Back when I was in the 8th grade the de facto leader of the boys in my class was a good athlete named Donny G. Donny was the shortstop when we played softball (or hardball), and he was the quarterback when we played football. We didn’t play basketball. Donny was a so-so student and not…

If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.                                                                          …

I haven’t written for some time, partly because of other commitments but mostly because I’ve been at a loss for what to say. Others, professional pundits, have beaten me to the punch as the cascade of outrages continue to pour out of the White House. But I have become slowly aware of the toll that…

I’m suffering from Information Overload, or maybe Outrage Overload, or just plain Trump Overload. I suspect we all are. And that’s a problem. It drains us, saps our civic energy and leaves us exhausted. I’ve written about this before, but the last month has been extraordinary. The pace of the current president’s tweets has increased,…

For purposes of discussion, let’s say that there are four broad categories where Donald Trump is concerned—those who adore him, those who merely tolerate him, those who think he’s a clown and those who know he’s a clown but pretend that he’s perfectly normal and, of course, The President, entitled to all the honor and…

“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Donald J. Trump, January 20, 2017 Carnage? Was he talking about the epidemic of mass murders committed by a variety of crazy and not-so-crazy gunmen and the even worse epidemic of daily gun deaths that had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of American–young…

“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…