Given the historic vitriol of this presidential campaign, it has been pretty easy to overlook something else historic that makes my heart nearly burst with pride: It was 53 years ago, six years before Barack Obama was born, that Rosa Parks was ordered to get out of her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, because of the color of her skin, and today a man of color — the embodiment of Martin Luther King’s dream — stands on the threshold of the presidency. This could have not happened...

If the Bush Years were plotted on a fever chart, the key turning point triggering the descent to the Great Abyss of Unpopularity was Hurricane Katrina. While the war in Iraq remained pretty much an abstraction, albeit an increasingly unpleasant one, when the Category 5 storm made landfall three year ago today, people were incredulous, incensed and finally angered that the White House’s response was an indifference that put the final nail in the coffin of compassionate conservatism. As a great...

While I was effusive in my praise for Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention the other night and was willing to let pass the fact that she didn’t give Barack Obama a big wet smooch in urging her supporters to get with the program, it was with trepidation that I surfed away from the Phillies-Mets post-game show to see what Bill “Famously Hurt Feelings” Clinton had to offer when it was his turn on the Denver dais. In the run-up to the second most most...

While no one would confuse the Democratic National Convention with “Comedy Central,” there have been some boffo jibes and great lines: “John McCain calls himself a maverick, but he votes with George Bush 90 percent of the time. That’s not a maverick. That’s a sidekick.” – BOB CASEY Jr. “I spent 20 years in business. If you ran a company whose only strategy was to tear down the competition, it wouldn’t last long.” – MARK WARNER “You...

PLEASE! BUT BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN STAYS, OKAY?

I’m no actor and I have sixty four films to prove it. – VICTOR MATURE If you want to see the girl next door, go next door. – JOAN CRAWFORD There is a marvelous scene in the 1956 hit High Society that distills the greatness of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby not as terrific singers, which they of course were, but as consummate movie stars. It is their rendition of Cole Porter’s swingingly whimsical “Did Ya Evah,” which as film historian Jeanine Basinger writes,...

UH OH.

I’m more or less with Jazz on the political spouses thing, but wild horses wouldn’t have been able to drag me away from Senator Ted Kennedy’s valedictory last night. For some people of a certain age, Kennedy will always be the rich drunk who drove off the Chappaquiddick Bridge and sent Mary Jo Kopechne to her watery death. For others like myself, he will always be the scandal-tarnished baby brother who would never follow in the footsteps of Jack or Bobby but nevertheless did great...

While Joe Biden brings a fair amount of baggage to the Barack Obama ticket, he was the best choice as a vice presidential running mate because of the balance he offers. Pity poor John McCain, because his choices will be exceedingly limited if he hopes to balance his ticket. My tears are of the crocodile variety, of course, and McCain has no one to blame but that guy looking back at him from the mirrors in those how many homes. He made the decision to market himself as a faux maverick but of course...

(12.) Anyone scratching the surface of Joe Biden’s financial history will become acquainted with Delaware’s growth industry — usury in the form of credit card-bank-friendly state laws written for some of his biggest contributors. (11.) Too much will be made in the coming weeks of Biden’s humble roots, but he can connect with blue collar Americans and help shore up Obama with Catholic and elderly voters. (10.) His wife Jill’s first marriage, like millions of Americans,...

THE ANSWER IS HERE.

Brandon Friedman at Vet Voice nails it: “The fact is, John McCain’s service during Vietnam was honorable and he sacrificed a great deal. But his service to the country carries no more weight than that of any other POW. Likewise, while McCain has given so much to his country, thousands of veterans–past and present–have given as much or more. In this war alone, thousands of troops have lost limbs, been paralyzed, and been burned beyond recognition. So to see McCain resort to...

2008: The Dream Team; 1972: Biden celebrates his 30th birthday with his sons and wife, who was killed a month later While Delaware has its charms, notably its great beaches, it is mostly a place to go through to get to somewhere else, and its mark on American politics since it became the first signatory to the Constitution 225 years ago has been as negligible as the state is small. An exception was Senator John J. “Honest John” Williams, a chicken farmer and Republican who earned the...

Senator Joseph R. Biden is the first Delawarean to appear on a major-party presidential slate although several residents of the tiny state have run for president under (very) minor party banners. Delaware’s representation in the upper reaches of national government also is on the thin side: One state senator became Senate president pro-tem and another secretary of state, but that’s about it. Biden, who is running for a seventh term, is expected to remain on the November ballot. If Barack...

THE BASS VOICE OF MY YOUTH (FAR RIGHT) HAS PASSED

Forget about Barack Obama’s travails — real or imagined — for a moment. What does it say about the state of the Republican Party that the speakers on the opening night of its national convention are a president widely considered to be one of the worst in history, a vice president who may be culpable for war crimes, a serial adulterer who used public funds on his mistress, and a Uriah Heep-ish Democratic turncoat? Oh, yeah. And the guy being nominated is an addled septuagenarian,...

THIS REALLY SUCKS.

Once I am able to get past the immorality of the Iraq war, as well as the carnage in human lives and its devastating impact on stability in the Mideast and the American economy (and that ain’t easy), the tentative troop withdrawal agreement reached between Baghdad and Washington is good news for Barack Obama. It also is bad news and good news for John McCain. It is bad news because Obama can correctly claim that “This is what I’ve been urging the U.S. to do all along,” and...

HMM.

The post-post-mortems are rolling in on Fornigate as we learn more than we ever cared to know about Rielle Hunter, including how to correctly pronounce the trollop’s name and the revelation that her lawyer advised her to let John Edwards take a paternity test because he would marry her after his wife Elizabeth succumbed to cancer. Yes, it all makes you want to take a really long shower. Most pundits are picking at crumbs at this point, I myself have drained the well of usable photographs of...

MORE HERE.

I promised myself that I would not blog on the Jennifer Aniston-John Mayer smash-up, and it’s been like only 72 hours since I last wrote anything about the John & Rielle Show, which actually had more to do with electrocuting horses than short-circuiting political careers. But a newly-published account concerning Edwards shamelessly using his wife’s cancer to try to guilt-trip a newspaper editor into the presidential wannabe’s own Cone of Silence cannot go un-noted. Explains...

Is it possible that the addled John McCain really believes the “cross in the dirt” incident occurred when he was a POW? I’ll give him that much, but isn’t it curious that he has brought it up at a time when a guy to whom such an incident did happened has been much in the news? And won’t it just be ducky when we get past the conventions and can move on from crosses in the dirt, cones of silence and Hawaii as an elitist destination and talk about the stuff that matters? Or...

When the Bush administration put out the word that only guilty verdicts were allowable at the Guantánamo Bay war crimes tribunal, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann saluted crisply and answered the call. Hartmann (small photo), an Air Force reservist and corporate lawyer, has been a relentless and aggressive advocate for the military commission system despite his supposedly neutral role and so shamelessly pro-prosecution that a military judge has barred him from acting as a legal advisor to an accused...

I didn’t think I had it in me, but I have just finished yet another book about World War II, probably the hundredth or so that I have read in a lifetime of interest in the myriad angles, intricacies and strategies of that great conflict fought by my parents’ generation. I am glad that I did what with the dust-up in Georgia and a war in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the time between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and their unconditional surrender. Retribution: The...