Category: US News

Will We Someday Ask Ourselves, Maybe Trump Wasn’t That Bad?

Recently it occurred to me that no matter how bad how presidents tend to be, their successors are usually worse. So much worse, in fact, that we’re obliged to re-think our terrible opinions of previous presidents.

Take Nixon, the president who was impeached and resigned from office. “Well, he was a vindictive anti-semite who tried to subvert the Constitution… but on the other hand, he did establish the Environmental Protection Agency. So maybe he wasn’t that bad.”

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Trump doesn’t crave war, but he does crave its TV ratings

Now that the America-firsters are more or less in place, others are saying that the President has assembled a ‘war cabinet.’

That strikes me as giving Psycho Trump too much credit. His goal isn’t war. His goal is attention, and he pursues it through a borish, juvenile belligerence that could result in war but more through hare-brained miscalculation than any conscious strategy.

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Why Rednecks Should Stop Worrying and Love Europe

The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in February 2017.

I was a redneck, but a year in Europe changed my life.

My hometown was Harlan, Kentucky, a coal-mining hub set deep in Appalachia. By 1989, through circumstance and chance, I gained a scholarship to study at a prestigious prep school in Massachusetts. My classmates included a Hilton, a Roosevelt and a son of the King of Jordan. Deerfield Academy offered a career trajectory far higher than I had any right to expect, if I could seize it.

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Bin Laden Would Like Trump’s America

The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in September 2014.

HELL IS REAL, says the billboard on my right.

Driving through Indiana, I think: ain’t that the truth.

As the town of Gary – at this point, just a crumbling monument to U.S. Steel’s past greatness – comes into view, my partner gasps from my Prius C’s passenger seat. A Spaniard, she’s used to seeing clean and modern roadways and pristine infrastructure built, in part, with European Union funds. “It’s like a third-world country,” she says, staring at the abandoned factories.

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Are Europeans and Americans Drifting Apart?

The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in 2014.

Broader surveillance was supposed to be about catching terrorists, not about eavesdropping on a German leader who’s been one of America’s best friends.

Revelations that the National Security Agency tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private mobile phone have made a big impression here in Brussels and across Europe. They have given concrete form to a long-held European suspicion: that sometimes when America talks about protecting the West from terrorism, it really means conducting surveillance for its own economic and political advantage. It turns out that it’s not about your security, this example seems to say; it’s about our prosperity.

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The ‘Today’ Show: A Sign of the Apocalypse

The following article appeared in The Huffington Post in September 2014.

Is NBC’s Today show now a sign of a coming apocalypse? I’m beginning to wonder.

Last Thursday, I tuned in to Today for the first time in a long while. I watched a bright and chirpy correspondent climb about 40 feet of the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska as part of her epic Journey to some of America’s most iconic landmarks. She gawked at the glory of Mendenhall Lake, paddling around it in a kayak. She waxed trivial about her incredibleadventure, her great guides and how gorgeous and magnificent she found the glacier.

But a fundamental fact was missing from her report.

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