Veterans used to be widely regarded as model candidates for their tendency toward bipartisanship and preference for just getting things done. Some still are. But there’s now a breed of veteran candidate who has gone beyond a healthy skepticism of military interventions and sees himself as a foot soldier in the far right’s efforts to overthrow the democracy.

The killing of Craig Ridley is a reminder that luxuriant cruelty carries a price beyond that paid by the victim. In what sort of civilized society, after all, do people walk past a paralyzed man begging for help?

If President Biden is offering poor explanations for poor results, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what he says. No presidential statement can compete with declining real wages and steeply increasing food costs.

One of the several definitions of “justice” is “the administering of deserved punishment or reward.” If Nikolas Cruz did not deserve having his life taken from him because he robbed 17 others of theirs, what crime would fit the definition?

History is written by the winners … so there is always the chance, if intolerance wins, if ignorance wins, if election denial wins and they shape the future in their image, our children will inherit an America transactional, small-minded and mean, and never know that once upon a time, America stood — or at least, sometimes tried to stand — for something loftier.

Due to the quiet lobbying at the Pinehurst tournaments, Rafael Trujillo enjoyed a favorable reputation in the United States into the late 1950s. Considering the conversations occupying the long pauses between swings on the course, golf proved the perfect venue to lobby those directing U.S. foreign policy without the public learning of the public relations campaign.

A re-awakened America won’t come through politics and government, no matter how strongly Christian nationalists wish for it.

It is certainly true that our political debate is fevered and apocalyptic. It may be the case that we will experience more political violence, but it would hardly be unprecedented in our national life and wouldn’t constitute anything remotely like a civil war.

What Elon Musk seems to miss, apart from a sense of civic responsibility, is this: No one has to be on Twitter. Letting Trump and his thuggy minions back on would ruin the neighborhood. Twitter would turn into a “right-wing cesspool,” as a writer for Vanity Fair put it.