With 15 months to go before election day 2006, the National Republican Senatorial Committee unleashed an attack ad in West Virginia in an attempt to soften up Democratic Senator Robert Byrd for an eventual GOP challenger. Byrd responded immediately with a TV ad of his own. Both ads contained shopworn distortions.
It isn’t often we see large corporations claim the moral high ground. With all the stories of corporate plundering and executives doing the perp walk in handcuffs, it is indeed rare to hear of a company that allows moral interpretation of the stuff it peddles.
Later this month, George W. Bush will surpass Ronald Reagan as our most vacationing president. Bush is currently taking a five-week vacation, the longest sustained r-and-r since Richard Nixon, who liked his vacations so much he owned beachfront homes on both coasts.
It’s time for us to accept and defend our imperialism. Imperialism has received bad press for most of the last hundred years. We think of pith helmets when we hear the word, and tiger hunts, and pathetic little bands in remote Indian provinces playing “God Save the King.” We think of a stiff upper lip that looks, over time, more like foolish bravado than noble resolve. We think of colonial hubris and the blind assertion of cultural superiority.
More than 38,000 pages of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’ work for the Reagan administration were released Thursday as the White House and Congress played tug-of-war over Roberts’ papers as a top Supreme Court lawyer for President Bush’s father.
In Beaumont, Texas, the focus of controversy was a park dedicated to a Confederate soldier. In Palm Beach County, Fla., it was a middle school named after Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. In Memphis, Tenn., it is three parks commemorating the Southern cause, including one that bears the gravesite and name of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Rebel icon later vilified for founding the Ku Klux Klan.
The number of Americans earning doctoral degrees has declined in recent years, renewing worries that the United States is losing its dominance in Ph.D.-level education to rapidly developing nations like China and India.