Slate

So, a fresh and sly political subtext in a very bizarre campaign season. The two Democratic nominees remain icily calm when in each other’s vicinity - plain as it is that they cordially loathe and despise one another - while huge shudders of molten rage continue to shake the ample and empurpled yet graying

The stirring news - that the dockworkers of Durban, South Africa, had refused to unload a shipload of Chinese weapons ordered by the lawless government of Zimbabwe - made me remember very piercingly how good it sometimes felt to be a socialist. Here’s a clear-cut case of solidarity and internationalism in which the laboring

The visit of his holiness the pope to the United States this week will be an occasion for all kinds of manifestation of deference and servility from politicians and from the press. There will also be the usual speculation about the growth of a specifically or distinctively “American” Catholicism: a Catholicism that, for instance,

When Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, I was 19 years old and fancifully considered myself to be far to the left of him. Notwithstanding that, he felt to me like one of my moral elders and tutors (as he still does). When I was first asked to sign a petition to make his

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi

It’s been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it’s at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. “If Barack gets past the

The extraordinary thing - and also the alarming thing - about the hasty withdrawal of Prince Harry from his front-line duties in Afghanistan is the way in which everybody seems to assume that it was the only right thing to do. It was all very well, apparently, for the junior of the two royal princes

One of the great moments among many in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is when we find the young Albert Brooks manning the phones in the campaign office of the man we know (and he does not) to be a double-dyed phony. On behalf of the empty and grinning Sen. Palantine, he is complaining to a

Someone with a good memory of the conversation once told me how Lord Carrington, then one of the "mediators" of the incipient post-Yugoslavia war, came to the conclusion that Slobodan Milosevic was a highly dangerous man. Well-disposed toward Serbia (as the British establishment has always been), Carrington told the late dictator that he understood Serb