Panic in Year Zero

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4

John McCain's Questionable Qualifications
2008-03-21 13:44:00
Lately, the cable TV pundits have taken to filling the minutes between Viagra commercials with breathless discussion of the relative qualifications of the two Democratic candidates for president. This is not entirely their fault, of course. Hillary Clinton has largely staked her bid for the White House on the proposition that she, rather than rival Barack Obama, is fully prepared the lead the country into the next decade. Obama, in response, has questioned whether eight years as First Lady really contributed anything meaningful to his opponent's curriculum vitae (and yes, there is a subtle tinge of sexism to that position, but we'll leave it for another day).In all the Democratic crossfire, one question has received surprisingly little attention from the talking heads: if we’re going to talk about qualifications, exactly how prepared is John McCain for the nation's top job. He has, of course, warmed a seat in the United States Senate for more than two decades, but his lengt...
More About: Qualifications

Welcome to Year Six
2008-03-20 15:35:00
World War II did not last five years. Nor did World War I, the Korean War, the Civil War, or the American Revolution. Many full presidencies never reach the half-decade mark. Even the original mandate of the Starship Enterprise called for the mission to be accomplished within a five year period, and they were traversing entire galaxies.But the Iraq War, a ruinous, gratuitous conflict authored by a dishonest, incompetent administration, has now entered its sixth year. To celebrate, John McCain, who still doesn't understand the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Islam, dragged himself over to Baghdad to babble about victory before heading over to Israel to fit in a photo-op over at the Wailing Wall. To hear McCain talk, one could imagine that he still expects the conflict in Iraq to end with somebody (Osama bin Laden? The ghost of Saddam? Some anonymous warlord?) eventually surrendering to the United States like Lee handing his sword to Grant at Appomattox.Meanwhile, back at home, G...
More About: Year

Howard Dean's 48-State Strategy
2008-03-19 14:54:00
Four years and three months ago, Howard Dean was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United State s. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, proprietor of the infant weblog "Daily Kos" was one of Dean's biggest online cheerleaders. Though their efforts failed back in 2004—Dean simply wasn't up to the task of sustaining a top-tier candidacy—both survived the debacle quite nicely. Today, Moulitsas ("Kos") holds down a position as one of the most influential voices in the left blogosphere, and his blessing (as well as his fundraising prowess) is routinely sought by Democrats running for various offices from coast to coast. Howard Dean, once the quintessential insurgent, now chairs the Democratic National Committee.Each came into the 2008 with a big idea. Kos argued, as he did during the Dean campaign, that rank and file Democrats must break the monopoly on power held by the party's sclerotic Beltway insiders, timid centrists, and money-grubbing consultants. In th...
More About: Strategy

Faith, Race, and Barack Obama
2008-03-18 16:05:00
OK, so let's for the sake of argument assume the worst case scenario. Somewhere a witness or, worse yet, a film clip exists verifying Barack Obama 's presence in church at the moment his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, said something controversial and angry. Maybe even something along the lines of "God damn America".Obviously, this would be devastating to Obama's campaign for president. It might even constitute a death blow. Indeed, the fact that this story has dominated the cable shows for nearly a week has already damaged the senator badly (Obama must wish that Eliot Spitzer had decided to tough it out for a while, rather than resigning immediately). The fallout from his former minister's remarks has been so great that Obama has been forced to schedule a speech today to address the one issue he had hoped to avoid: race in America.But leaving aside the political consequences, consider what this incident says about Barack Obama the man. The answer, of course, is nothing, or at ...
More About: Faith , Race

A St. Patrick's Day Message of Hope
2008-03-17 14:29:00
On St. Patrick's Day, 2008, I happily recall a trip I took to the Emerald Isle a couple of years ago. The village of Belleek, in Northern Ireland, is known for its pottery, and our tour bus stopped there to give the passengers a chance to pick up a few souvenirs. Having no interest in pottery, I walked across a bridge in search of a pub.Nothing remarkable about this other than the fact that the bridge crossed the River Erne and took me from County Fermanagh to County Donegal in the Irish Republic. Those of you younger than thirty might not grasp the significance of this, but as I sat down in the pub with a cool pint of Guinness, I reflected on how I had just crossed one of the most contentious borders of the 20th Century without encountering a checkpoint or even seeing so much as a local constable.When I was a kid, the word "terrorist" was generally used to describe two organizations often referred to by their three-letter abbreviations: the PLO and the IRA. The Palestine Liber...
More About: Message , Hope

McCain-Rice in 2008: Because Eight Years is Not Enough
2008-03-16 14:37:00
One of things I've learned from blogging over the past four months is that it is often difficult to come up with topics to write about on a regular basis. The world occasionally changes quickly, but mostly it just chugs along at a fairly glacial pace. Today's stories are small variations on yesterday's. Those who write commentary for a living must sometimes feel as though they are forever in rewrite, trying to give old news a fresh angle.Only this could explain Hendrik Hertzberg's current column in The New Yorker, in which he raises the intriguing--to him--notion that John McCain might be well served by handing the vice presidential nomination to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice . Reassuringly, Hertzberg suggests that this choice "would not be an entirely cynical one." It remains unclear why that would be the case, since the main justification presented by the writer involves Rice's race and gender, and the fact that her presence on the ticket would free the GOP to attac...
More About: Years , 2008

Wright and Wrong
2008-03-15 14:05:00
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the closely contested Democratic presidential race has been how long it took for all the dirty laundry to be aired. Barack Obama, of course, set a tone early on that made it impossible for him to throw the first punch. But the vaunted Clinton political machine either enjoys a wildly undeserved reputation for effectiveness or has been thrown off its game by the racial dynamics of the 2008 campaign.We are only now, after most of the country has already voted, hearing about comments made several years ago by Senator Obama's one-time pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright . Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Reverend Wright took to the pulpit to suggest that the United States was partly responsible for its own misfortune, citing America's supposed support for "state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans" and comparing al Qaeda's atrocities to the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during Wor...
More About: Wrong

My Own Special Comment
2008-03-14 14:45:00
I like Barack Obama a great deal. I will happily vote for him should he receive the Democratic nomination for president. While his courage in opposing the Iraq War from Day One is somewhat exaggerated—he wasn’t in the Senate and did not actually have to cast a vote—it is nevertheless nice to see somebody in the race who never fell for the Bush Administration’s lies. If elected, he will be the first non-Southern Democrat to enter the White House in nearly 50 years. That is a good thing.I am, however, increasingly bothered by the tone of many of the Illinois senator’s supporters. I understand that once you choose sides, it’s often difficult to resist the temptation to think of your opponent as a (to choose a word at random) monster. I also realize that political first-timers often recoil at the nastiness inherent in the process. Young people in particular may have difficulty acquiring a sense of perspective.But Keith Olbermann is not young. He was reading baseball ...
More About: Special , Comment

A Thought for a Thursday
2008-03-14 01:05:00
I'm a bit indisposed today, so I am only up for a short post.With that in mind, a quick thought: after 9/11 it's particularly important not to be promiscuous in our use of the word "terrorist". I was reading the other day about a radical environmental group that burned down several unoccupied homes that had just been erected somewhere. Maybe it was some endangered species habitat; I really don't remember. Anyway, the media referred to the wrongdoers as eco-terrorists.They are not terrorists. They are vandals. They are arsonists. They are presumably felons. But terrorists are people who try to create, you know, terror. They are not people who make clear their intention not to harm or kill another human being.We musn't allow the right wing to get away with this formulation.That is all.
More About: Thought , Thursday

Another Day, Another Outrage
2008-03-12 10:56:00
It used to be that the national media would demand our outrage only two or three times a year. First, someone would say something stupid or offensive. Then, we would have the ritual bloodletting, the Maoist-style confession, and finally, if the situation warranted it, the public beheading. Sometimes, as in the case of Don Imus, the offense was actually severe and detestable. Other times, as when Illinois Senator Dick Durbin compared Guantánamo to the Soviet gulag, a slight exaggeration resulted in a manufactured overreaction. Careers interrupted, ambitions destroyed, reputations shattered—all in a day's work for the empty proprietors of the 24-hour cable news networks and their stable of windup pundits.During this election year, however, we seem to be enduring these faux outrages on a regular basis. This week, in fact, we have been treated to two such controversies in a span of barely 72 hours. Over the weekend, Barack Obama's key foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, walked ...

Sex, Lies, and Wiretaps
2008-03-11 13:11:00
One of the few positive things to come from the impeachment of Bill Clinton a decade ago was our brief national conversation about the law and common sense. It was never framed in those terms, of course. No responsible media outlet would dare entertain the notion that some laws are just too stupid to enforce. But the debate over Clinton's culpability was, in the end, neither entirely about sex nor entirely about perjury. Rather, it combined both in some fairly instructive ways.By any narrow, technical standard, President Clinton did, in fact, lie under oath. That he was, as the Grateful Dead once put it, set up like a bowling pin does not change that fact. He had the option of honestly addressing his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and he chose not to. Republicans, focused by their hatred on this single point, remain utterly flummoxed over the public's inability to comprehend a very simple truth: the President of the United States committed perjury.What they still don't underst...
More About: Lies

The Super Delegates' Dilemma
2008-03-10 13:52:00
As of this morning, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are as close to tied as two candidates could be. Despite lopsided wins in unrepresentative, low-turnout caucus states, Obama leads the pledged delegate count by only the slender margin of 53% to 47%. The overall popular vote is even closer. In a summary of surveys matching each candidate against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, each polls exactly 48% (Obama's lead over McCain is slightly higher because of the undecided vote). This is Bush-Gore 2000 without the U.S. Supreme Court.The much-maligned Super Delegates are going to decide the Democratic nomination, regardless of what Senator Obama's internet supporters try to claim. Most of them probably dread that prospect, particularly the elected officials who do not wish to be accused of overturning the will of the people, whatever that means in this topsy-turvy, multilayered contest. But their task is very clear and this is, in fact, the sort of moment for which the rol...
More About: Dilemma , The Super

Dreams and Nightmares
2008-03-09 15:22:00
The Dream Team has become Barack Obama's biggest nightmare. Bill Clinton, whose political instincts remain unmatched, gets it. He's been on the campaign trail openly flirting with the idea that the best way for the Democrats to take back the White House in November is to offer the public a ticket that includes both his wife and her rival. In this moment in which history will be made, why not make it on both the presidential and vice presidential levels? With a Clinton-Obama ticket, everyone leaves the party's Denver convention with a smiling face.And make no mistake—the ticket would, in fact, be Clinton and Obama, in that order. Hillary Clinton brings exactly nothing to an Obama presidential run that he couldn't find somewhere else. Unlike 1984, when Walter Mondale had to pluck Queens Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro out of obscurity in his futile effort to upend Ronald Reagan, the Democratic bench today is deep and includes several highly accomplished women at both the g...
More About: Dreams , Nightmares

Obama Loses Power
2008-03-08 14:49:00
So few teapots, so many tempests.Irish-born Samantha Power took time out of her busy schedule Wednesday to have a chat with a Scottish newspaper reporter in London. During the course of the conversation, she happened to opine that Hillary Clinton is, in her view, a "monster" who is "stooping to anything" to win the Democratic nomination for president. Unkind remarks to be sure, though it's clear that Senator Clinton has been called far worse. At no point in the interview, for example, did Ms. Power suggest that the former First Lady killed anyone, a charge routinely leveled by some of the more unhinged members of our society.Samantha Power, however, wasn't simply another of the roughly 45% of the American people who hold a negative view of the junior senator from New York. She is also—or at least she was until yesterday—one of Barack Obama 's senior foreign policy advisers. The Clinton campaign, leaving no stone, pebble, or dust mite unturned, immediately seized on the Harvard...

Academic Freedom and the Duke 88
2008-03-07 14:58:00
I've never lived with a right-wing culture warrior, but I do share my house with a 10-year old mongrel dog that I picked up in the course of my travels. My purpose here is not to insult the little guy by comparing him to people who obsess over art exhibits and obscure radical college professors and the phantom evils of reverse discrimination. Rather, it is simply to point out one thing that the warriors have in common with a typical canine. When my dog sinks his teeth into a chew toy, he doesn't quit until the thing is ripped to shreds, mangled, and distorted beyond all recognition. I guess if a cultural movement can still turn beet red and sputter semi-coherently about something dumb that Jane Fonda did nearly forty years ago, then I shouldn't be surprised that they can't stop going on about the Duke lacrosse case from 2006. I would be more than happy to cede the issue to them and never speak of it again, except for the fact that they seem unable to stop hounding a group of...
More About: Freedom , Academic

Texas Provides the Smoking Gun (Naturally)
2008-03-06 14:56:00
For Hillary Clinton, the best part of winning three of the four primaries held this week is that it allows her a chance to re-frame the discussion about the nomination process. During her eleven state February losing streak, she knew that any complaints she offered would have been quickly dismissed as poor sportsmanship by the Obama camp and its media cheerleaders. But now is her chance to make the case against her rival's claim that delegate counts are somehow equivalent to the popular will.Indeed, one of the results from March 4 places the speciousness of Obama's argument into stark relief. Just look at Texas . For reasons that could only make sense in a state where grown men still wear cowboy hats, Lone Star Democrats chose to select their delegates through both a primary and a caucus. It is, to be charitable, an idea that obviously did not emerge from one of Texas's dry counties. Nevertheless, it provides us with a naturalistic experiment by which to judge the impact of caucus...
More About: Smoking , Smoking Gun , Naturally , The Smoking Gun

Clinton, Obama, and the Audacity of Rules
2008-03-05 14:42:00
The good news for Barack Obama is that only four states cast primary ballots yesterday and that one of them, Vermont, is populated by latte-drinking Prius drivers who eat Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream and know their Merlots from their Cabernets. The bad news is that after the very first week of negative press he has ever endured in his life, Obama lost decisively to Hillary Clinton in the non tie-dyed states of Rhode Island and Ohio, and suffered an upset defeat in Texas. By the time it was over, Senator Clinton had not only broken through her colleague's aura of invincibility, she had also introduced a new phrase to the 2008 political lexicon: buyer's remorse.Obama, of course, is not the first frontrunner to face a backlash from voters in the later primary states. It happened on both the Republican (Ford vs. Reagan) and Democratic (Carter vs. Jerry Brown) sides in 1976. But it really hasn't occurred since then, and thirty years is a long time ago, back when we wore bell-bottoms and...
More About: Rules , Audacity

Lying About NAFTA
2008-03-04 14:59:00
Among the many downsides of our ridiculous system of selecting presidential nominees is the state-by-state pander than invariably occurs every four years. In Iowa, politicians pledge their undying love of corn and its byproducts, promising to fuel every car, truck, and lawnmower in America with ethanol by the year 2010. Down in South Carolina, Republican candidates invariably get sucked into yet another divisive conversation over whether the Confederate flag represents heritage or bigotry (it was never clear to me why these categories are mutually exclusive). With California's primary on the horizon, the candidates suddenly turn greener than the grand marshal at the St. Patrick's Day parade. And so it goes, as each state's parochial concerns receive their moment in the sun.This year, of course, things are even worse, in large part because the Democratic presidential race has been so close for so long. States that haven't received even cursory attention for years have suddenly be...
More About: Lying

Even Rhode Island
2008-03-03 15:04:00
It was evidently a cold evening. Bill Schneider, CNN's top political analyst, stood before an unfamiliar skyline wrapped in an overcoat, covering his expansive bald head with one of those Russian-style fur hats. The coverage bounced between Schneider and some woman looking very warm and comfortable reporting from somewhere in Texas. It took a second to realize that there was really no reason for Schneider to be standing outside while discussing the upcoming Democratic primaries. Most every building in Providence, Rhode Island , does, after all, benefit from some form of central heating this time of year.There was, of course, nothing remarkable about a news organization asking one of its stars to suffer for the sake of a forgettable establishing shot of an unrecognizable city. That is simply life in a visual medium. Instead, what was remarkable was the fact that the network had actually set up shop, at least temporarily, in Providence, of all places. When was the last time any...

What Happens in Vegas...
2008-03-02 15:59:00
Anyone remember Jeffrey MacDonald, the so-called "Fatal Vision" killer? He's the Army doctor who was convicted of beating and stabbing to death his wife and two young daughters in North Carolina back in 1970. Ever since, he has claimed that the real murderers were a group of hippies—remember, this was 1970—who were evidently carrying out some East Coast version of the Manson Family's mayhem. Before being pummeled into unconsciousness, or so he insists, MacDonald heard a woman chant, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs."Once I read that, I was pretty sure that MacDonald, whose wounds were regarded by investigators as self-inflicted, had probably committed the crime. As a doctor, of course, he would have known exactly how to injure himself without risking permanent damage. But that wasn't what cinched the case for me. Instead, it was that chant: "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs". That wasn't the sort of thing that any self-respecting hippie would have said, especially by the b...
More About: Vegas

The Prince and the Poppies
2008-03-01 14:58:00
In my world, the British Royals are far less interesting than the Kansas City Royals, a team that had its last really good season back when Prince ss Diana was still alive and Marilyn had "Candle in the Wind" all to herself. I've always considered those Americans obsessed with the Buckingham Palace soap opera to be low-level traitors who should be put in stocks each July 4 so the rest of us can pelt them with red, white, and blue water balloons. Perhaps, I sometimes think, U.S. citizenship should be renewable, like a driver's license, and all applicants should be required to pass a short multiple-choice quiz every five years or so. Anyone who could accurately identify Oliver Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, and Dodi al-Fayed would fail and be required to watch consecutive showings of Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" and sing, karaoke-style, each of the songs from the musical "1776" (I feel fairly confident we can do this now, since torture has more or less been legalized).Still, it remains imp...
More About: Poppies

Yale and Jail: An American Travesty
2008-02-29 14:50:00
Jesse Jackson's an old guy now, a little crotchety, and often these days a step or two behind the times. He's made a few mistakes in his life, some personal and some rhetorical, and his style has always been a bit too intense for the cool medium of television. The mass media rarely pay attention to him anymore until some racial controversy flares, after which they invariably allow some ignorant young pundit to decry Jackson's obsession with black-white issues and to dismiss him as another Al Sharpton. (Don’t believe me? Google "Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson" and then "Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton" and you will be rewarded with over 75,000 hits.)I mean no disrespect to Reverend Sharpton, whose own resumé goes well beyond the regrettable Tawana Brawley case, but Jackson is in an entirely different league. The man served on the front lines of the battle for civil rights when that sort of activity could get you killed. Indeed, he was in Memphis with Dr. King on that awful day in ...
More About: American , Jail

Shattered Idealism
2008-02-28 14:49:00
I believe I was once idealistic, though it's hard to remember for certain. My earliest political memory, and just a faint one, imprinted itself on November 22, 1963, and resulted in a childhood of speculation about whether presidents typically die at the hands of lone nuts or whether they are rubbed out by organized criminals, government agencies, or the two acting in concert. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated before I reached the age of ten. War, daily battle deaths, and sometimes gruesome film coverage of combat in Asia filled my family's living room each evening, narrated by deep-voiced newsmen who presented each story without betraying their own opinion of the slaughter.In 1972, I worked in my first political campaign, George McGovern's hopeless quest for the presidency. By then, we knew that our previous president had been a liar, and we were fairly certain that the incumbent was a crook. Nevertheless, even as I leafleted my home town, usually to ...
More About: Idealism

In the Tank for Obama?
2008-02-27 15:04:00
I haven't watched Saturday Night Live in years. Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those middle-aged snobs who insist the program hasn't been funny since John Belushi was thin enough—and alive enough—to fit into his bumble bee costume. I kept up well into the early 1990s. After that, though, the popular culture begins to pass you by, the guest stars are often people you've never heard of, and the bands make you lunge for the mute button. I'm sure it's still funnier than, say, Mad TV (the producers of which must have had naked pictures of some TV executive cavorting with a zebra, that's all I'm going to say), but it's someone else's funny now.The past couple of days, however, have brought snippets of SNL back into my living room, courtesy of the 24 hour cable news channels. The overlap between the audiences of Saturday Night Live and Hardball with Chris Matthews is approximately zero (think: Clearasil vs. Viagra), but the newscasters and pundits, who have never ex...
More About: Obama , Tank

Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come for You?
2008-02-26 15:13:00
Nothing short of a rigidly enforced federal law could make me watch the Academy Awards show. Jon Stewart has his days, but very few of those days have been as a stand-up comic. Sort of like Jerry Seinfeld. Mostly, though, I can't stand the self-congratulatory orgy of people who imagine themselves artists because they occasionally create a film more substantial than Porky's Revenge. The emptiness of celebrity is the great American curse, and if Brad and Angelina (or Brangelina, or Angrad) want to fly off and save Africa this week, I'm all for it. I just don't want to hear about it.So anyway, unwilling to listen to a bunch of speeches thanking agents and cleaning ladies, and repelled by even the shortest musical number, I had no choice but to channel surf my way to amusement Sunday evening. The problem, of course, is that nobody counter-programs the Oscars and ESPN seems to have devoted the week to small time college basketball teams bidding to lose in the first round of the NCAAs...
More About: Gonna

Appealing to the Hypothalamus
2008-02-25 15:02:00
Because some of us compose symphonies and write novels, it is sometimes easy to forget that human beings are, first and foremost, animals. We share the genetic heritage of our species, including both the complex and the primitive. On the one hand, we are the lottery winners of the evolutionary process, developing over time into creatures that explore space, build skyscrapers, and cure diseases. On the other hand, we share the territoriality of our fellow mammals and we often choose up sides with cruel and devastating results. No pack of dogs could ever paint the Sistine Chapel; nor could they devise and administer the Nazi Holocaust.Timothy McVeigh was no less twisted and vicious than Osama bin Laden. That his terrorist attack did less damage than al Qaeda's assault on 9/11 speaks only to deficiencies in McVeigh's intellect and vision. And yet most Americans reacted very differently to these two atrocities. Despite clear evidence that McVeigh was part of a larger movement, the bom...

What Hillary Clinton Can Learn from Ronald Reagan
2008-02-24 15:51:00
The greatest comeback in presidential primary election history fell just short of success. Ronald Reagan , doing his party no favors, decided to challenge the unelected incumbent president, Gerald Ford, for the 1976 GOP nomination. Reagan, who would later be known, ironically, for his 11th Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"), attacked Ford as a feckless moderate, unable to stand up to a Democratic Congress and too weak and compromised to pursue an aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy. The president, who had pardoned his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, and had overseen the country's humiliating final defeat in Vietnam, was understood to be in deep trouble.Ford, however, began the primary season with a string of victories, including a narrow win in New Hampshire, then a rock-ribbed conservative state that was assumed by many to be Reagan country. His campaign faltering and in danger of extinction, the Gipper rebounded in North Carolina and Texas, ...
More About: Hillary Clinton , Ronald Reagan , Clinton , Hillary

John McCain and Courage
2008-02-23 14:52:00
Years ago, somebody (John F. Kennedy? Ted Sorenson?) wrote a book called Profiles in Courage. For years afterward, nearly every boy and girl with an interest in politics found the volume waiting under the Christmas tree around their twelfth birthday. After Dallas, of course, the book became increasingly poignant as readers reflected on the courageous risk implicitly taken by all those who enter the public arena.The book itself defined courage not as the post-War generation had come to see it, i.e. the heroic actions of soldiers and sailors, but rather in terms of moral and intellectual steadfastness. Profiles in Courage told the stories of politicians who risked, to borrow the revolutionary cliché, their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to stand up for the principles in which they believed. Some forfeited their careers and others their public respect, but all resisted the siren song of ambition to do what they thought was right and necessary.The truth was often more complicated th...
More About: John McCain

The Greatest Injustice in Human History
2008-02-22 15:06:00
If I were developing a list of the people who most need to go away and leave the rest of us alone, it would not begin with Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. Nor would I start off with Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. Pat Robertson wouldn't earn the top spot and neither would actor-turned-ubiquitous-pitchman Dennis Hopper. Instead, entry number one on my list of people who need to go away would be the 2006 Duke University lacrosse team.I assume everyone knows the back story. A group of athletes, nearly all white and well heeled, hired two African American exotic dancers for an evening of political symbolism…er, I mean boys-will-be-boys hijinks. Precisely what happened from there is a matter of dispute, but by the time the night ended, racial epithets were allegedly tossed about and one of the dancers persuaded the district attorney to charge three of the players with sexual assault.The national media, of course, found the spectacle irresistible. There was the racial angle. There was t...
More About: History , Human , Injustice , Greatest

The Man Who Stayed Too Long
2008-02-21 15:23:00
He was, by the time of his resignation, an anachronism, a relic of the Cold War who had improbably survived his Soviet patrons by nearly two decades. He led a brutal regime, and his final legacy may be his resistance to the democratic surge that swept his hemisphere during the past twenty years. Successive American presidents, alternately paranoid and pandering, had enhanced his stature on the world stage, but once his moment had passed, he appeared increasingly insignificant and, in some ways, almost pathetic.After nearly fifty years in power, Fidel Castro had outlived his legend.The triumphant American Cold War narrative is both incomplete and misleading. The Soviet empire, however, had few redeeming features. In its adolescence, under Stalin, it rivaled Hitler's Germany in its monstrosity. Even after Uncle Joe left the scene, the USSR remained a totalitarian state treating its dissidents to the horrors of the Gulag. After the Second World War, Russia acquired its European ...
More About: Long