Donald Kaul's blog

Where was Republican outrage when one of their own slandered a Democrat's war record?

At long last Republican presidential hopefuls crept out of their foxholes, where they’d been cowering and maintaining radio silence, to attack Donald Trump.

With one or two exceptions, the field went AWOL as Trump trashed immigrants, calling them drug runners and rapists. But as soon as Trump said “I like people who weren’t captured,” suggesting that Senator John McCain was less than a hero, they pounced.

Greece's economic lesson: In hard times you can't cut your way back to prosperity

I’d like to apologize to the people of Greece.

I’ve been pretty hard on them over the years. I’ve made fun of their freewheeling spendthrift habits, their unwillingness to pay their taxes, and their early retirement ethos.

When they were given membership in the Euro zone, I made fun of that too, or at least of the rest of Europe’s willingness to cast its lot with the Greeks. “That’s like going mountain climbing with your safety rope tied to the town drunk,” I said.

Obama's 'Amazing Grace': He left Charleston funeral as a black man who happened to be president

If Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech is the 20th century equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural — and I think it is — then what President Barack Obama gave us in Charleston, South Carolina is our century’s Gettysburg Address.

He gave a marvelous eulogy that was powerful and eloquent. He was moving without resorting to sentimentality.

Gap in wealth grows partly because we keep electing politicians who promise nothing less

One of the biggest questions of the day is: Why do the rich keep getting richer and the middle class keep getting poorer?

This also ranks as the dumbest question of the day, week, month, or year. To anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s obvious why economic inequality in our land is growing:

That’s what we asked for.

Government by bagmen: Our experiment in self-governance spawns a highest-bidder-take-all bazaar

When Dennis Hastert was indicted for trying to cover up some $3.5 million in hush money payments to a man he’d allegedly sexually abused decades ago, Washington was shocked. I wasn’t.

I was shocked that Hastert, who’d spent the better part of his life in public service after working as a high school teacher and wrestling coach, could afford to contemplate a $3.5 million payout.

Presidential candidates belatedly get worked up about inequality, but lose touch with reality

Hardly a day goes by that another candidate doesn’t announce his or her intention to run for the presidency. One day it’s Carly Fiorina, the next it’s Mike Huckabee, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton, even.

It’s like the circus — when the little car rolls into the center ring and a clown gets out, then another, then two more, and on and on until the ring is overflowing with 1,000 clowns, or so it seems.

The Baltimore uprising's backstory: Race riots as American as baseball and apple pie

Race riots, as we used to call them, are as American as baseball and apple pie.

What started out as righteous protest over the death of a young black man in the hands of Baltimore cops (he had been accused of “making eye contact with a police officer”) quickly degenerated into a full-scale riot. By nightfall the city was on fire, its hopes for a better tomorrow in ruins.

Ahhh, the presidential primary campaign season and the unmistakeable whiff of hypocrisy in the air

Baseball has spring training, football’s got its training camps. But for a political junkie like me, nothing compares with the opening of the presidential primary season.

Some 19 candidates, give or take, recently swarmed a Republican forum in New Hampshire in search of a kind word and a smile from voters there. They spent much of their time arm-wrestling each other over who hated Hillary Clinton more.

Campaigns begin for presidential election and the trash-talking from SuperPACs isn't far behind

That harsh whine you hear in the background — like a buzzsaw getting ready for a log to come down the chute — is the vast right-wing conspiracy revving its engines.

America Rising, an opposition research Super PAC that lives to trash the Clintons, dashed off a press release challenging the notion that Hillary was going to “drive to Iowa” to start her campaign as she said she would. Hillary doesn’t drive, it said. Someone would have to drive her.

Republicans invited the Israeli PM to Congress to embarrass Obama, not to defuse a nuclear threat

On March 3, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked into our Capitol as though he owned the place, stuck a thumb in President Barack Obama’s eye, and walked out to multitudes of cheering Republicans.

Is that a mensch or what?

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