“America,” wrote Ari Shavit in Haaretz a few days ago, “is no longer the country we have known…It is no longer a nation confident in itself, its identity and its future. It is a frightened, angry America. An America that has lost its way.” The man who spurred these words is, of course, Donald Trump, the billionaire bigot who appears likely to become the Republican presidential ...
Marco Rubio would be a terrible president. His tax proposals make George W. Bush look fiscally prudent. He acts as if America can use sanctions, war, or the threat of war to bludgeon its adversaries into submission despite the devastating failure of that approach since 9/11. He has been dishonest and gutless on immigration. He has flirted with climate-change denial even though his hometown now ...
Last Sunday, Marco Rubio voiced the conventional wisdom that guides much horse-race commentary about the GOP campaign: “Part of the dynamic up to this point,” Rubio declared, “is Donald [Trump] has been, you know, in the mid 30s to low 30s, high 20s, in most polls, and then you have 70 percent of the Republican electorate that says, ‘We’re not voting for him.’ But they’re ...
Should the United States give Israel $4 billion a year without asking it to do anything to keep the two state solution alive? It’s a timely question. America’s current agreement with Israel, which expires in 2018, grants the Jewish state $3 billion per year in military aid. …
If Jeb Bush hadn’t run for president, Donald Trump would have had to invent him. The former Florida governor was Trump’s perfect foil. First, because Jeb was prim, proper, and incapable of expressing the rage—especially towards Muslims and Mexicans—that many Republicans currently feel. Second, because Jeb’s candidacy represented the reductio ad absurdum of the campaign finance corruption that Trump, alone among GOP candidates, calls out. ...
I got an email last weekend from a gentleman asking my advice on how to counter Israel’s “delegitimization” in the United States. This column constitutes my response. To counter Israel’s “delegitimization,” you must first understand what “legitimizes” Israel in the first place. For three different groups of Americans, there are three different answers. …
Some commentators think Hillary Clinton’s problem in wooing the progressive young is her lack of authenticity. I disagree. In the way she talks about political change, Clinton is entirely authentic. She believes in working inside the system for incremental change. She always has. Were Hillary Clinton a college student today, she’d probably vote for Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately for her, she has run up against a ...
Pundits keep reminding us that the two men who won New Hampshire, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are both “outsiders.” But that doesn’t mean much. George Wallace and George McGovern were both outsiders, too. While the Trump and Sanders campaigns both represent insurgencies against party elites, they represent insurgencies aimed at taking America in radically different directions. One way of understanding those different directions is ...
By fighting Hillary Clinton to a virtual draw this week in Iowa, Bernie Sanders became the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in American history. But that’s largely beside the point. Sanders’ real cultural significance isn’t that he’s Jewish; it’s that he’s secular. …
If Marco Rubio is a robot, then what’s Bernie Sanders? On Sunday, CBS’ John Dickerson asked the Vermont Senator how he’d respond to North Korea’s missile test. In his answer, Sanders ignored North Korea entirely. Instead, he recited his standard talking point about opposing the Iraq War. As David Sanger has noted in the New York Times, this has become a pattern. …