Hillary certainly isn’t making this campaign season any easier, and this time it’s not her fault. But seeing the words “Hillary Clinton” and “emails” in the same sentence once again did come as a punch to the solar plexus, leaving me gasping for breath. I worry that those words, back in the headlines, are a […]
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came of age in the late 1960s, tumultuous years in American history, when the civil rights and anti-war movements roused many of the country’s young people. Hillary Clinton was one of those people. Speaking at Wellesley College’s 1969 commencement, she said, “[The] challenge now is to practice politics as the […]
We have heard a lot lately about what disasters our cities are, particularly the old industrial centers that were once the backbone of American manufacturing. Often the stories are told by people who don’t go near the places they describe, as if our inner cities were foreign and far away and easily forgotten. This discomfort […]
My life has not been the same since Grover Cleveland stole the election from James G. Blaine in 1884. It was a close campaign, “marred,” according to Wikipedia, “by exceptional political acrimony and personal invective,” something quite unusual in American political history. Cleveland, it turned out, had sired an illegitimate child, while Blaine had some […]
It was 80 degrees in New York City last evening, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded and, said the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “2016 has really blown that [record] out of the water.” If the history of this presidential campaign is any […]
Thirty-three years ago next week, a suicide bomber blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 254 American servicemen. It was, wrote Jane Mayer, “the single deadliest attack on American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima.” The bomber drove through a gate the U.S. military had ordered kept open, past sentries whose weapons had no ammunition. […]
“It’s just words,” Donald Trump. “The cancerous con man is determined to take the entire ship down with him!” A Republican friend of mine. Donald Trump is attacking any- and everyone against whom he has ever held a grudge, and that is a lot of people. His object is to (1) humiliate those he attacks and […]
In all his adult life I don’t think my stepfather ever voted for a Democrat – and he lived in Massachusetts where Republicans have long been hard to find. He was conservative in almost all things. He wore gray suits, button-down shirts, and ties with regimental stripes. He became a stockbroker when he married my […]
