When philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned...

When Richard Nixon declared to a gathering of editors in 1973, “I am not a crook,” he was wrong. He was a crook, and columnist Jack Anderson did more than anyone to expose his manifold crookedness. Anderson, meanwhile, was the Rodney Dangerfield of journalists. Even worse, actually...

Having taken the oath of office just one year ago, Barack Obama is a flashing meteor that sputtered out too soon—or so the national media narrative tells us. According to this story line, the young president is a presumptuous liberal who disappointed his own idealistic followers while irritating...

Every now and then, an insider inadvertently exposes the hideous rationalizations that run the American political grotesquerie. The best known of these statements are memorialized on TV as "gaffes." But the ones that never become famous tend to reveal the ugliest assumptions of all. Case in point is the comment the pharmaceutical...

Colorado's Bill Ritter (D) is a typical swing-state governor in these most atypical times: overly cautious, predictably equivocal -- you know the type. Upon getting himself elected in 2006, he promised to pass legislation that "provides ever�y Coloradan with access to some basic form of health insurance and health care by 2010." One year later, with America gorging on a presidential hoopla, Ritter backed...

Mea Culpa Mondays was started as a weekly feature to track the most interesting media apologies. It dates back to the first, now defunct, Shepherd Express website – the original posts are lost to the internet and confined on my hard drive. So trust me when I say that this is the first time in the Mea Culpa history with two consecutive Tua Culpa Tuesdays. Now more than ever before, other people are at fault. This lession was taken to the logical extreme by Memphis Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden, NBC News and the president last week when each found ways to turn being accused of blame into being the victim. For no one could becoming a victim be more complicated than Bruce VanWyngarden. After a Monday television report, the entire city of Memphis took offense to columnist John Branston's use of  “HNIC” to discuss the search for a new school principal. Coined by Joe Clark, the principal immortalized in Lean on Me, the unique term is the most ethnically colorful way of acronyming the “Highest [black dude] In Charge.” Like policing the school baseball bat in hand or chaining student’s to desks, HNIC was a part of Clark’s no-nonsense, lawman persona. So when the mayor referred to the need for a Joe Clark like principal, Branston figured the new recruit would enjoy Clark’s nickname. Naturally. “I apologize to those who were offended by the use of the term in John's column,” VanWyngarden wrote in an online editor’s note. “It was not intended as a racial slur but as a cultural reference to a very real and important decision facing our school board.” “Thanks primarily to a rather sensationalistic story on WREG Channel 3, John Branston's City Beat column from this week's Flyer seems to be generating some controversy,” it began. “…Whether that was an error in judgment or insensitive is open to debate.” To be fair, WREG is notorious for sensationalizing the entire NIC system of taxonomy. They even complained about the Lowest NIC.

Read More