The ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes is as rare and precious in our private lives as it is in the affairs of nations. Word that young Muslims are flocking to the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan to take up arms against the West has Washington beltway insiders beating the war drums [...]
Read More...Sexism, racism, agism, smoothies, bumblers, swift-boaters, dreamers—all flavors in the great American apple pie. As we learn to avoid trans fats so we learn, ever so slowly, to wean ourselves from misogyny, racism, agism and all those other nasties.
The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the [...]
It’s interesting how eager both the left and the right wings are to pull the trigger on Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman, who has written a book confirming many of our worst suspicions about the Bush Administration.
If he knew his bosses were lying about Iraq and Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whom [...]
West Virginians on Tuesday broke the devil’s deal between the media and the people to talk about racism and misogyny as little as possible. The voters in the mountain state chose to see Barack Obama as half black, not half white. They chose to remind us that racism is alive and well in the United [...]
Read More...Hickory dickory dock, Pillory Clinton is determined to turn back the clock, now borrowing $6.4 from herself in her Energizer Bunny effort to convince us we’re not ready to elect an African-American. That’s her message. She can disguise it with talk about Barack Obama’s inexperience and empty eloquence, but the message is we’re [...]
Read More... How disheartening — for Americans and everyone else — to see all three wannabe presidents acting like schoolyard goons, backbiting, pandering to the worst instincts of the media and ideologues. How disheartening the media in their preference for the shallow.
The media are fond of speaking of right-wing and left-wing ideological bases, but they have [...]
Calling for Iraq’s militias to disband, whether it’s our call or the Baghdad government’s, may be like King George or the Continental Congress calling on the states to disband their militias. Lots of luck with that.
Iraq’s separate sects, peoples and provinces have far less in common than the original thirteen states.
Seen in this context, [...]
America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European.
We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our [...]
For six days the new American-trained Iraqi army was unable to wrest control of the southern oil port of Basra from Moktada al Sadr’s Shi’ite militia. Then Mr. Sadr suspended the battle and demanded concessions.
That’s the news. We’ve all heard it. But something is buried in the news that calls into question all the claims [...]
The next time a politician or pundit says anything about Iraq, anything at all, ask yourself if you have ever heard him say that Iranians have historically regarded Shi’ism as a deterrent to Arabization?
If you haven’t heard anybody who sounds knowledgeable talking about this, then you have no reason to think him knowledgeable.
We may [...]