Several years ago a caller to my talk-radio program insisted that, when it came to abortion, God told her what was right and the rest of the country should obey His dictates. I replied that whenever anybody claimed to know exactly what God has in mind, I was inclined to count the silver. Since the [...]

Journalists play fast and loose with “truth.” That’s not a complaint from a loser in the November election. It comes instead after reviewing several journalism codes and statements of ethics. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists calls upon its members to “Seek Truth and Report it.” The Radio Television News Directors [...]

Nearly three months after John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running-mate, what possessed McCain to select her is still a mystery. The McCain-Palin candidacy crashed and burned, but the usual post-mortems have shed no definitive light on McCain’s thinking. Republicans had a legitimate issue with which to pummel the Democratic ticket:Barack Obama’s thin resume [...]

Sifting through the 2008 presidential election, one lesson should be that its historical nature, in all probability, goes beyond the election of an African American to the presidency. My guess is that 2004 will turn out to be the last year that all four GOP and Democratic candidates for the presidency and vice presidency were [...]

I suppose it was inevitable that media folk should at first insist on describing Barack Obama as the first African-American president-elect. Even now some are still pinching themselves, finding it hard to believe that this is so. The other day MSNBC’s Chris Matthews confessed as much on the air during his “Hardball” program. My hope [...]

In my first post on this site, after many years covering politics, I warned that we should “run like hell” from the conventional wisdom. Well, Sen. Barack Obama has barely gotten used to being President-elect Obama and here came the conventional wise guys. Their message: don’t overreach…govern to the right..be bipartisan… Even before the election, [...]

Before the election, a young acquaintance, anticipating a Barack Obama victory, commented how meaningful it must be for someone of my generation to have witnessed both segregation in this country and the election of a black president. His point hit home with special force because my personal experience with segregation was in the armed forces, [...]

Satire–A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision or wit. I quit writing satire years ago when too many angry readers took what I wrote literally. I blamed their lack of discrimination on an increasingly dippy world in which reality too often seemed bizarre. I made the break with [...]