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Not crazy, just racist
OK, can we finally stop beating around the bush and say outright that President Donald J. Trump is a white supremacist?
When in doubt, blame Obama
“Bump stocks.” Hardly anyone had heard about them before they were found in the late Las Vegas sniper’s arsenal. Association with that massacre has made the devices, which can enable a semiautomatic rifle to fire almost as rapidly as a machine gun, so widely despised that even the National Rifle Association has turned against them in a surprising move — after unsurprisingly blaming Barack Obama.
Hugh Hefner’s ‘playboy’ legacy
Hugh Hefner’s death on Sept. 27 at age 91 brought to mind a special piece of history that we have in our house: A Braille edition of Playboy magazine.
Trump: The hip-hop prez
Although they hardly could seem to be less alike sometimes, President Trump and people of color have had a love-hate relationship for nearly three decades.
Eschew the violence supremacists use
At his recent Phoenix rally, President Trump bashed one of his favorite go-to scapegoats — the news media. We vex him with our insistence on reporting facts that he doesn’t like to hear.
Obamacare wins again
After Republicans spectacularly failed to gather enough votes to repeal and replace Obamacare, President Trump should consider changing his slogan from “Make America Great Again” to “Hey, We Tried.”
An absence of facts
It is hard to be rebuffed more soundly than President Trump’s “election integrity” commission — or, as he called it, the “very distinguished voter fraud panel.” The commission has been stiffed by most of the states. It’s not hard to imagine why. For one thing, the panel appears to be designed less to improve election efficiency than to boost the president’s fragile ego.
Trump unshackled, unhinged
When Donald Trump gloated that “the shackles have been taken off me,” I immediately wondered, how was he shackled? Was that the shackled Mr. Trump, for example, who obsessively attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel in May, Khizr Khan and his family in July and Alicia Machado in September?
Infidelity: A weak line of attack
I grabbed my ear lobe and jiggled it in disbelief of the words I was hearing from former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s mouth.
Trump and the birthers
News Flash: Donald Trump now believes that President Obama was born in the country of which he is president.
While athletes speak out, Trump drops ball
Donald Trump is a political commentator’s dream in the usually news-challenged weeks of late summer when we’re looking for someone to complain about.
Dialogue, criticism must go both ways
Because I’m not a regular viewer of “Grey’s Anatomy,” I didn’t know who actor Jesse Williams was until his eloquent rants about the state of race in America popped up in viral internet videos.
Trump gets trumped in Iowa
Ever since Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential race, I have been waiting to see him lose. I wanted to see how he would handle it. Humility, after all, is not an emotion with which The Donald appears to be intimately familiar. Remember when his rival Ben Carson, the retired brain surgeon, was running neck and neck with him in polls back in November, occasionally beating him? “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” Mr. Trump raged about Dr. Carson in a Fort Dodge rant. “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?”
A ‘kill-and-cover-up’ police culture?
When public officials refuse to release a video that shows alleged misconduct by a police officer, you should only expect the worst. That’s particularly true in Chicago, where one “bad apple” too often has signaled a bushel of coverups and other problems underneath.
Jim Webb’s ‘culture’ war
Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, feeling disrespected at CNN’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, says he’s dropping out to consider running as an independent. That’s his right, but I wonder whether anyone will notice. It is well known that Mr. Webb, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, former secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan and author of numerous books, has two flaws for an aspiring politician: He doesn’t care much for campaigning and he really hates asking people for money.
Freedom from a long-lost cause
Could this, at last, be the end of the Civil War? Or, as some fans of Southern heritage call it, the War Between the States? Or the War of Northern Aggression?
A clash of freedoms in Indiana
Neither side in the uproar over Indiana’s “religious freedom restoration” law has been totally candid about its benefits or its dangers. That often happens in politics, an arena in which it often seems that no statement is too good to be overstated. For example, defenders of the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed last week, are technically correct when they say the law is not a “license to discriminate” against gays and lesbians as critics claim.
Ferguson’s double message
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Ferguson investigation offers plenty for both sides of this dispute to hate. Seven months after the shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown by former white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson sparked national protests and a #BlackLivesMatter movement, U.S. Justice Department sleuths found enough evidence to let the cop off the hook but indicted the criminal justice system in which he worked. That’s enraging to Michael Brown’s family and many protesters nationwide who wanted to see Mr. Wilson prosecuted. But the evidence kept pointing the other way, said Mr. Holder, who would hardly be called an apologist for police abuse or racial profilers.
