ArcaMax

This is a column about a man named Washington -- not George, but a person named for him: his slave Harry. He had escaped once and been recaptured. Harry lived at Mount Vernon where, eventually, he cared for his master's horses. He later escaped again, this time to join the British army in its effort to suppress the rebellion that his master led....Read more

The Republican Party is the modern-day equivalent of the medieval church. It fights science. It protects ignorance. Above all, it embraces a lunatic reading of the Second Amendment so that any nut can buy a weapon that can kill a maximum number of people in a minimum amount of time. El Paso, Dayton -- at least 31 dead, many wounded, mountains of...Read more

My mother would have been 107 this month. She died just seven years ago, and I think about her often -- for the usual reasons, of course, but also because I now wonder what she would have thought of Donald Trump. She was an immigrant, after all, 8 years old when she arrived in 1920 at Ellis Island from Poland, not even knowing her birth date. ...Read more

There are red states, blue states and, it is now clear, yellow states. The yellow states are represented in Congress by Republicans too cowardly to condemn a president who resorts to unabashed racism not only to stir his base, but also to express his genuine bigotry. Donald Trump does not drink. Stark sober, he is drunk on hate.

In the ...Read more

The bevy of Democrats running for president seems determined to test my silent vow never to vote Republican, especially for Donald Trump. The truth is that I cannot imagine that happening, but I can imagine entering the voting booth with about a colonoscopy level of enthusiasm. Please, can we get this over with?

At the moment, the party is ...Read more

With the exception of Mary Queen of Scots, probably no woman has risen as high and fallen so far as Linda Fairstein, the one-time sex-crimes prosecutor now accused of railroading the convictions of five teenagers for a rape they did not commit. Fairstein has lost her book contract, her seats on various boards and, it seems fair to say, her good ...Read more

More than a year in Congress has not dimmed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's talent for flippant demagoguery. After helping to scuttle Amazon's move to New York City -- at a cost of about 25,000 jobs -- and confusing a tax abatement with an outright subsidy, she recently called immigrant detention centers at the southern border "concentration camps." ...Read more

Whatever happened to pride?

I ask because reports regularly surface about Donald Trump berating or insulting someone, often an aide, who just takes it. A recent example comes from Michael Wolff's new book "Siege," in which Paul Manafort, once Trump's campaign chairman but now domiciled in stir, was vulgarly upbraided by the president: "You're ...Read more

On one day last week, Joe Biden reaffirmed his support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the federal funding of most abortions. A day later, Biden reversed himself, giving as a reason the recent spate of draconian anti-abortion laws enacted in several states. Surely, however, Biden was pushed by Democratic Party activists. At this rate, he...Read more

The late Richard Holbrooke was a liar. He was often disingenuous, betraying his friends as well as his lovers, flattering political gargoyles -- Jesse Helms, for instance -- and went everywhere protected by a posse of his own formidable ego. He could be thoroughly dislikable, but he failed in that regard with me. I liked him. He was a friend.

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If you are a Democrat -- or anyone -- opposed to Donald Trump, you can look back at the 2018 midterms for optimism. Democrats flipped 43 congressional seats, some in districts that had voted for Trump, and exit polls suggested that suburban women and those with more than a high school education had had quite enough of the bumptious bigot in the...Read more

Donald Trump serves up a daily smorgasbord of offenses. He lies with almost every breath. He promulgates policy by inane tweet. He hires on a whim, fires out of pique and runs through the federal government spreading chaos and confusion as a fairy might spread pixie dust. He is his own Mount Rushmore of incompetence and vile behavior. He is the ...Read more

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, famous these days for being infamous, is being taken to task for what she said last week about the Holocaust. Two leading Republicans quickly pounced, feeling so strongly about Tlaib's remarks that, in the name of all things Israel, they mangled what she had actually said and used the Holocaust to score cheap political points...Read more

EDITORS: Please note the quoted language in the 6th graf.

I am a stranger in my own land. I read the newspapers in puzzlement. Who are these people mentioned as Democratic presidential candidates? Oh, sure, I know Biden and Sanders and Booker and Harris and some of the others, but the other day I came across the name of John Delaney or Seth ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- The Democratic Party would be wise to get inside Mitch McConnell's head. It is a dark place, to be sure, full of furious resentments, but it is amazingly disciplined and organized so that nothing matters but certain cherished goals. One of them is to make President Trump think he's in charge of the Republican agenda. The other is ...Read more