John Podhoretz has now sent me a note to explain his first email to me: Good Lord, Weiss, I was making fun of your preposterous and hysterical neocon baiting. I presumed you would see my name at the top of…
A couple days ago I did my most successful item, counting by serious comments: about the vanishing progressive Jewish presence in public life, from my viewpoint as an assimilating Jew. Later that day I opened my email to discover a…
Someone had run over this black snake on a woods road. Some people like doing that kind of thing. My dog wasn’t wild about having his picture taken with it. This is as close as he would sit. He didn’t…
Under Terry Gross’s fine questioning on Fresh Air today, Hans Blix pointed out that the U.N.’s reports on WMD in Iraq proved to be much more accurate than all the national reports on the same question, from the U.S. and…
The My Lai massacre, of hundreds of civilians, took place in March 1968 and didn’t break the surface for a year and a half: November 1969. This time it’s only dozens dead and we only had to wait four months…
Tonight the NBC Nightly News doggedly began its broadcast with a report from the levees of New Orleans at the onset of hurricane season rather than where CBS and ABC began: with the Haditha massacre and the European-U.S. coalition visavis…
Is Condi Rice’s warm-and-fuzzy opening to Iran, after President Ahmedinejad’s man-to-man letter to President Bush, a signal of a sharply soft turn in an Administration desperate to shore up public trust, not just in Europe but in the U.S.A.? I…
When I tuned in C-Span for the White House briefing today, they were reairing this morning’s Washington Journal call-in. In the space of five minutes I heard two attacks on the closeness of U.S. policy to Israel. Both callers described…
Entering the White House press room today, Tony Snow commented that it was nice to be in a warm space. “My office is freezing.” David Frum makes the same point in The Right Man, his (sometimes-charming) memoir of working for…