Lawrence Meyer

“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…

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Emerson said. No need to worry then about the size of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s mind. Back in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to replace him on the Supreme Court, McConnell, the Republican majority leader of the U.S. Senate…

Our text for today is taken from the movie “Hud,” spoken by Homer Bannon, Hud’s father, “…little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.” I haven’t looked at any Most Popular Male American polls recently, but it’s fair to say that the current occupant of the White House…

A few boring statistics to start, but first: As almost everyone knows the United States is somewhere around full employment, maybe beyond that (full employment doesn’t necessarily mean everyone who wants a job has one because people may be in transition from one to another or some other reason not to be working). Anyway, here’s…

Is doing the right thing the right thing to do if it accomplishes the wrong result? Should Congress impeach Donald Trump if doing so guarantees his election to another four years as President? If Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses, should he not be impeached? Richard Nixon left a smoking gun. Bill Clinton committed indiscretions…

Back in the 18th Century Grigory Potemkin, a minister and lover of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, constructed phony villages populated by phony peasants to impress foreign ambassadors with how Crimea had prospered under Russian rule. As the entourage passed, the villages were disassembled and moved downstream to be viewed by the ambassadors as they passed…

Not long after Richard Nixon became President in 1969, his Attorney General, the dour, pipe-smoking John Mitchell, scolded the media for what he apparently thought was an over-reaction to the incendiary rhetoric of the new administration. Mitchell, in words more ironic than he or anyone else could appreciate at the time, advised the critics to…

When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the founders—seeking the broadest consensus possible among the Jewish community—adopted a system of proportional representation, a system that guaranteed that an Orthodox Jewish political party or parties would have representation in the Israeli Knesset or legislature. It was meant as a temporary measure until Israel had…

I apologize to anyone who cares that I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks. Part of the problem is the enormity of the crisis at hand and the difficulty in breaking it down into bite-size pieces. Consider: On the one hand, our chief administrator is a pathological liar who is brilliant at demagoguery…