Updated at 12:54 p.m. ET on July 8, 2022The Japan That Can Say No was the title of a once-famous book by a once-rising Japanese politician.Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese prime minister who was assassinated earlier today, bequeaths a much prouder legacy: a Japan that can—and does—say yes.Abe was more than the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese democratic history.
The head of government is caught in a series of scandals. The scandals are not necessarily so important in themselves. Many of them involve purely personal misconduct. But if exposed, they would shock public opinion and threaten the leader’s hold on power. So he lies and lies and lies again. He mobilizes his cabinet and staff to lie for him. And when the truth does finally catch up with him, he tries to brazen things out. The people voted for him. He has a mandate.
In the last few minutes of today’s January 6 committee hearing, Representative Liz Cheney presented evidence of possible witness intimidation. Several witnesses, she reported, had received messages from shadowy persons purportedly close to former President Donald Trump that implicitly warned of consequences to follow if those witnesses told the truth about his conduct.That is one sort of attempted cover-up.
The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.
The comedian Dave Chappelle returned to his hometown of Washington, D.C., Monday night—and to a painful controversy.Chappelle is a graduate of—and generous donor to—Washington’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts. In 2017, the school completed an ambitious renovation. To express recognition and thanks to Chappelle, the school proposed to name its theater for him.
Which would you prefer? An elderly TikTok star who compares himself to Donald Trump? Or a former Marxist guerrilla who attended the funeral of Hugo Chávez? A candidate notorious for his radical flip-flops on public policy? Or a candidate notorious for his intolerance of any kind of disagreement or dissent? One who explained his praise for the Hitler dictatorship by claiming he had confused Adolf Hitler with Albert Einstein?
The congressional hearing into the events of January 6 on Thursday night focused attention on a single decisive person. Not the hearing’s powerful chair or the meticulous vice chair. Not the former U.S. president who tried to overthrow the government. Not the former vice president whom the former president said deserved hanging. Not the lawless insurrectionists, not the heroic police officers, not the documentarian who caught history on a camera. The single decisive person is: you.
Thoughts and prayers. It began as a cliché. It became a joke. It has putrefied into a national shame.If tonight, Americans do turn heavenward in pain and grief for the lost children of Uvalde, Texas, they may hear the answer delivered in the Bible through the words of Isaiah:“And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
“White House Walks Back Biden Taiwan Defense Claim for Third Time in Nine Months” was the patronizing headline the New York Post applied to its report on President Joe Biden’s Taiwan comments at a regional summit in Tokyo. The story line was preset: semi-senile president blurts unscripted comment, is corrected by his staff minders.But if you reread Biden’s repeated comments on Taiwan, you see a policy that is clear, considered, and consistent.
Was it one of ours? Or one of theirs?That’s the question that flashes through American minds after a mass shooting.
Last week, Politico reported on a strange leak from the J. D. Vance campaign. A super PAC supporting the Ohio Republican—who won the party’s nomination for Senate on May 3—had commissioned opposition research to help Vance defend against his vulnerabilities. The super PAC discovered that a decade ago, the now staunchly pro-Trump Vance had written a half dozen articles for a website run by a future anti-Trumper: me.
Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET on March 29, 2022.At noon on January 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump spoke to supporters at a rally near the White House. Journalists often quote his incendiary language from the speech: “Fight like hell”; “We will not take it anymore.” But Trump also laid out a precise plan of action for the crowd:
If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the No.
The United States is supporting Ukraine with aid and weapons and punishing Russian aggression with financial and economic sanctions. But the United States can do more to resolve the global crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine: It can end the ethanol program.For decades, the U.S. government has, at great expense, encouraged farmers to grow more corn so that it can be turned into ethanol, a gasoline additive. Ethanol makers receive all kinds of grants and subsidies.
The EU Commission announced this afternoon that the European Central Bank will deploy its most powerful financial weapon against Russian aggression. Several hours later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Federal Reserve will impose sanctions of its own upon the Russian central bank.Central-bank sanctions are a weapon so devastating, in fact, that the only question is whether they might do more damage than Western governments might wish.
Updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on February 11, 2022.Within a week of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, demonstrators were marching in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, and many other countries. The European and Asian protesters mimicked the style and symbolism of the protests in the United States: taking a knee, pulling down statues. In the social-media age, all protests are potentially global.
Bernie Moreno should have been a contender. Instead, he has dropped out of the race for Ohio’s Senate seat after spending millions of his own money and never reaching even fifth place in polls of the Republican primary. It’s a story with a lesson, a very sad lesson.Moreno, age 54, declared last year for the seat now held by Ohio Republican Rob Portman.
Twenty years ago today, President George W. Bush delivered a State of the Union address that would instantly become one of the most bitterly controversial in U.S. history. At its core were short indictments of the aggressions and human-rights abuses of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.Then the kicker:“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.
Does anyone still remember the Chicago Seven?
They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government.The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules.
The dining room of the French ambassador’s residence is one of the most beautiful places in Washington, D.C., a confection of frothed plaster overlooking a garden in the poodle-clipped style the French so love. Before COVID-19, the room was known for the discussion sessions held there, hosted by a gracious series of ambassadors. It’s been a long time since anyone was able to enjoy an in-person event at the residence.
Gerald Ford supported abortion rights. George H. W. Bush supported abortion rights for the first two decades of his political career. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed one of the most permissive abortion laws in the nation.Over the four decades since 1980, however, the Republican Party has coalesced around a more radical brand of abortion politics. This week, the Republican-appointed majority on the U.S.
Imagine how the scene at the Kabul airport looked to the suicide bomber in the last seconds before he committed his act of murder yesterday: thousands of men, women, and children queuing and jostling in desperate escape from the coming Taliban regime. These were not randomly selected men, women, and children either. These were people with technical skills: medicine, computers, electrical engineering. These were people who spoke foreign languages.
Had the United States caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would have faded away almost immediately afterward. I cannot prove that. It’s only an opinion from my vantage point as one of President George W. Bush’s speechwriters in 2001 and 2002.Yet I strongly believe it. The U.S.
While he was president of the United States, Donald Trump tried to overthrow the election of 2020, first by fraud, then by violence. His efforts were defeated in great part because of the integrity and courage of state-level Republican officials.Half a year has now passed since supporters of the president stormed Congress in an effort to coerce Vice President Mike Pence to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.
First Canada overtook the United States in the vaccination race. Now the European Union has done so. Even poor European countries such as Greece, Lithuania, and Poland have surpassed vaccine-resistant U.S. states such as Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri.Why is this happening? Facebook exists on the other side of the Atlantic as much as it does on ours. Europeans do not lack for far-right political parties swayed by Russian misinformation.
Updated at 9:50 a.m. ET on July 8, 2021.Not in more than 100 years had a Haitian president died by violence. That previous assassination was of a repressive leader who was beaten lifeless by rebels in 1915, a murder that preceded and substantially prompted an American invasion and occupation of Haiti that ultimately lasted until 1934.The murder of President Jovenel Moïse yesterday seems unlikely to yield such dire results.
When my wife and I were young parents living in Manhattan, we rented an apartment above a psychiatrist with many wealthy patients. Through each hour of the working day, a succession of limousines and drivers would wait on the curb for one patient after another to exit the office. I once had the opportunity to ask what brought his clients to his door. He answered that they all presented versions of the same complaint: They thought they were frauds.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”“What brought it on?”“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends.”— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also RisesLike Hemingway’s Mike Campbell, the Trump Organization is confronting troubles that accumulated gradually and have coalesced suddenly. And once again, friends are at the bottom of it.
The Democratic primary voters of deep-blue New York City delivered a message clearly, firmly, and loudly: “Defund the police” was stupid and is now over. The first tally of the mayoral primary showed the pro-funding and pro-reform ex–police officer Eric Adams atop a large lead. The next day, President Joe Biden urged Democratic cities and states to spend some of their billions in coronavirus-relief money to hire more cops and put them on more streets.
In November 2018, The Washington Post published a disturbing headline: “‘They Were Threatening Me and My Family’: Tucker Carlson’s Home Targeted by Protesters.”The Post story quoted the prime-time Fox News host at length. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door,” Carlson claimed. “It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat … They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said.