Call her Seo-yeon. She’s an infant, cute as could be, and she will be born in the city of Busan, South Korea, in the year 2030. When she emits her first cry, this statistical abstract will have a life expectancy of about 90. Maddison, on the other hand, born the same year but in, say, […]
Richard Cohen
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
'President for a Day,' starring Donald Trump
Donald Trump, clever guy that he is, has come up with a new reality show. It’s called “President for a Day” and the way it works is that, every so often, maybe once a month, Trump acts presidential, gives a speech in which an aide is not standing by with meds, and many in the […]
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Similarities between Trump and Mussolini obvious
Despite his jutting jaw and comical bravado, Donald Trump is not another Benito Mussolini. The Italian dictator had six children, one wife and several mistresses, the most loyal of whom, Claretta Petacci, chose to die with him and was hung upside down in a Milan gas station. Most of Trump’s women have fared better. On […]
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Trump's vilification of the media sounds familiar
For reasons he cannot fathom, Donald Trump has been asked recently about anti-Semitism, not just the rising number of incidents both here and abroad but also — as he oddly interpreted a question at his latest news conference — his own attitudes. As for the latter, he is, by his own testimony and that of […]
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Can't anybody here play this game?
Sooner or later in any administration, Casey Stengel comes to mind. The great Yankee manager, ending his career with the then-hapless New York Mets, looked down the dugout one dismal day in 1962 and asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” The answer for the Mets was no. It is the same now for the […]
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What does it mean to act presidential?
My friend has a teenage son. He’s a good kid, well-behaved, impeccably mannered and exasperatingly unpredictable as many teenagers are — a man one minute, a boy the next. My friend has schooled his son in the verities of life — be truthful, be reliable, be civil, be patient and, above all, be humble. Now, […]
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Immigration policy has been stupid before, but never for less reason
Early in World War II, my friend’s father put on his Civil Defense helmet and scanned the Coney Island beach for the arrival of German saboteurs. Maybe because he was so alert, Nazis never landed near the roller coaster, but on the West Coast similar no-shows nevertheless produced a panic. Soon enough, Japanese-Americans were incarcerated […]
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Inner circle can’t stand up to Trump
Sean Spicer is the appropriate face of the new Trump administration. He is the White House press secretary and he came into the briefing room on Saturday wearing a blank expression. You’ve heard of a Molotov cocktail. Spicer was wearing a Molotov face. Vyacheslav Molotov was Josef Stalin’s foreign minister. He was so scared of […]
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Obama can still act on Syrian horror
The New York Times’ David Sanger had an interesting observation in a recent article on Vladimir Putin’s bizarre foreign policy. Russia, Sanger wrote, is a “declining economy with the gross domestic product of Italy.” So how come it manages to push around the United States, which has the world’s biggest economy and, as President Obama […]
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Aleppo: A lesson the world always seems to forget
In April of 1937, the war planes of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy chose a market day to bomb a Basque town, one of the first times a civilian population was deliberately targeted. Pablo Picasso, a native of Spain, quickly reacted by depicting the horror in his famous mural named for the town, “Guernica.” It […]