I have known guys like Bill O’Reilly all my life, and they have all annoyed me. He’s Cathoic working class, just like me, just like a lot of guys I went to school with. He’s smart, but bombastic, smug, pugnacious, anti-intellectual, and on top of that, cynical. He always wants to pick an argument, and …
It will always be an impediment to any mellowing of my feelings towards Ronald Reagan to recall his visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi after becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 1980. Philadelphia was the place where the Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, and for Reagan, in his …
I don’t know if Joe Scarborough is running for president, but he is sure doing all the things he would need to do if he were. Over the last few years, Scarborough has taken some cues from the Ronald Reagan playbook. Like Reagan, Scarborough has maximized his best natural asset–his amiability–to position himself as a …
Having been an unsuccessful and rejected president long ago liberated Jimmy Carter from the illusion that he might have something to gain by making nice to his former colleagues in government. Carter–pious, a scold, and possessed of a blind spot when it comes to foreign despots–is that sort of person whose views are hard to …
There was a moment on D-Day, related in Cornelius Ryan’s great history The Longest Day, when American troops landing on Utah beach discovered they had disembarked their landing craft in the wrong place, at a point significantly removed from the planned point of attack. Surrounded by confused and anxious captains, Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the …