Connecting.the.Dots

A stranger sees a farmer struggling with a mule that refuses to move, says, “Let me reason with him” and bashes a plank over the mule’s head...

A reality check for Americans as they Christmas shop and prepare for holiday screenings of “It’s a Wonderful Life”: The disaster in Iraq has...

On “The West Wing,” Martin Sheen embodied the fantasy of an idealistic President who gave us respite from the shoddy realities of the networ...

Every November 22nd, older Americans wake up with a pang. More than four decades later, the death of John F. Kennedy still hurts. It is more...

George W. Bush finally goes to Vietnam and, as usual, misses the point. Back in Washington, John McCain, who was there when it counted, is a...

Just as politicians with their attack ads seem to have won the Gold in the Sleaze Olympics, along come O.J. Simpson, publisher Judith Regan ...

What would the Senate’s last sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have made of this year’s election? “We are getting used to a lot o...

Has the high altitude of being the 2008 front-runner made John McCain politically tone-deaf? First he swallows his principles to kiss Jerry ...

Since the elections, our President has been acting like the kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Gone, for now, are the sanct...

If the Republicans had not been dazzled by bringing out The Base, they might have seen an obvious answer to keeping control of the Senate. M...

Behind the mock-swagger of the President’s post-election press conference are clues to a possible sea change in the Bush family psychodrama....

The comeuppance of George Bush’s Congress comes with its own ironies. Lincoln Chaffee, who had the courage to vote against the war in 2002, ...

The joy will go out of George W. Bush’s life on November 8, 2006. Whether or not Republicans hold on to Congress, Bush’s loss will be irrepa...

As he faces his final years in the White House, George W. Bush should take a closer look at what two of his role models did in their second ...

To older ears, Barack Obama’s triumphal book tour with “The Audacity of Hope” has obvious echoes of John F. Kennedy and “Profiles in Coura...

In the 1982 movie “Tootsie,” Dustin Hoffman in drag is auditioning for a soap opera when the producer asks the cameraman, “I’d like to mak...

Two weeks before the election, President Bush tells us he's working on a "timetable" for getting out of the Iraq mess, but his...

The New York Times’ conservative Deep Thinker, David Brooks, is in love. His October 19th column, “Run, Barack, Run” is a valentine to the...

“I’ m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” That line, from a 30-year-old movie written by my high-school classmate, Paddy ...

When a ubiquitous Big Name comes out with a book defending The Middle Class (today, anyone with TV), starts speechifying against “politi...