Over the past few weeks, the American public has been exposed to any number of measures of the nation’s well-being. Inflation, we are told, is down to 5 percent; job opportunities are growing; our gross domestic product (GDP) will be whatever those imaginary numbers say. As New America has pointed out, “[O]ur dominant reporting on…
Author: John Farmer Jr., Opinion Contributor
This season, let us all remember the lullaby for the lost
Of all the beautiful, soul-stirring music associated with the Christmas season, perhaps the most haunting melody, and easily the most unsettling lyrics, belong to the “Coventry Carol.” Far from a joyous celebration of Jesus’s birth, the carol commemorates the nightmare that followed, the so-called “slaughter of the innocents” in which, according to the Gospel of…
As with 9/11, your government has failed you — again
“Your government failed you.” With that dramatic testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Richard Clarke, counterterrorism coordinator at the White House during the Clinton and Bush administrations, laid bare the raw truth of the government’s failure to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans. It was shocking. It was cathartic. It was also…
Hate speech, privacy and the personal lives of public officials
The recent arrest of an armed, threatening, potentially murderous person outside the home of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has underscored two areas of continuing and tragic governmental neglect: the vulnerability of public officials to violence, even assassination, and the incessant drumbeat of hate speech on social media aimed at vulnerable individuals and populations. Congresswoman Jayapal,…
Of RINOs, DINOs and the zombie ant apocalypse
Missouri GOP Senate candidate Eric Greitens’s martial “RINO-hunting” campaign ad, in which he invites the listener to join the MAGA crew and get a RINO-hunting license (with no limits on “bagging” or “tagging” so-called Republicans in name only), may have been tongue in cheek but it underscores the displacement by Trump-style populism of many formerly…
Remembering Bill Watkinson, a true ‘Top Gun’ maverick
On May 27, timed for the patriotism of Memorial Day, the long-awaited sequel to “Top Gun,” the Tom Cruise-as-ultra-cool-fighter-pilot-rebel-dude vehicle, opened nationwide and dominated the holiday weekend, grossing $160 million at the box office. Two days earlier, on May 25, our nation lost the real thing. Bill Watkinson passed away quietly at home in Flemington,…
Flying blind through a pandemic
Early in my career in government service, I learned a lesson about human nature — as it finds expression in government bureaucracy — that has served me well in trying to understand our government’s response to the global pandemic. In the early 1990s, New Jersey’s legislature required that the schools administer a “fourth-grade test,” which…