Keyword: suzannefields
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The holiday season is all ablaze, with lights to brighten the eye and warm the spirit. The candles of Hanukkah, recalling the triumph of the Maccabees in repulsing an army of Syrians who tried to evict the Jews from ancient Israel, twinkle for eight days in the Jewish "festival of the lights." The lights of Christmas celebrate the birth of Christ, symbolizing the coming of the Messiah and the triumph of light over darkness in a world of suffering. It's a season about survival, of standing up to evil forces. The lighting of the candles for the rededicated temple commemorates...
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Barack Obama has been accused of hubris and arrogance for his continuing references of identification with Abraham Lincoln, who by the measure of many was the greatest of all our presidents. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat ... he reminded me not just of my own struggles," he told Time magazine as he set out in his quest for the White House. "He also reminded me of a larger fundamental element of American life -- the enduring beliefs that...
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Despite everything John McCain and Barack Obama can do, Sarah Palin continues to be the liveliest of the candidates, now starting the clubhouse turn and about to race down the homestretch. There's only one more presidential debate to endure. By this time in a campaign, both presidential candidates are so programmed, their talking points so tested and trite if not necessarily true, that viewers long for a refreshing gaffe. But all we get is a Tuesday-night debate where both men seem terrified of saying something interesting and new. Tom Brokaw tried. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is something else....
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The Germans were ecstatic when Barack Obama landed in Berlin. They called him the "American Idol," a political superstar they expected to walk on the River Spree. He didn't walk on water, but he didn't disappoint. He promised to remake the world where everybody would love everybody. "There is a sort of 'Obamamania' in Germany right now," says an aide in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office, "but I think a lot of people will have their illusions shattered if he does become president." He's a novelty who causes skeptics to suggest he paraphrase JFK's famous boast at the Berlin Wall:...
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Politics and the street fight between Hillary and Barack Obama aren't the only games in town. A bachelor acquaintance of mine, a prosperous man in his 40s, was new in town and wanted to meet the love of his life, to marry, and become a father and citizen (and voter). So, I organized a small cocktail party and invited several attractive women in their late 30s who are still looking for Mr. Right (and might be willing to settle for Mr. Good Enough). They're women with professional careers but want marriage and family, too. They feel a mild panic that...
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While the candidates argue over who's on first, who got to second and who won the gold and who won the silver, the rest of us can concentrate on the really important things. What will their world be like when our little girls grow up to be president of the United States? We may be ignoring what we shouldn't. Not every little girl wants to grow up to be Hillary Clinton. Politics is tough. Tough enough to bring a candidate to tears, even the first female candidate. Sexism isn't the only reason that many women avoid politics. More than two...
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It was neither the best of times, nor the worst of times, to steal an opening line from Dickens. It was neither the age of wisdom, nor the age of foolishness. We mixed belief with incredulity, light with darkness, enjoyed good and feared evil. Looking back on 2007, we mixed comparisons as if on a seesaw. Suicide bombing looked to be less fashionable in the Middle East, but the assassination of Benazir Bhutto stunned everyone, reminding us that evil is always lurking in the shadows. If the Iraq War once looked unwinnable, it now appears that the surge is working....
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Are we meant to elect the comedian-in-chief, or what? The a-hah! moment of insight has morphed into the ha-ha moment of interpretation. We've advanced from obsession with Hillary's cleavage to revulsion at her cackle. She once told reporters traveling with her, "You guys keep telling me to lighten up and be fun." She thought we were aching for a laugh track. Bill Clinton goes on and on with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" about what a great one-liner his wife delivered in a Democratic debate. "I thought that the moment was great," he said. "I thought it was the...
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A few days before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, a young man ranting in Arabic accosted a rabbi walking home from his synagogue in an upscale neighborhood of Frankfurt, and stabbed him. As he shoved the blade of his pocketknife into the rabbi's stomach, he switched from Arabic to German and told the man: "You sh---- Jew, I'm going to kill you." The rabbi survived, and Jewish leaders in Germany were outraged and condemned the barbarism, but moderated their criticism. "We oppose leveling blanket accusations at the Muslim community because the majority of Muslims in Germany condemn acts of violence...
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History repeats itself, but rarely exactly. Examples of both cowardice and courage have lessons to teach, and so do comparisons with the past. The oft-drawn analogy between abrupt withdrawal from Iraq and Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938 is inexact, but irresistible. Chamberlain, like some of the loudest voices crying now for taking the last plane out of Baghdad, was regarded by his colleagues and the newspapers as "a hero for peace." Though many Englishmen knew better, few politicians were brave enough to speak up when Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler in Munich in 1938, proclaiming "peace in our...
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They call him "Bush's poodle." Headlines scream "Good Riddance." They're saying he was thrown out of "10 Downer Street." After that, they get mean. It's easy for some of his countrymen to jeer at Tony Blair as he leaves office as prime minister of Britain. But not by us, and not by friends of civilization. He has been a staunch friend of the United States, and he looks at the world with a visionary's eye. He didn't accomplish everything he tried to do, and sometimes he seemed a little eager to spin his "celebrity," but he has his values on...
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They're caricatured with hooknoses and humpbacks, as sucking up a sow's excrement, murdering children for their blood in a recipe for matzoh. They're scorned for being weak and sneered at for being strong, for passivity and aggression, for segregating themselves and for assimilating to disappear among their secular neighbors. They're too studious or merely stupid, obsessed with cleanliness or living in filth, hated for their industry and reviled for their sloth. They're condemned as greedy capitalists and naive communists, as reactionaries and radicals, patriotic nationalists and secular internationalists, for being stateless and for building a thriving state. Jews are persecuted...
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That crunching noise George W. Bush and the Republicans hear is not ice in the White House bird feeder, where those of us taking in the sun here at the southernmost tip of America imagine ice must be. It may be the faint sound of the conservative coalition cracking at the edges. A few tiny cracks don't constitute a trend, of course, and strange and unexpected noises in the night aren't necessarily trends. Nevertheless, Rod Dreher may be an outrider of the new counterculture. He's a columnist for the Dallas Morning News with impeccable credentials in Hillary Clinton's celebrated "vast...
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While most of us were opening the last of our "holiday" presents, basking in the glow of Lancome's "multi-defense protective tinted cream," or deciding whether to wear the new tie with prancing horses or the one with intertwined golf clubs, several hundred Nervous Nellies and Fearful Freddies, many with newly minted Ph.Ds in hand, were busy networking, i.e., job-hunting, at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Washington. This meant sitting through days of seminars on subjects of interest only to the authors of the learned papers. Their parents had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to...
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BERLIN. -- A cold dampness hovers over the streets and the skies turn bleak and dark early in the afternoon. Nevertheless, 'tis the season to be jolly. More than 50 Christmas markets celebrate the season, and none is as unusual as the one here at 14 Lindenstrasse, behind the provocative new Jewish Museum, lighted by a huge Channukah Menorah and traditional Christmas decorations celebrating an exhibition entitled "Chrismukkah." Christians and Jews gather to share a warm glass of Gluhwein, the seasonal spicy red wine, to warm the hands and lift the spirit, and to nibble a potato latke or a...
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A magazine cover story about postmodern life on the American college campus depicts three monkeys in cap and gown, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, a parody of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil caricature. But students at many colleges actually get quite the opposite. They're required to hear, see, speak and study all about evil, as long as it's the evil oppression of everybody in American society. There's an emphasis on multicultural studies and few campuses have escaped the disease, ... students study the life and murder of Tupac Shakur, the "gangsta" rapper ...There's "Queer...
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Everyone has an image of New Orleans before the flood, even those who have never been there. Every columnist and commentator who ever spent a weekend there has indulged himself explaining the voodoo hoodoo of the Big Easy. New Orleans, more than any other place, conjures poetry, music, desire and degeneracy, romance accompanied by a dirge of death, a mix of ethnics and ethics side by side with tolerance and hostility. All grew from the same root, producing an exotic harvest of flower and fruit. (Who could not be seduced by a city that named streets after the nine muses...
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The Labor Day weekend marks the official end of summer, usually offering a final burst of reflection, with the singing of the crickets of late August bathing consciousness in a sad symphony of vague melancholia. We yearn to remember summer through the haze of lazy, happy days when nothing much happened. Not this year. News of suicide bombs in Iraq, horrendous wind and high water in our own South and anti-war protest in Texas seize our attention. Reflection this year carries high anxiety.
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COROLLA, N.C. -- Strange new sounds disturb the rustle of the eternal sea, and unaccustomed noises echo through wood and across dune. There's no respite inside the summer houses, on the sidewalk outside the ice-cream parlor. These are sounds out of sync with the whine of the mosquito, the low buzz of the voices of distant children at play, the sudden trill of a songbird. High tech intrudes everywhere. The insistent chimes of cell phones, video games and the click-click-click from the keyboard of the laptop invade consciousness like mind snatchers, distracting from the homely rhythms that once contributed to...
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Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, as we all know, but sometimes vigilantes have to invent bad guys to keep their franchise alive. You could ask some of our Democratic senators or the ladies at the National Organization for Women. The Democrats in the Senate who must confirm a successor to Sandra Day O'Connor have wasted no time in signaling that they're spoiling for a fight, and no sooner had Justice O'Connor announced that she would resign when a successor was confirmed — note that she hasn't retired yet, so technically there isn't yet a vacancy on the Supreme...
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