From the Left
/Politics
Backlash: America Cools on Crazy
The morning after the 1972 election in which Richard Nixon defeated liberal Democrat George McGovern by 23 points, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wandered glumly around the magazine's Manhattan office. "I don't know how this could have happened," Kael muttered. "Not one person I know voted for him."
Polls continue to show President Joe ...Read more
American Gold: At Age 100, Lieutenant Benjamin Inspires Still
If 100 can be said to be the new 70, Lieutenant Alfred D. Benjamin of the Army Air Corps' 384th Bomb Group has to be the expression's poster boy. Ramrod-straight and sharp as the proverbial tack, the Canton, Massachusetts, centenarian is as smart as the salute he gives as he finishes an interview about his service as a B-17 navigator flying 31...Read more
Mindless or Spineless: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Elizabeth Warren
The 350 missiles fired at Israelis last weekend were fired by Iran, which has consistently pledged to annihilate Israel. This, of course, is a pledge to commit genocide, defined by Oxford Dictionary as "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." ...Read more
Hot Air Buffoons: Talking Heads Hand Out Hogwash on Gaza
MSNBC's talk show "Morning Joe" is catnip for political junkies, especially those who detest Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of us, our body clocks by now conditioned to wake in time to grab coffee and hop on the treadmill just before 6 a.m., start each weekday with predictable, comfortable left-of-center patter from the show's regulars.
...Read more
Mourning Joe: Losing Lieberman, We Lose a Principled Independent
In the summer of 1997, the Republican-controlled Senate Governmental Affairs Committee was investigating whether the Clinton-Gore White House and the Democratic National Committee had engaged in improper, or even illegal, fundraising practices during President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign. Acrimony was high, and partisan divides ...Read more
The Bibi Bogeyman: Democrats' Feeble Wobble on Hamas Risks Sinking Biden
You can blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for plenty of things, and plenty of Israelis do. These include his cynical maneuvering to avoid being held to account on criminal charges, his alliances with nut jobs in his coalition government and the gross negligence that left Israel vulnerable to Hamas' invasion of Israel and its ...Read more
Blessed Mission: From Soul and Heart They Serve
"In order to serve with dignity, you've got to be organized," says Mary Ann Ponti, director of outreach programs and community engagement at St. Anthony's Shrine in downtown Boston. And on a recent morning at the Shrine, dignity and organization are much on display, as several hundred Bostonians line up for food -- no questions asked -- ...Read more
Hate Rape: The Kids Say It's OK
The United Nations has long been so uniformly corrupt on the subject of Israel that anytime it ekes out an acknowledgement of attacks on the Jewish state -- however reluctantly, belatedly and perfunctorily it does so -- it's a man-bite-dog story. Last week, a U.N. official who had clearly drawn the bureaucratic short straw issued a "report" of ...Read more
College Daze: On Campuses As In Newsrooms, Orthodoxy Rules
In a recent piece in The Atlantic, former New York Times staffer Adam Rubenstein went public with his firsthand account of what has become the classic story of the Times' surrender to the orthodoxy of a certain political set. In 2020, after white policemen murdered George Floyd, protests of police brutality, long an under-recognized feature of...Read more
Ostrich Days: Democracy on the Line, Americans Decide Whether to Fight or Fold
"Sometimes the more absurd the lie, the more effective it is," observed a former United Nations official in "Kiss the Future," the new documentary produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck about the resilience of Sarajevo's residents under fire from Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic's killers during the 1990s. The documentary recounts the ...Read more