Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin’s domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.
The Olympics are never just about sports.
We have at least learned that the offspring of presidents don’t necessarily make good politicians themselves.
For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.
Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.
Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.
The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.
It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.
Every movement, to stay alive – a very difficult thing to do historically – has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going.
Afghanistan can’t police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.
Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that’s the subject that interests me the most. I’m attached to it, critical, but it’s definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I’m overseas.
Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.
I’ve been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I really knew about and cared about.
Americans almost never elect presidents on the basis of foreign policy.
It’s a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it’s true.
The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart’s bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin – ‘The worse, the better.’
I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by, and you wonder, ‘What did I do today?’
Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy.
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