Part One is here. "What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds  that underlie the words.  Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let u...

Bob Woodward's offering Barack Obama ten rules of thumb for a successful President. Funny thing.  Woodward forgot to put one key item on the list. Early in your first term and then again just before you're up for re-election, try to get a highly regarded, powerful and influential editor at the ...

Unless the aliens landed before noon Tuesday and he donned his old flight suit, jumped into the cockpit of an F-14 conveniently parked on the White House lawn, kept fueled up and with rockets armed for eight years for just such an emergency, and flew off into the skies to shoot down all the flying s...

There was never a golden age of American journalism. Never a time when the Press reported everything without fear or favor, when it was journalists' collective mission to speak truth to power, when the news wasn't a mix of gossip and scandal mongering interrupted by "heartwarming" human interest sto...

Of course I don't know Barack Obama or anything about what makes him tick, and how could I?  Why should I?  I don't need to know who he is, only what he's doing.  But I don't feel that I know him.  And I have a feeling that I'm never going to feel I know him.  Not the way I ...

This week's Wednesday Night at the Movie's open thread will focus on Bonnie and Clyde and to start rev-ing up the discussion here's an extended quote from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland describing some of the contemporary reaction to the movie: The action opened with a close-up of the siren lips of Faye...

I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but there are some dead about whom you can't tell the truth without speaking anything but ill. Jesse Helms is now one of those dead. I didn't expect any of his obituaries in venues like the New York Times or AP to include the words "racist so...

It's been three weeks since I posted my review of the movie Charlie Wilson's War and you'd think that by now I'd have let it go and moved on.  But there are a couple of things about the movie that irritated the hell out of me that I couldn't work into the review and they're still irritating me ...

Reading Rick Perlstein’s magnificent Nixonland and in my head watching Richard Nixon nursing his grievances and resentments as he outwits and outmaneuvers one rival after and another, defeats and destroys various political opponents, survives setbacks personal and professional that would have conv...

This country has had only three great Presidents. Washington.  Lincoln.  And Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the house where I grew up Roosevelt was still a living presence.  Actually, in the country I was born in he was still the President.  His ghost guided the nation and haunted...