Many of us are cynical about promises made by politicians. “Campaign promises are made to be broken” is a venerable truism of American politics. There are “truth-in-advertising” laws against misrepresentation by private businesses, but no such protections apply to political speech. Why do politicians so often deny, stretch, obscure, evade or mutilate truth? In brief,... Continue Reading

Some people I know react with incredulity when they hear television commentators remark on President Barack Obama’s brilliance. “How can he say that?” they expostulate. “He doesn’t understand basic economics, and he relies on a teleprompter even during news conferences. This guy is in over his head.” To which I reply: True, true … and... Continue Reading

Human nature has a blind spot. We often detect external flaws faster than internal ones—seeing the speck in our neighbor’s eye sooner than the beam in our own, to use the biblical metaphor. This same tendency exists at the national level. Such blindness can be fatal, as Ralph Waldo Emerson warned when he wrote, “A... Continue Reading