Columnist.
What impressed most when the news arrived late Sunday night was the cheering, yelling, flag-waving crowd that materialized almost immediately outside the White House. ("U.S.A! U.S.A!") In this country, a spontaneous demonstration can still be spontaneous. Nobody had to organize this celebration. It just burst forth. It came as naturally to Americans as breathing free, as celebrating the victory of good over evil. Justice had finally been done. And when the news -- the long awaited news -- reached America, celebrations erupted. Everywhere. Especially in the heart.
Attending the funeral of a dear friend, who herself had gone to too many funerals too soon in her family, and gazing upon her beautiful grandchildren, bereft now of what they would not know in the years ahead, our hearts sank. Death had settled in and begun to make himself comfortable -- and the rest of us not. But then the service began, and the familiar old words of the Book of Common Prayer began to roll out like a lifeline, like a banner unfurling, like a swelling chord that would fill the chapel with sound, an iron cord that would never rust.
It's no secret that the messianic hopes Barack Obama once inspired have steadily given way to disillusion, and an ever-deepening sense of unease about the direction the country is heading. The president's critics are tempted to say they told us so -- and they give in to that temptation all too often. Instead of rallying around a serious alternative, which may explain why no such candidate has yet to emerge from the pack. As for the president's supporters, they sound more defensive than proud. It's a familiar sound -- that of a presidency losing steam, and maybe hope.
Dear Grandma, It was wholly a pleasure to get your reaction to my obituary tribute to the late Bernard Nathanson, M.D., a prominent pro-choice leader who became an even more prominent pro-life advocate. Because he could no longer ignore advances in prenatal technology, like ultrasound imagery, that made it impossible for him to deny he was destroying a human life -- instead of just "an undifferentiated mass of cells." It was good of you to share the story of your own journey along the same road to Damascus -- a road I, too, took over the years. Although my change of heart, and mind, on the abortion issue was more of an evolution than your moment of truth. Here's how you describe it:
The elephant in the room is getting harder and harder to ignore. It's not just bigger than ever, but threatens to go on a rampage that could lay waste everything around it. This particular elephant has a name: the national debt. The neighbors who have been propping it up -- by buying the government's bonds -- can't help but notice how huge it's become, and wonder how safe they'll be once the beast gets completely out of control.
There was a time when the Bible and Shakespeare were recognized as twin pillars of not just English literature but Western civilization. Wherever the English-speaking peoples went, these books would go, for they were compact storehouses of wisdom, strength and beauty. Even the humblest cabin along the American frontier might have a family Bible and maybe a copy of Shakespeare's plays. Those books would introduce a young Abe Lincoln to life and thought, and it showed. One day it would show in the language he would mobilize on behalf of nothing less than the American Union itself.
It had been some time since I'd stopped by to see the eminent Pierre Cliche, man of a thousand words and phrases, mostly banalities but interspersed with platitudes, shibboleths and bromides for (non)variety's sake. I understood why I had put off seeing him as soon as he greeted me at the door of his cliche factory. "Dude!" he cried out, which I take it is no longer a noun of address but the current substitute for Hello. It is not an improvement. I instinctively looked over my shoulder, but apparently M. Cliche was addressing me.
Let's see if I've got this right. According to NPR's official line, the greatest hope for objective news reporting on the American airwaves will be lost if its federal subsidy is eliminated. And it's quite a bargain for the taxpayers, too, for only 2 percent of its budget is federally funded. But like much of NPR's news, any such claim is incomplete at best, misleading at worse. My first question is why, if NPR gets only 2 percent of its budget from the feds, or a measly $5 million out of its $145 million in revenues, it couldn't make up that mere 2 percent from private sources -- if its programming is as good as it says it is.
The good doctor could have stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss short story. A fashionable but conscientious professional on the Upper West Side, his ideas, like his Brooks Bothers suits, were tailored to fit in. His ideals were those of the enlightened, modern urban America of his time, which was the mid- to late 20th century. And he was always doing what he could to further them. The doctor's political, medical and social convictions were much what one would have expected of a New York liberal, as clear as his curriculum vitae. The son of a secular Jewish ob/gyn, he would follow his prominent father's footsteps, graduate from McGill Medical College in Montreal, and start his practice in Manhattan. He was a quick study, whether absorbing the latest medical knowledge or political trend. Especially when it came to abortion.
It has taken time. Agonizing, unnecessary, indecisive years of it. But at last the attorney general of the United States may have begun to yield to reality. Unwillingly, begrudgingly, regretfully, even bitterly, but yield nevertheless. Almost 10 years after the dastardly attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and after two years of aimless dawdling and dithering and general dilly-dallying, The Hon. Eric H. Holder Jr. has discovered a body of law specifically designed to deal with enemy combatants, lawful and otherwise.
Dear Reader, It was wholly a pleasure to receive your complaint about a headline over one of our stories in the Sports section the other day. The story was about Mike Anderson's early hesitation to come back from Missouri to coach men's basketball at the University of Arkansas, and the headline read: Happy where he's at
When, oh, when is the Obama administration going to recognize the rebels in Benghazi as that country's legitimate government? Those ill-equipped, ill-organized freedom fighters remain the world's best hope of dislodging Libya's still dangerous dictator in Tripoli. Just as our Afghan allies proved capable of driving the Taliban from Kabul with a little help, and maybe more than a little, from an America striking back at al-Qaida after September 11th.
Welcome to the Muddle East, which these days extends across North Africa to Tripoli and points west. Now that Barack Obama has explained this country's policy toward Libya -- or by maybe by now it's NATO's policy, or the UN's, or the European Community's, or anybody's but his -- it's as muddled as ever. If not more so. How sum up that policy? To sum up the president's long-awaited speech about American policy toward Libya, which isn't an easy task, and may be an impossible one, the president believes that country's long-time dictator and nutcase (not necessarily in that order) must go, but doesn't believe in ousting him.
LITTLE ROCK -- It is a truth universally acknowledged among baseball fans: There is life and there is the off-season. The off-season now thrashes to an end in the throes of March Madness, which features proto-professional athletes running around in baggy shorts under hoops while everybody else in the country dives into betting pools. They don't call it madness for nothing. But the fit will soon be past, and even now life returns like health after a long sickness. Its first sprouts -- verdant, clear, promising -- can be found in the friendly confines of your nearest minor-league ballpark.
Some of us have seen this movie before -- and didn't much like it the first time. The cast might have changed but the plot is the same: A president thinks he can keep spending-and-taxing, running up deficits and adding to the national debt, but escape the inescapable result: rising inflation. More dollars, less wealth. Why work, save, invest, put in overtime or start a business if the dollars you earn are worth less and less? Inflation is the most insidious of taxes, eroding people's savings, salaries, initiative.
The world in 2011 seems much like that of the century before, and much unlike it. History doesn't repeat itself, it has been said, but it does rhyme. Not in any simple, clear way. But more like Emily Dickinson's rhymes -- assonant, subtle, on the slant. And sore must be the storm.... Once I tore off dispatches from the teletype machine in a little newsroom, alone in the middle of the night when I couldn't go home, consumed as I was by curiosity, anxiety, desperation about what would happen next in the latest war in the Muddle East. One clattering BULLETIN and FLASH would follow the other as the war approached its climax or anti-climax or neither....
Dear Unreconstructed, It was wholly a pleasure to get your brief note, accompanied by voluminous documentation, solemnly informing me that there is no Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. No legal Fourteenth Amendment, anyway. You could've fooled me. I quoted from it not long ago on the subject of birthright citizenship, the idea that anyone born on American soil is an American citizen. Race, creed, color or previous condition of servitude ... none of that matters. If you're born an American, you are an American. No questions asked. It's one of many ideas that makes America exceptional.
If there is one number from the vast jumble the Obama administration calls a federal budget, it's this one: The American economy is projected to grow at the rate of 5 percent a year. That's the figure at the basis of the president's assurances that the country can dig its way out of debt and still afford a full panoply of social entitlements and more to come.
If you're looking for a three-word explanation for why so many Americans grow so cynical about government, you could do worse than this one: Erma Fingers Hendrix. That's the impressive name of an alderwoman here in Little Rock, a city government with a top-heavy organizational chart and a top-heavy salary schedule to match. What is her response to these challenging times for local government? She wants the city to ... give her a raise.
The words Chief Justice John Roberts just used in Snyder v. Phelps will surely find their way into the law books. For he was defending the very essence of freedom of speech, which is freedom not for the ideas we approve of -- they're in no danger of being suppressed -- but freedom for the ideas we loathe. They're the ones people want to censor. The chief justice was defending the right of a little group of fanatics out of Topeka, Kan., who tour the country picketing military funerals and collecting headlines. Funerals like the one for Lance Corp. Matthew Snyder, USMC, whose father sued the group/family/sect that calls itself Westboro Baptist Church for the emotional damages they'd inflicted.
