There’s a saying: “Cheer up, things could be worse; so I cheered up and sure enough—things got worse.’ Bobby McFerrin’s decades-old ditty, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” won’t work now, if it ever did. There’s plenty of fright left over from Halloween–and in biblical proportions: war, famine, earthquake, pestilence, fires and either too much […]
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
WAIT, IT’S GETTING WORSE
October 29, 2022WE DODGED A BULLET
December 31, 2020As history warns, democracy’s most lethal challenges come from within, not without. Donald Trump, until his ego thrust him into politics, presented himself to the world as a much different man: aggressive, yes, but charming and not a tad affably soft-spoken. Then he morphed into a monster: loud, insolent and name-calling–shedding hosts of public […]
ENTER LEVIATHAN
November 11, 2016To the chagrin of many, the most qualified presidential candidate in modern history has been denied her deserved place, and we’ve embraced incivility, mutual disrespect, xenophobia, denigration of women, and racial inequality—you know, all those things inappropriate to 21st-century world leadership. In a trice, we saw Donald blow the obligatory air-kiss as “everybody’s […]
CAN YOU SPELL “COMEUPPANCE”?
October 24, 2016Our long national nightmare of presidential debates is done. Donald Trump’s Rat Race is over—and the rat didn’t win. Indeed, he lost all three in the court of public opinion, regardless what some very partial pundits said. Enough people know a jerk when they see one, and god help those who don’t. It […]
SO CALM DOWN ALREADY
August 31, 2016[This was a column published in the Daily News just before Trump’s downfall in the polls] Political liberals are the worst of nervous nellies, ever fretting lest their world come to an end. This time they fret that Donald Trump will be elected in November. Not to say it can’t happen. Anything […]
TRUMP’S THIRD PARTY
March 22, 2016Ye who suffer the anguish of this presidential campaign: I feel not your pain. I’ve loved every moment of it—hoping Donald would sweep the GOP board and spout nonsense till his head blows up, which it will. A reminder: I never judge by poll results. You too can delve into websites […]
THE CLOWN CAR DE-RAILED
November 2, 2015Around coastal Georgia are what are known as frizzle-chickens, scruffy and battered-looking, ends of feathers twisted forward, and known for continuously scratching in the dirt. Earlier poor settlers, refugees from slavery, deemed the toil of such fowl as attempts to uncover evil spirits and expose them to sunlight, thereby killing them. After too […]
Lincoln & Obama, General-ly Speaking
February 1, 2014Americans, encumbered with a love of all things military and the notion that those in uniform can do no wrong, quickly forget the sins of the most higher-up, the generals: the Petraeuses and McChrystals and their ilk. Pride went before their fall, but it’s all a ho-hum, let’s-move-on matter. But generals do matter: […]
THE BULLSHIT SCANDALS
May 27, 2013Republicans believe that God loves them again. Having lost all foothold on their anti-Obama attacks since his re-election, and staring at the chance of a mid-term electoral disaster, along came some red meat not even of their making. Well, the Benghazi smear is their creation, given that it was all they had–before the […]
COMPARING PRESIDENTS
May 22, 2013Presidents Day occasioned my annual peek into history, bringing me this time to Eisenhower, about whom no one seems to know jack. But he is vaguely recalled with fondness because time colors current perceptions. Ike was commander of all Allied forces in Europe during WWII, and when we and our pals won, he […]
Ichabod's Kin 