Columnist.
Even hurricanes have a silver lining: The downpour washes away a lot of bull.
The drive to purge Columbus from the historical memory is gaining newfound momentum.
You hear it constantly these days: "This can't go on." "Something's got to give."
Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn't necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact.
Last year around this time (and the year before that), I was arguing with some of my fellow conservatives about the insanity of finding any common cause whatsoever with the so-called alt-right.
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times hired me as a columnist. That was great news (for me). But the best part was when Barbra Streisand canceled her subscription in protest.
"The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before," the president declared in a series of tweets Monday morning, and that "will never change." Many observers were quick to point out that this assertion isn't borne out in the polls.
A friend of mine who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year — I skipped it — reported to me that the Young Republican men were "wearing their ties down past their [crotches]."
It's a bit of a cliche to quote "Casablanca" when it comes to Washington's gift for manufactured outrage, but the classics are classics for a reason.
Last week, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned. This was part of a "White House shakeup" to get the Trump administration back on track. The new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, would fix the White House's "messaging problem."
The story of health care policy this week, this month and for the last decade (at least) has been a tale of partisan folly. But fear not, this isn't another earnest pundit's lament for the vital center to emerge, phoenix-like, to form a governing coalition of moderates in both parties. That's not my bag.
The greatest trick any politician can pull off is to get his self-interest and his principles in perfect alignment. As Thomas More observed in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," "If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly."
One of the hallmarks of the "Ugly American" is the habit of thinking foreigners will understand what you're saying if just shout it louder and louder.
Charlie Gard's parents are doing the wrong thing — and I'd probably do it too. Charlie Gard, if you haven't heard, is the 11-month-old baby whose plight has become a popular cause in England and, increasingly, the United States.
During President Trump's speech in Warsaw, Poland, on Thursday, he memorialized Pope John Paul II's momentous 1979 visit to the city.
On the Saturday before the Fourth of July, Donald Trump tweeted, "My use of social media is not Presidential — it's MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!" I joked on Twitter that I thought this was a perfectly apt explanation for a real estate guy.
Let me just say this at the outset: Mildred Dresselhaus, who died in February at the age of 86, was an amazing women. An accomplished physicist who won just about every scientific award short of the Nobel Prize, Dresselhaus was by all accounts a pioneer, patriot and great American.
Even by Washington standards, this is a particularly dumb political moment.
I do not fear much correction when I say that my columns of the last few years have not been characterized by an overabundance of cheerfulness and optimism.
There's a tension so deep in how we think about free expression, it should rightly be called a paradox.
