Generations of United States Senators now past would view with dazed wonder at what the world's greatest deliberative body has become. Virtually all struggled to serve their and many struggled even more to stay there. Throughout the nation's history the prestige of such service was second only to the presidency...

Underlying all the media focus on the Catholic cardinals' selection of a new pope, and the predictable focus on personality over meaning, was a much greater struggle between tradition and reform, conservatism and progress. That struggle mirrors politics in America and most western democracies.

We humans are divided between preservation...

The nature of warfare has, more often than not throughout history, been driven by technology. The Trojan horse, you might say, was a technological invention of the Greeks, followed by the long bow, catapults, machine guns, nuclear weapons, and... the drone.

The drone is new and effective and, for the...

It is unfortunate that senior administration officials making life and death decisions today on when, where, and against whom drone strikes should be launched did not live through, as I did, the period of 1975-76 when Congressional investigations, including the famous Church committee, discovered plots by our government to assassinate...

There is a distinct pattern for Democratic presidents to select Republicans as Secretaries of Defense. These include: Bill Cohen, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta (a Democrat who began as a Republican), and now Chuck Hagel. All of these were good Secretaries. Bill Cohen is a friend of many years, and I...

America has done some extraordinary things. Leave aside victory in war, though the triumph of the Union was a triumph for union and World War II rid the world of fascism, at least for a time. There was the Louisiana Purchase, the Westward expansion and the occupation of the continent,...

"This is not about politics," said one conservative Republican Congressman, "this is about human beings." Later, a colleague added: "This is not a handout." Both are from New York and both were arguing, and rightly so, for federal aid to areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

But both have participated in...

Gun ownership was a fact of life in early America. That fact was never challenged, and little discussed, during the founding era. The Constitution's drafters, however, felt it necessary to recognize that fact as central to the maintenance of a "well-regulated militia." The militia, mentioned twice elsewhere than in the...

It may take the slaughter of small children to finally prompt true minutemen to separate themselves from gun extremists. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that gun ownership is guaranteed by the Constitution and an estimated 300 million guns of various kinds are at large in the nation. It is...

If the "unlimited debate" (filibuster) rule continues to be abused in the Senate, little will be accomplished in the second Obama term. Regardless, proposed reform of this rule is not as simple as it looks from the outside. This has to do with the unique nature of the Senate.
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We search through the lives of a few Americans to solve the mystery of who we are and how we, as a nation, should live. This is more true of Abraham Lincoln than perhaps any other American who ever lived. The new movie Lincoln haunts your mind for hours and...

Law students learn very quickly that the law is about what is and is not legal (and mostly about all those cases that don't fall clearly into either neat category), but that there is another parallel system for governing society that is called equity. In some jurisdictions there are even...

Forty years after, it is still surprising that so many historians, journalists, and concerned Americans want to talk about the 1972 presidential election. George McGovern lost. Even more to the point, America lost. He routinely accepted his share of responsibility for this. But a large percentage of America's voters spoke...

The political media has long treated politics as a sport and a contact sport at that. All the verbs and most of the adjectives are taken from the sports pages. And, of course, it is all about winning and losing. From this perspective, George McGovern goes down as an epic...

Why didn't anyone tell us? is the question everyone will be asking. Well, not everyone. A few of us, particularly Richard Clarke and more recently Leon Panetta, have been warning the nation. But too few have been listening. The threat, of course, is cyber warfare, the destructive use of computers...

Myths play a central role as metaphor in many world religions, according to Joseph Campbell. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth he studied the world mythologies, found common themes in a wide variety of cultures, and reached a startling conclusion: myths, he said, come...

Principles are central to human behavior. "Unprincipled" is one of the harshest accusations one person can make about another. Principles are also central to government and politics. Parties and public official we hope will conduct themselves according to principles that guide their beliefs and actions. Principles are the basis for...

With GOP policy, language and funding in the grip of far-right regressives -- and its national ticket too -- now is the time for Congressional Democrats to sharpen differences to win and govern. Here's our Open Letter to 10 Congressional Leaders signed by 20 leading Democrats.

Robert Frost once...

Tempting as it is to send the iconic movie-maker Clint Eastwood a copy of Plato or even one of my books on the Republic, it would probably not make his day. But the past week, with its attempt to focus on economic issues, despite candidates telling their life stories or...

The media-friendly catch-phrase "It's the economy, stupid" appeals to those who like their politics, and their government, simple. By and large people do vote their pocketbooks. But those same people have sons and daughters in the military, work for companies with international operations, and are threatened, at least to some...