“To sin by silence, when they should protest,” it has been said, “makes cowards out of men.”* We are seeing quite a bit of cowardice lately, along with hypocrisy, mendacity and just plain sleaziness. The history of our Republic, as any number of commentators have pointed out lately, has forever been a struggle between our…

I haven’t written anything for a while. It’s dispiriting when the torrent of outrages comes so quickly and relentlessly that it’s difficult to keep up. I start to write about one thing, and before I can finish something equally bad—or worse—comes along leaving my work in the dust. We had the Iranian downing of an…