuous unbelievers — non-Christians like Aristotle, Socrates and Julius Caesar. The second is for those who give in to their carnal desires, your Cleopatra and Achilles types.
The Miss America Organization announced this week that it will no longer judge women on their "outward physical appearance." To that end, the swimsuit competition is gone.
In conservative circles, few arguments are more triggering than those that begin: "The Founding Fathers never could have imagined ..."
During the so-called McCarthy era, a single question cut across all partisan and philosophical lines: Were you on Sen. Joe McCarthy's side or not? McCarthy's conspiratorial, bullying, blunderbuss anti-communism and "red-baiting" was either defensible or it wasn't.
As the immigration debate hit another low last week, I received the news that my favorite immigrant died: my father-in-law, Paul Gavora.
"Let's grow up, conservatives." That call to arms was delivered by Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention to implore members of the then-youthful conservative movement to hold their noses and rally around Richard Nixon's candidacy.
The Trump presidency is often a kind of political "Rashomon," with partisans on either side looking at the same facts and coming to wildly different conclusions.
The conventional image of baby boomer political rebellion features a young left-wing activist organizing, protesting or otherwise agitating, ideally with Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" playing in the background: "There's something happening here / What it is ain't exactly clear ..."
During almost every Supreme Court nomination battle, I try to make the same point: These fights wouldn't be nearly so ugly if we didn't invest so much power in the Supreme Court it shouldn't have in the first place.
If there were any doubt that the multi-front battle over the Russia investigation has become the political equivalent of a Tong war, Rudy Giuliani removed it.
At some point, alas, cultural appropriation went from being descriptive to proscriptive.
Last year, John Tooby, a founder of evolutionary psychology, was asked by the website Edge.org what scientific concept should be more widely known. He argued for something called the "coalition instinct."
In Frank Herbert's *Dune* series (my favorite science fiction books), he made a bold writerly decision. In a genre famous for robots and computers (particularly in the 1960s), Herbert imagined a futuristic universe with neither. In his telling, some 10,000 years prior to the story of the book, there was a galactic revolt called the Butlerian Jihad. This is where I first learned the word "Jihad" — the Arabic term for Islamic holy war.
Responding to reports that North Korea said it "no longer needs" nuclear tests, Jim Hanson, president of the generally pro-Trump Security Studies Group, credited President Trump.
I don't normally watch the GLAAD Media Awards. Not that there's anything wrong with them. GLAAD, by the way, originally stood for "Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation" before the organization declared that GLAAD was its name and not an acronym.
President Trump was right to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad with airstrikes on Friday.
Here's a bet: Congress will end up "cracking down" on Facebook with "tough" regulations that Facebook will probably protest quite vigorously.
One of the Right's most common, and best, arguments for the Trump presidency is that it shattered the Republican Party's calcified agenda. Invested in a coalition of various interests and beholden to a pervasive and outdated Reagan nostalgia, the GOP desperately needed new rhetoric and a new approach. For good or ill, President Trump provided both.
One of the best things about the passage of historical time is how the partisanship of a given moment melts away.
