ArcaMax

For anyone planning a book entitled "Totalitarianism for Dummies," last Saturday was a good day. "He who saves his country does not violate any Law," proclaimed President Donald Trump, convicted of violating 34 of them. It is, of course, a fascist's credo, one that Trump believes, apparently correctly, he can embrace without consequence: I am ...Read more

"The key to success," George Burns observed, "is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Donald Trump has established himself as far and away the most successful faker in American history, conning half the country plus a bit more in battleground states into believing that he is all about Making America Great. Motivated instead by...Read more

For anyone doubting whether America is ailing and headed for an unhealthy next four years, President Donald Trump's exquisitely characteristic blaming of a midair collision of an airplane and a helicopter over the Potomac River on the promotion of racial diversity should be a wake-up call. Unfortunately, it won't be; Americans decided fair and ...Read more

It's an excellent time for bullies and bros in Donald Trump's Washington, where the president wasted no time confirming that if he has his way -- namely, whatever he wants -- it's going to be all thuggery all the time.

There's a fresh flood of new examples each day. They're intended to overwhelm us, and it's working. Here's one: Trump gleefully...Read more

Hamas' release of three Israeli women it kidnapped and held hostage for 471 days provided quite the split-screen on Sunday. Israelis rejoiced that these young innocents had finally made it out of Hamas tunnels alive. Hundreds of Gazans surrounded the cars carrying the women to freedom, cursing them and vowing -- guess what? -- to continue a ...Read more

The Supreme Court's narrow vote to permit a New York state judge to formally pronounce a practically meaningless sentence on Donald Trump pursuant to a jury verdict convicting him of 34 felonies was hailed by some as promising news, that there remain institutional guardrails constraining the 47th president from doing anything he wishes after ...Read more

Shamsud-Din Jabbar's mass murder of innocents in New Orleans on New Year's Day, "inspired" by ISIS' exhortations to wage war against "non-believers," reminded Americans about the existence of evil. In our comfort, in our security, we don't see evil up close all that frequently.

Unfortunately for Israelis, they see it every day. Evil in the form...Read more

Respect for the rule of law in the United States can hardly be helped by the fact that so many Americans don't know what it means. Last year's annual civics survey by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found that one-third of our countrymen couldn't name all three branches of government -- and almost 1 in 5 couldn't ...Read more

In her iconic song "Big Yellow Taxi," an obvious lament about American presidents who have been underappreciated while in office only to finally be given their due with time's passage, famed presidential historian Joni Mitchell wondered, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" Professor Mitchell clearly ...Read more

It's in vogue since Donald Trump's election last month to suggest that using words like "autocrat" or "strongman," let alone "fascist," to describe the once and future president is bad form at best and terribly out of line at worst. The problem with this suggestion is what the president says and what he does; other than that, there's no ...Read more

The cold-blooded, targeted murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he walked into a Manhattan hotel early last Wednesday morning has grabbed national attention, focusing some of it on America's troubling embrace of simple cruelty, and of violence.

There's chilling video circulating widely of the hooded, masked assassin pulling out a ...Read more

The word that Palestinians use for the 1948 displacement of many of their forebears is "Nakba," Arabic for "catastrophe." That displacement, of course, was a self-inflicted catastrophe, but also one that Arab leaders inflicted on the rest of the world, which has paid a heavy price for it. It was the proximate result of the decision by Arab ...Read more

The furor about the real risk to American national security posed by President-elect Donald Trump's choice of Tulsi Gabbard as the next Director of National Intelligence has obscured what is the even greater risk, and that's the one posed by the president-elect himself. It's somehow all but forgotten that Trump was indicted for intentionally ...Read more