She looked nice, Laura Bush, in her black veil and modest dress, touring the Dome of the Rock, smiling sweetly at the protesters outside. She sounded nice, too, in her keynote speech at the Dead Sea in Jordan. Read on »

“It’s appalling that this story got out there,” said the secretary of state. “Shaky from the very get-go,” thundered the White House spokesman. “We’ve not found any wrongdoing on the part of U.S. servicemembers,” declared the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Outrage filled the airwaves this week as administration officials took turns denouncing Newsweek’s brief report of alleged desecrations of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. Read on »

“It just offends me that the president of the United States is, directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land.” That was 1998. The speaker, Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), was then House majority whip. The president was Bill Clinton, who had “attacked his own country” while in Uganda. Read on »

To the British reading public of the mid-19th century, the story was a shocking one: A woman left her fiance standing at the altar after an unexpected revelation, ran away without a penny, threw herself on the mercy of strangers — and then ultimately returned. Read on »

Try, if you can, to picture the scene. A vast crowd in Red Square: Lenin’s tomb and Stalin’s memorial in the background. Soldiers march in goose step behind rolling tanks, and the air echoes with martial music, occasionally drowned out by the whine of fighter jets. Read on »

After the dust has settled — after the processions are over and the Masses have been said, after the new pope has accustomed himself to new apartments, new tasks, new vestments — Benedict XVI will face an extraordinary list of problems, ranging from the bioethical to the geopolitical. But for this German pope, among his toughest tasks by far will be the battle for acceptance on the continent of his birth. Read on »

“It just breaks my heart when I think of American citizens having to go to Switzerland or Mexico to get the drugs and devices they need to stay alive because the Washington bureaucracy won’t approve them.”
– Rep. Thomas Bliley (R-Va.), 1995

“When the FDA approves a drug, it should be a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. . . . Consumers shouldn’t have to second-guess the safety of what’s in their medicine cabinet.”
– Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), 2005 Read on »

If you’ve been watching television or reading newspapers at all over the past week, it would have been difficult not to learn that the late Pope John Paul II helped “defeat” communism. The pope has been said to have “sparked the fall of communism,” to have “stared down communism” or to have “championed communism’s collapse.” Read on »

No matter how you ask the question, most people — right-wing, left-wing, atheist, religious — will tell you that they don’t want to die like Terri Schiavo. That is, they don’t want to spend their final days in a hospital, tied up to a machine, unable to feed themselves, unable to speak. Read on »

This week I had planned to write a column about Sinn Fein, the political front organization for the Irish Republican Army, whose leaders have recently been linked to acts of murder and grand larceny. Read on »