Columnist.
What was the greatest baseball team in history? The 1927 New York Yankees regularly lead the list of nominees for that distinction. The sluggers at the heart of the Yankee line-up came to be known as Murderers Row: Earle Combs (CF), Bob Meusel (LF), Babe Ruth (RF), Lou Gehrig (1B), and Tony Lazzeri (2B). The names still ring in the annals of the game, or rather resound -- like the crack of a bat.
It's the rational, fair, humane and, perhaps most of all, patriotic solution to just one aspect of the vast challenge represented by the millions of illegal immigrants in this country. It's called the DREAM Act, and it would allow young people brought into this country illegally but reared as Americans to get on a path to citizenship -- if they enroll in college or join the armed services.
It's not exactly news that businesses in this country have been cutting jobs and pay for a couple of years in hopes of staying solvent. Now the Obama administration may follow suit. The president has proposed freezing the pay of federal employees for the next couple of years, which is just one of the cost-cutting steps his critics have been proposing for the last couple of years. It is part of Barack Obama's gift of gab that he can make it seem like his own idea.
Here's the latest from that continuing show, "As the Media World Turns." It seems George Soros, sugar daddy of 1,001 leftish crusaders, personal hobbyhorses, and even some good causes, has just given NPR $1.8 million to hire a hundred new reporters. Some commentators on the state of the American media, formerly the American press, are shocked, shocked! Others aren't. Inquiring minds want to know if this is a scandal, just philanthropy, a menacing portent for the independence of American journalism, or all of the above.
This evening we light the first candle on the Chanukah menorah, for it's the first night of this minor eight-day Jewish holiday that's become a major one over the years. There are blessings to be recited, songs to be sung, latkes to be eaten. ... But just what does Chanukah celebrate?
You'd think any country that had gone through hyperinflation would be aware of the dangers thereof. And you'd be right. No one has been more critical of this administration's inflationary policies than the Germans. They remember the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic -- much better, apparently, than we Americans remember the stagflation of the Carter Years.
Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, our North Korean friends have given us something to be decidedly less than thankful for. The world's crazy aunt has started playing with guns again. This time she wasn't just screaming and banging her broomstick on the floor. That's nothing new. The world's used to it. This time she was lobbing artillery shells at her neighbor to the south. With deadly results.
It's the busiest day of the year at the nation's crowded airports. And in many a kitchen. Imagine the hubbub that preceded the first Thanksgiving in American history. As every good Southerner knows, that festive occasion took place not in New England's harsh climes but in beautiful, lush Virginia. To be specific, at the Berkeley Plantation outside Williamsburg on December 4, 1619. You can look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say.
In the middle of the car wreck or the plunge down the mountainside, or in the mind of the drowning, time slows, then stops -- the way it does for some Americans every year when the page of the calendar is torn away and today's date revealed: November 22.
Credit for best timing in this year's midterm elections goes to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and political maven who resigned earlier this year to run for mayor of Chicago, his reputation as a hard-driving winner still intact. Nothing sustains a reputation like resigning in time.
Ben Bernanke is proving a fitting successor to Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Unfortunately. The Fed's previous chairman and guru-in-chief drove interest rates down till he could scarcely get them any lower without diving into the negative numbers. It was a very popular policy. Booms always are till they go bust.
Some people are alone because they want to be. This we call solitude, and how sweet it is. Others are alone but don't want to be. So they cluster. Where do all the lonely people go to be together? If they have laptops, to Starbucks. If not, they can be found -- where else? -- in either bars or churches. Both institutions provide fellowship, allay fear, offer succor and may disappoint.
You knew it was going to be an exhilarating election night when among the early victors in Florida was a retired lieutenant colonel by the name of Allen West. He was declared the winner in his race for Congress against one of the best-funded Democrats in the House. What his critics used against him -- an incident in his long and proud military career that caused him to be disciplined -- only endeared him to some of us. And explained why a lot of folks outside Florida were rooting for him.
What a difference a day makes. You go to sleep in a blue state and, next morning, wake up in a red one, or at least one that looks decidedly purplish by dawn's early light. It didn't happen just in Arkansas -- as the midterm election returns poured in, the whole United States map looked like a sea of red between the coasts. But the change was particularly dramatic here in this last Democratic bastion south of the Mason-Dixon. Till now, Arkansas had stuck out of Dixie like a sore thumb, but by Wednesday morning, its political complexion had changed. Markedly.
It's all over but the post-mortems as the politicos and pundits do their endless thing after every election, analyzing and re-analyzing the entrails to explain the results and predict the future. Who won, who lost? What does it all mean? Each party will try to put the best face it can on confused things. The real winner, as always, will be hubris. Much the same triumphant declarations that were made after the Millennium arrived two years ago with the presidential election may now be made by the opposite but equally over-excited party. The more things change ... the more they must be rehashed.
The best idea some public officials ever have is to resign, effective immediately. See Richard Nixon, 1974. Resignation remains the sincerest form of apology. You don't have to be president of the United States to realize it. Resignation can even become a member of a city council. Or of a school board.
If the polls were unerring, historians would now be debating the pros and cons of the first Dewey administration. But as I write these lines, Americans are still observing the ritual, communion and act of faith known as voting. Perhaps it's not entirely coincidence that those little voting booths we enter to cast our ballot resemble confessionals.
There is the party of hope and there is the party of memory, and often enough they are the same party just a couple of years removed. For the bright hopes of election season inevitably give way to the harsh realities of exercising power -- for good or ill. Then the party in power is weighed in the balance, and its performance compared with its promises. When that party it is found wanting, there is no refuge like recalling those halcyon days when all was possible, when hope and change were in the air. Now excuses must be made, and in politics nostalgia can be a useful substitute for accomplishment.
SYLAMORE, Ark. -- Walker Percy called it a Repetition, by which he meant going back to a place and noting the changes that had occurred since you'd been there before -- the changes in you, not the place. Which is why the author had Binx Bolling, his character in "The Moviegoer," go back to see the same unchanging movies -- to gauge how his reactions to them have changed, and so apprehend the passage of time. Within himself.
A letter to the editor struck a chord the other day. It was from a reader who'd just returned from London. While there, riding the Underground, he'd encountered a member of that country's chattering class -- the bloke said he was teaching at Oxford -- who was blaming all the troubles in the world on America. So what else is new? He sounded much like his counterparts on many a politically correct American campus.
