ArcaMax

EDITORS: Richard Cohen is retiring after four decades in syndication and 51 years at The Washington Post. This is his final column. Note quoted language in last sentence of 8th graf. Until Friday, Oct. 4, you are welcome to run columns by another writer in place of this column. To use a substitute column, first go to syndication.washingtonpost....Read more

The best thing the Democratic Party has going for it right now is President Trump. Were he not running for reelection, I might vote for a Republican. It would be only the second time in my life -- I once voted for John Lindsay as mayor of New York -- but that sort of thing would be next to impossible now since liberal Republicans like him exist ...Read more

I'm beginning to think the American Revolution was a mistake. Much would have been different, some things for the better and some for the worse, but at this moment, we'd have politicians willing to resign over matters of principle. Donald Trump would learn the meaning of pride.

As it is, the president has abased his office and the people who ...Read more

Bid farewell to Joe Biden. I say that with regret, for the former vice president is the nicest of fellows, lacking malice, who likes people and likes doing something for them. Yet, his gaffes continue feeding the impression that he is a touch gaga, and, worse, no one can complete the sentence: "Joe Biden because ... ."

That's not the case with ...Read more

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