And here we are, one year later. If you are groping for markers by which to measure how profoundly we have been changed since Inauguration Day, here’s one you might want to consider: In January of 1998, reports surfaced of a sexual affair between President Bill Clinton and a 24-year-old White House intern. It would […]

I was wrong. Years ago, people used to ask me what journalists should do to combat the nation’s drift toward “factish” and “truthy” logic. What was needed, I’d reply with misplaced confidence, is robust fact-checking. If news media were more aggressive in calling people out for lying, I predicted, they’d be less likely to do […]

A few words on the difficulty of voting while black. As we mark what would have been his 89th birthday, it seems fitting to recall that Martin Luther King spoke to that difficulty in a 1957 speech whose words ring relevant 61 years later. “All types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent […]

America desperately wanted this book. America desperately needed it, too. That’s why “Fire and Fury,” by journalist Michael Wolff, which purported to be a fly-on-the-wall, inside view of life in the Trump White House, shot to Number One on Amazon.com last week after Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to suppress it. It’s why bookstores had to […]

It really wasn’t all that bad. That, at least, was the consensus response from a dozen historians to whom Politico posed a question in the waning hours of the old year: “Was 2017 the Craziest Year in U.S. Political History?” Only one answered in the affirmative. The rest deferred to years they consider crazier, including […]

It happened again Monday when The Washington Post unmasked an apparent Project Veritas operative who had tried over the course of two weeks to induce the paper to bite on a false story. Jaime Phillips approached the Post with the sensational claim that Alabama senatorial candidate and accused child molester Roy Moore got her pregnant […]

So I guess you can take men off the endangered species list. It wasn’t that long ago we were hearing that men were in trouble. It was said that our manly maleness was under siege from a culture of runaway political correctness hellbent on snipping off our masculine accoutrements and turning us into sissified wimps […]

Call it the politics of “I know you are, but what am I?” It is a form of “reasoning” that appeals to Donald Trump. You got an example in last year’s final presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton called him a “puppet” of Russian president Vladimir Putin. “No puppet,” snapped Trump. “No puppet. You’re the puppet. […]

I hate mass shootings. Everybody hates them, of course: innocent death, fathers, fiances, best friends, and sons snatched violently away, sudden carnage crashing ordinary days. But I hate them for an additional reason. When things like this happen, you see, it’s my job to have something to say. And I’ve got nothing. More accurately, I’ve […]