ArcaMax

The immutable laws of politics and of human nature make one thing clear: It's easier to be angry than it is to be rational, and it's more satisfying. Leaders to whom citizens owe a great deal are often punished, undone by undercurrents of "What have you done for me lately?"

Just two months after he had finished rescuing his nation from the ...Read more

Steve Bannon has been one lucky con man, and he is betting that his luck will hold. This week the House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol aimed at torpedoing last November's election will vote to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress. The reason: The Committee subpoenaed Bannon to appear and answer questions about what he...Read more

Fiona Hill knows something about how democracies die, and she worries that ours may be in critical condition. The working-class girl from an English mining town immigrated to America and became a Russia expert, advising Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Hill rose to prominence during the 2019 investigation into The Former Guy's ...Read more

If they are not awfully careful, the Democrats' reversion to their time-honored penchant for turning on one another may make their control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue short-lived. President Joe Biden's approval ratings are plunging, evidently because he withdrew American troops from Afghanistan in accord with his predecessor's deal ...Read more

With a new academic year underway, Jewish college students across America are in receipt of yet more empirical evidence that the anxiety they are experiencing is not a figment of their imaginations. A poll released last week by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law found that more than 65% of Jewish college kids have felt ...Read more

Last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into the sexual molestation of dozens of young female gymnasts combined the unfamiliar appearance of congressional bipartisanship with the sobering story of an FBI whose gross indifference to a physician's rampant abuse of his patients fully warranted Committee Chair Dick Durbin's verdict. The ...Read more

The president whose fate it was to summon the best of America after al-Qaida's murderous attack on us 20 years ago delivered a powerful warning on Saturday about the menace posed by the worst of America. "We have seen growing evidence," former President George W. Bush noted at the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial to the heroes of United ...Read more

Last week's recommendation by two California parole officials that the man who murdered Robert F. Kennedy should be released from prison was quirky, even by California standards. Over the decades, 15 separate parole boards have considered Sirhan Sirhan's claim that "justice" required that he be set free. Each rejected it, most recently in 2016...Read more

"The work that we're going to do now is the work that we've always done," says Marjean Perhot, Catholic Charities Boston's Director of Refugee and Immigration Services, about preparations to welcome Greater Boston's share of Afghan refugees en route to their new homes in America. "Pretty much whenever there's been a refugee crisis, Catholic ...Read more

In the spring of 1999, when the government of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had killed tens of thousands of citizens of the former Yugoslavia and forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands more, the Western European democracies turned to America to order NATO to use its armed forces, principally those of the United States, to stop him. ...Read more

"When I was a kid, I was shy," Ira Glasser, the longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union, told a Canton, Massachusetts, audience last week. It seemed hard to believe. A nonlawyer and proud of it, Glasser led the ACLU from 1978 until 2001 and is credited by the organization for having transformed it "from a mom-and-pop style ...Read more

In her new book, "The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America," Barbara Kellerman examines the role former President Donald Trump's political and media acolytes played in enabling what may be the most disastrous presidential performance in American history. "By every objective measure," observes Kellerman, who has ...Read more

The announcement that Vermont ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's was terminating its relationship with its longtime Israeli distributor because it sold ice cream on the West Bank may have been nutty, but it was a sign of the times. It was also a feather in the cap of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, which makes no secret of its desire to ...Read more