Harold Meyerson

It’s not as if the Supreme Court comes before us with clean hands. In the course of its 200-plus years, it has at various times ruled that no runaway slave could ever be free so long as his master wanted him back; that black children had no right to attend......

Al Gore has had a crummy week, but popular sovereignty in America has had a catastrophic one. In Tallahassee, Judge N. Sanders Sauls ruled that a lagging campaign could not contest the outcome of an election by having a court inspect uncounted ballots. At the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Antonin......

It would be one thing if all this misery were being visited only upon Al Gore. There‘s a kind of rough justice, after all, in this most inept of candidates having his fate determined by the Palm Beach County election officials who devised the butterfly ballot, delayed the hand re-count......

It‘s that time of year, boys and girls, to tell the story of how the word turkey became a derogatory term. The first, and primary, use of turkey, to mean a bad show, a stinker, something to shun if at all possible, comes, like much American slang, from show biz......

So who, exactly, has said that W. is our next president? This assertion, initially heard on election night, was first trotted out by none other than W.‘s cousin, John Ellis, who, in a triumph of executive headhunting, was chief of the election desk for the Fox News Network (”Republican Numbers......

Photo by Stephan Sovoia/AP On the theory that purgatory is, if nothing else, better than hell, I suppose I should be grateful the United States hasn’t gone to the devil just quite yet. At the end of one of the most astonishing, bewildering, intermittently exhilarating and nauseating evenings in American......

Photo by Virginia Lee HunterLet’s start with two propositions. First, Ralph Nader is a genuine American hero who is running on what is the progressive community’s dream program for America. Second, his third-party presidential candidacy is a monumental exercise in wrong-headedness that, far from building the left “for the long......

Now is the autumn of our anxiety Made dangerous bummer by this son of Bush Panic is now permissible. If the elections were held as of this week‘s press time, the likeliest outcome would be a GOP trifecta, with George W. Bush taking the White House and the Republicans clinging......

In the end, Al Gore went back to the only thing that had worked for him during this long, frustrating campaign year. He returned to the themes of his Democratic Convention acceptance speech of August, the speech that had propelled him into the lead for nearly two months. Once again,......

Like a film running inexplicably backward, first slowly, then faster and faster until everything‘s a blur, the Middle East we thought we knew has reverted abruptly to its hate-filled past, to an ethnocentrism stunning in its savagery. The sudden turnabout has all but obliterated the work of a generation: the......