One symptom of the coronavirus outbreak—at least for me—has been nasty flashbacks to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. At the time I was a policy adviser to President George W. Bush, visiting New York City for meetings. The day after…
WASHINGTON — America is entering a disturbing new stage in the coronavirus outbreak. There has been community-spread in at least one and likely two locations in Washington state. And it appears the virus was being transmitted for several weeks before…
Usually our civic holidays inspire us. But sometimes—as in the case of Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2020—the spirit of a holiday is so at odds with our current practice that it judges and indicts us. That spirit is impossible…
WASHINGTON — I was at the dentist getting a tooth drilled at the start of Robert Mueller’s comparable experience on Capitol Hill. I am the kind of person who cringes intensely while watching anyone fail in a public and humiliating…
The celebration of American independence is supposed to be a unifying national ritual. But we are a country with profound differences over the meaning of nationhood itself. People in more typical countries —such as Belgium, Japan or Russia—are attached primarily…
I worked for a leader who was sometimes accused of lacking in the smarts department. But no one I know who spent time with President George W. Bush was left with that impression. Bush took an almost gleeful satisfaction in…
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report that is the closest thing we have to the quantification of despair. Between 1999 and 2017, suicide rates in America rose to their highest level since World War…