ArcaMax

WASHINGTON -- OK, America, are we great again yet? Are we respected throughout the world? Are the Chinese quaking in their boots as we hike tariffs? Has Saudi Arabia come clean about murdering a Washington Post columnist after covering up the atrocity so clumsily that you could almost see blood dripping from the hands of the crown prince? If ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- The Black Death of the 14th century killed as much as 60 percent of Europe's population. A cause of the disease was the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but lacking microscopes, many at the time turned a keen eye on the Jews and killed them by the thousands. Still, somehow, the plague persisted, with the old and children dying off, but ...Read more

Guess what name produces an explosion of outrage if dropped in a conversation with many New York Democrats? Donald Trump? Mitch McConnell? Paul Ryan? Guess again. It's Kirsten Gillibrand, the political assassin of Al Franken, widely seen as an opportunist who has so sharply changed some of her positions that it's a wonder she's not in traction ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- According to lore or rumor, some ancient tribes used to place the old people on an ice floe and shove them into the frigid ocean. Whether this is true, I know not, but it is essentially what some 16 House Democrats want to do with Nancy Pelosi. Here the legend ends differently: She ain't going.

Why she should be denied another ...Read more

Every organization has its rules. The Mafia forbade the killing of law-enforcement officials, so when Dutch Schultz (nee Arthur Simon Flegenheimer) planned to kill Tom Dewey, the New York special prosecutor, the mob killed Schultz instead. A similar rule seems to have guided David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, who apparently was ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Whatever the outcome of the midterm elections, this we already know: Donald Trump will do anything to win. He will exaggerate. He will lie. He will smear his opponents. He will stoke racism, white nationalism and fear of immigration and he will do any of these things because his entire ideology comes down to this: He will not be a ...Read more

While visiting Poland in 1976, I heard about a book. It was called "Anti-Semitism Without Jews: Communist Eastern Europe," and it was mentioned to me because the Jews of Poland, once numerous, had almost entirely been murdered -- yet the hatred of them persisted. The title of that book popped into my head over the weekend when 11 Jews were ...Read more

Almost a year ago, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said that Bill Clinton should have resigned over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, I thought Gillibrand was wrong -- not to mention a bit tardy -- but now I'm undecided. What moved me, though, has little to do with Lewinsky and much more to do with a name that seems to have been forgotten: ...Read more

Eric Holder, who has never been elected for anything in his life, has some advice for his fellow Democrats. Revising Michelle Obama's mantra -- "when they go low, we go high" -- Holder says "when they go low, we kick them." All through this great nation of ours, Republicans licked their chops. Someone should check to see if Holder is on the GOP ...Read more

Mario Puzo begins "The Godfather" with a quote from Honore de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." That certainly seems to be true of Donald Trump's fortune, sneaked to him by his father, Fred, with accounting sleights of hand designed to fool the IRS and everyone else. That, though, is not the crime. It is this: Much of what ...Read more

Both women are successful. One is a lawyer, a partner in a prosperous New York firm. The other is a show-business personality, famous but not street-stoppingly so. We met at an event and quickly the talk turned to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. This was days before last week's testimony from him and Christine Blasey Ford, and so there ...Read more

The FBI, which can do anything, has tried to solve the mystery of a purported Abraham Lincoln hat. It looks like one of his and it's his size, 7 1/8, and the band is stretched near where Lincoln would often keep some papers. But when the FBI did a DNA analysis, it could not substantiate the claim of an Illinois museum that the hat was one of ...Read more

In "Fear," Bob Woodward's nonfiction Gothic tale of the haunting of the White House, dread stalks the Oval Office and overcomes anyone who approaches the ironically named Resolute desk. They all but tremble before Donald Trump, fearing his temper, his enormous and unfathomable ignorance, his obsessions and his Category 5 dishonesty but there, on...Read more

The Republican Party has a communicable disease. It has been intimate for so long with Donald Trump that it acts pretty much as he does. He lies and then Republicans lie about his lies -- they don't matter, just noise, the wall is more important, etc.. These evasions are intended to suggest that moral squalor can be cleansed by a jump in ...Read more

It is about this time in his presidency that Donald Trump must be feeling like the Paul Newman and Robert Redford characters in the marvelous movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Being relentlessly pursued by a posse, the men repeatedly ask in both puzzlement and exasperation, "Who are those guys?" In their case, they're armed men paid by...Read more

WASHINGTON -- On the Today Show in June, Bill Clinton was asked if he had ever apologized personally to Monica Lewinsky. The normally eloquent and loquacious former president went into the verbal equivalent of a mad dash to the sidelines -- once again getting comeuppance for his appalling behavior while in office. But Clinton was hardly the only...Read more

It is highly unlikely that Donald Trump knows or cares anything about poetry, but just in case he does, he should know that T.S. Eliot was wrong. When it comes to U.S. presidents, April is not the cruelest month. It's August. The month's a killer.

It was Aug. 9, 1974, that Richard Nixon, surrounded by a fed-up Congress and an unsympathetic ...Read more