As he goes off on vacation, perhaps to write the book for which Rupert Murdoch gave him a $1 million advance, Clarence Thomas can take satisfaction in having embarked on his real life’s work–dismantling the progress in race relations since Brown v Board of Education in 1954. In her syndicated column today, Ellen Goodman points out a significant statement by the usually silent Supreme Court Justice in the decision striking down voluntary integration plans in Seattle and Louisville schools: “One...

At first, it just seemed like an indiscretion, a couple of $400 haircuts while he was away from home. But John Edwards’ passion for his hair is now a full-blown campaign issue with his Beverly Hills stylist telling all today to the Washington Post. It started, as these things often do, with a few casual trims in 2003 and 2004 and no money changing hands. The stylist Joseph Torreneuva waived his usual $175 fee. “I was just doing it because I’m a Democrat,” he recalled. But...

At the end of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” after the carnage caused by fanaticism and misplaced loyalties, a dazed British doctor wanders among the bodies, repeating over and over, “Madness, madness.” That image can be the only response to the revelation now that an al Qaeda leader told a British cleric who lives in Iraq that “those who cure you will kill you.” Canon Andrew White, who heads Baghdad’s only Anglican parish, met him at a meeting about religious...

Barack Obama won the fund-raising contest for the past quarter, but Hillary Clinton “won” the Democratic debate Thursday night and holds a big lead in the polls. In the coming months, we may be seeing a contest of “new politics” that isn’t quite what analysts have been predicting. Their demographic newness is obvious–first woman President, first of color–but Clinton and Obama bring deeper divides than their half-a-generation age difference to the Party and...

Depending on how you feel about the candidate (and everybody seems to feel strongly one way or the other), there is either far-sighted prudence or incredible arrogance in what Hillary Clinton’s most ardent backers have been doing this weekend. Buoyed by favorable fund-raising and poll numbers, they are debating in detail her running mate for ’08. After ticking off the pluses and minuses of the most obvious contenders, they have decided that Hillary’s Al Gore should be a choice...

After the London bombings two years ago, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan had some advice for Tony Blair: “They should have been doing what they have been demanding of us to do–to ban extremist groups like they asked us to do here in Pakistan and which I have done.” Musharraf was a little testy about the revelation that at least two of the 2005 bombers had been in his country a few months earlier. He will no doubt be giving similar advice to the new Prime Minister Gordon...

It was never just about abortion. The struggle for America’s soul goes deeper, as the Supreme Court and Congress have been showing us this week. It was never as simple as faith vs. reason. Rational people can recognize a Higher Power, the religious can respect science and logic. What it has been about is the conflict between our hopes and fears, between the risks of freedom and the comfort of control, between our needs to feel decent and to feel safe. Before the trauma of 9/11, the tension...

Science defines mutualism, one form of symbiosis, as “an interaction between two or more species, where both derive benefit.” Think bees and flowers. In putting the relationship of Ann Coulter and John Edwards under the microscope, another example seems more apt: the birds that eat parasites off crocodiles and are in turn protected from predators by their hosts’ giant jaws. The gnashing of Coulter’s mandibles against him have not only nourished her notoriety (and lecture...

Before the 2002 resolution to invade Iraq, Robert Byrd warned that, when Senators changed their minds, it would take a two-thirds vote to get out. After 3500 lives, billions of dollars and four years of bitter defeat, that number is within reach. Dick Lugar’s speech Monday night will give colleagues cover for retreat. He was joined yesterday by Sen. George Voinovich with a letter to the President saying that the Iraqis should “know we are indeed disengaging.” Add these two respected...

This weekend’s TV talkathon has been about New York’s Mayor leaving the Republican Party to run for President as an Independent. But as this politically dissonant year goes on, it may make more sense for Mike Bloomberg to go for the Democratic nomination. Anyone willing to spend half a billion dollars on a campaign, as Bloomberg is, should not be eager to put a sizable portion of it into creating an organization and getting on the ballot in every state. A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg...

Of the damage this presidency has done to American society, the worst and longest-lasting is just becoming visible. As the Supreme Court ends its 2006-2007 term, signs of a tectonic shift in the legal landscape show an ultra-conservative majority in place to curtail individual rights to privacy and protections from discrimination. In the most striking decision so far, the Court in April upheld by 5-4 a federal law banning a type of abortion in the middle-to-late second trimester. In her dissent,...

This week 2000 Pakistani scholars bestowed their highest honor on Osama bin Laden, the title of Sword of Allah. If it seems strange that the nation President Bush calls “a vital ally in the War on Terror” is awarding prizes to the world’s Terrorist-in-Chief, there is complexity involved here. The Pakistanis really don’t like bin Laden that much, but they were peeved at “the British Government’s decision to bestow the title of ‘Sir’ on blasphemer...

New polls show Americans unhappy with just about everything. “A very sour mood” is the Gallup conclusion. Only 24 percent say they are satisfied “with the way things are going,” a figure that hasn’t been this low since 1992. At that time, Bill Clinton’s advisers saw a reason (“It’s the economy, stupid”) and used it to get to the White House. According to Gallup, Americans now worry about the economy, their jobs, high gasoline prices and, since...

When Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress before the invasion in 2003 that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify Iraq, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz ridiculed him. To justify the war, the Administration pushed Gen. Colin Powell, by then Secretary of State, into a UN presentation from which he tried, not altogether successfully, to remove Scooter Libby’s “garbage” supplied by Ahmad Chalabi. Cheney didn’t even try to hide the fact that he and Bush were...

After a bleak Father’s Day, Andrew J. Bacevich is giving us all a present. As a military historian, decorated veteran and parent of a son who died there, Bacevich is in a unique position to advise the next President about Iraq. In today’s Los Angeles Times, he does just that: “The challenge…is to devise an alternative to Bush’s failed strategy. To pass muster, any such strategy will have to recognize the limits of American power, military and otherwise. It must acknowledge...

Not least of the vileness that Bush, Cheney and Rove have brought into our public life is the rage of those who cherish traditional American respect for law and decency. That’s why I hope Bush pardons Scooter Libby. His doing so would frustrate our desire for retribution but at the cost of implicating his entire Administration in the hateful enterprise of which Libby’s actions were a part. How could he believably justify it? He has nothing like Gerald Ford’s excuse that a Nixon...

It must be wonderful to be the smartest guy in a world of morons, the only honest person left on earth, the last great truth-teller in the universe. On Good Morning America yesterday, Michael Moore took time out from promoting The Word on health care in America, to lecture Chris Cuomo on the failure of “the people in this building” and the rest of the media to prevent the war in Iraq. To his credit, Cuomo was having none of it. Deconstructing Michael Moore is difficult because his heart...

In my prehistoric newspaper days, the “silly season” was late summer when the real world was on vacation, and editors filled space with offbeat stuff that would otherwise never qualify as news. This week’s Washington Post has one that would be a classic in any era–about a D.C. judge who is suing his neighborhood dry cleaner for $65 million over a pair of disputed pants. The courtroom scene, which is pure Marx Brothers, recalls Groucho’s reminiscences about his father,...

A useful word that has fallen into disfavor, “punk” should be revived for the current political discourse over Iran. The loose-lipped Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad certainly fits the primary definition of an inexperienced, combative young thug. Over here, we have his aging American counterpart Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has never seen a Middle East confrontation he didn’t like, today spouting off on CBS’ Face the Nation that “we’ve got to be prepared to...

Everybody’s beating up on him for suing the Yale Club after falling off their dais. What they don’t know is that the injury may make him miss the National Review’s Alaska cruise this summer, for which he is scheduled to be a speaker, and you can imagine how much it hurts to think of missing a reunion with his old Neo-Con buddies. All the golden oldies will be there–Bill Buckley, Arthur Laffer, even John Bolton. Not even a $1 million could ease the pain of that: Neo-Con Love...

The script for this writes itself: Critics on the right will call it “the hug-a-terrorist strategy.” Idealists on the left will applaud Edwards for striking at the “root causes” of terrorism. Both will miss the point, just as the former Senator’s proposal for 10,000 volunteers to help people in underdeveloped countries misses the point about terrorism. His re-treaded Peace Corps solution recalls the old Yiddish joke about the bystander who keeps yelling at those treating...

For all this time that he has been beseeching Congress not to let down the troops, Joe Lieberman goes to Iraq to visit our fighting men and they let him down. One of his own constituents, in fact, admits “not speaking from the heart” by failing to tell Joe what he told a reporter, “It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at.” Now the Senator told CNN he is “really upset.” If Lieberman wants to hear someone “speaking from the heart,”...

Barack Obama is provoking the pundits. Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column today titled “Can He Unleash the Force?” echoes rising criticism that he is “tentative about commanding the stage and consistently channeling the excitement he engenders. At times, he seems to be actively resisting his phenom status and easy appeals to emotion. When he should fire up, he dampens. When he should dominate, he’s deferential. When he should lacerate, he’s languid.” But...

Like Joni Mitchell with life and love, Karl Rove has seen voter fraud “from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow,” it’s only the illusions he wants us to recall. As the U.S. Attorney scandals go on, the villainy du jour is now about “caging,” dirty tricks to exclude unfriendly voters as practiced by Rove’s assistant, Tim Griffin, appointed to replace a prosecutor in the purges of those not avid enough in pursuing Democrats for, yes, voter fraud. In...

Subjective, undoubtedly prejudiced reactions: Two Democratic candidates brought themselves into sharper focus tonight: Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Chris Dodd as informed, forceful, experienced and realistic political figures. Whether that kind of heft translates into poll numbers is another question. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, obviously on defense as front runners, lost no ground, with the former First Lady looking somewhat more relaxed than she has been up to now. John Edwards continued...