Among some people, the new parlor game is choosing who would make the worst president: Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. This is not a lady-or-the-tiger dilemma, but a tiger-or-tiger one. The choice is between a fiercely friendless reactionary and a bombastic, thoroughly dishonest egomaniac. You pick. My choice is Trump. He wins in this close […]
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Party power brokers have lost power
WASHINGTON — What we are seeing in the continuing march of Donald Trump toward the Republican presidential nomination is the power and significance of political entrepreneurship. If you want to become president (or senator or House member), you don’t need the permission of either party. You just announce, comply with the legal requirements for filing […]
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Abortions, with no regrets, are a reality
It is as disturbing as it is inspiring, this response from so many women to publicly share their abortion stories so that members of the U.S. Supreme Court might read them. Why must women in America continue to reveal to strangers the most intimate details of our lives to preserve our constitutional right to privacy? […]
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Ronald Reagan’s message still worthy
If there’s anything we thought we knew about the GOP, it is that it is the party of Reagan. Paying obeisance to Ronald Reagan — his memory, his accomplishments, his policies — has long been the price of entry to Republican presidential politics. Yet here comes Donald Trump, who gives no indication of caring the […]
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Strategy of disrespect comes back to haunt
“If he was for it, we had to be against it.” — Former U.S. Sen. George Voinovich quoted in “The New New Deal” by Michael Grunwald The “he” is President Obama. The “we” is the Republican Party. And it is not coincidental that as the former pushes toward the end of his second term, the […]
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Time has come to take another long look at government waste
In the film “Girl, Interrupted,” the character played by Winona Ryder is watching TV in a psychiatric hospital. There is a news report about a demonstration and the narrator says: “We live in troubled times. The institutions we once trusted no longer seem reliable.” As I begin the laborious process of doing my income taxes, […]
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Years ago, GOP moderates failed to squelch hate speech
NEW YORK — A main cause of the rise of extremism in the world of Islam has been the cowardice of Muslim moderates, who for decades chose not to condemn bad ideas and ugly rhetoric. Fearing that they’d be seen simply as ideological weaklings, they’ve avoided confronting the cancer in plain sight. It is now […]
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Trump’s appeal lies in tough guy image
WASHINGTON — What happened to the evangelicals? They were supposed to be the bedrock of the Ted Cruz candidacy. Yet on Super Tuesday he lost them to Donald Trump. Cruz still did make a reasonably good showing, winning Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas, the latter by an impressive 17 points. But he didn’t have the great […]
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‘Sealed’ adoptees deserve the truth
My name was Helenea June Colvin when I was born in 1960 in Boston. I didn’t even find out the proper spelling of my first name until several weeks ago when I obtained my original “birth record,” which is not an actual birth certificate at all. To this day in many states, adoptees do not […]
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Can Republicans deny Trump the nomination?
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party is on the verge of being taken over by an egomaniac who appeals to the nation’s darkest impulses. Yet Donald Trump’s foes are splintered, tactically but also philosophically. It doesn’t help that each of his three serious challengers is a flawed alternative. None is sufficiently dominant to force the others […]