Category Politics

Donald Trump’s New Punching Bag: Pope Francis

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Monday, February 15, 2016 0 Politics , Permalink
Tim Rutten Regarding Politics and Media

Not content with spewing country club card room invective—“loser,” “jerk,” etc.—at other Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump now has turned on Pope Francis I. The pontiff is currently on a pastoral visit to Mexico, where over the course of the next few days he will meet with indigenous people and business leaders, celebrate Mass at the shrine of the country’s patroness, Our Lady of Guadalupe, visit a prison and lunch with seminarians. His itinerary consciously mirrors the journey of Mexican and Central American migrants northward to the Rio Grande and will culminate in Ciudad Juarez, where the pope will celebrate a ...

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Antonin Scalia’s Death: Obama Must Nominate a Replacement Despite GOP Rancor

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Sunday, February 14, 2016 0 Government, Politics , , Permalink
Tim Rutten Regarding Politics & Media

The unexpected death of Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has brought into sharp focus the fact this election cycle will decide not only control of the White House, but also the high court and the U.S. Senate—in other words, all three of the coequal branches of government. Scalia was a giant of the conservative jurisprudence that has come to play such a decisive role in our national life. His opinions on free speech and due process may have as many admirers on the left as they do on the right. Even so, his particular theory of constitutional interpretation—textualism, in which ...

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Note to Donald Trump: Interrogation Under Torture Just Doesn’t Work

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Monday, February 8, 2016 0 Politics , , Permalink

Of all the things I ever anticipated about the pursuit of opinion journalism, having to argue against torture was not one of them. And yet here we are again. The Bush-Cheney White House took advantage of the panicked aftermath to 9/11 to make the torture of captured Islamic extremists national policy, and had the CIA put together a secret international gulag in which to work their will out of sight. There’s probably a psychoanalytic explanation for all this—Bush and Cheney’s guilt over failure to prevent the deaths of so many Americans; perhaps panic over the blow to their masculinity delivered by ...

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