Opinion Daily columns by Tim Cavanaugh

August 14, 2007

Opinion Daily

Let the mighty liberal hawks soar

What comes after the twilight of the liberal hawks? Night of the liberal hawks? Return of the liberal hawks? Land of the liberal hawks?

July 17, 2007

Opinion Daily

Funny-book funk briefly brightens

Dying media don't come much dying-er than monthly comic books. From the great post-silver age watershed to the who lost Junior controversy about how this classic kids' medium became a forum for middle-aged comic-shop losers; from the death of Charlton Comics to the government war on head shops, all funny-book stories are variations on a single theme: a depletion that's been going on so long, and moving so slowly, that nobody's even sure if there ever was a boom time. To find a sadder tale, you'd have to look to the never-ending death of the American newspaper.

July 3, 2007

OPINION DAILY

Lessons from the Cold River

The annals of military history are notably free of heroic deeds executed by the Lebanese armed forces. The tiny republic boasts three military branches: an army that recently ended its mass-conscription policy, a navy without any ships and an air force which has not fielded an airworthy fighter plane in more than 20 years. Legendary as a cohort of disgruntled enlisted people and pampered, barely competent officers, Lebanon's regular fighting force was the butt of a joke from the early history of Israel: When forced to fight all the Arab countries at once, the story went, the Israelis would dispatch their marching band to handle Lebanon. (This joke seemed to come true in Israel's war against Hezbollah last summer, during which the regular army offered no real resistance.) The token armed forces held a kind of negative symbolic value as the brand of a fractured society and a dysfunctional government of a state unable even to control the use of violence within its own borders.

June 19, 2007

Opinion Daily

Semper Fidel

"I can tell you that he has recovered his fastball of 90 miles an hour," Hugo Chávez informed the world last week after meeting with Fidel Castro, adding that the Cuban president for life "has his uniform hanging near him and he's peeking at it, but he's still warming up his arm," and is "not yet ready to take the diamond."

June 5, 2007

OPINION DAILY

Portrait of the old man as a copyright miser

In the sweet science of early-21st-century struggles over intellectual property rights, the title fights tend to be fairly technology-rich. Court cases over network DVR, Viacom's continuing battle against Google, Microsoft's grudge match with the open-source community, George Lucas' accord with Star Wars mashup artists—that kind of thing. But every fight fan knows the undercards are where the really strange stuff happens, and you can still find old-fashioned battles involving such fanciful media as bound books and longhand letters.

May 8, 2007

Opinion Daily

Political situation presents challenges, opportunities

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can see that I was the Natural. I made a pledge, a pledge with teeth, not to carry water for the special interests. In a spirit of bipartisanship I reached across the aisle and found common ground, while building support at the grassroots and netroots levels. With straight talk, I fought as hard as I'd ever fought in my life for working families to keep our children safe.

March 29, 2007

Opinion Daily

Hackwork hacked

If good pornography is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing, good parody is exactly the opposite: A parody succeeds when large numbers of people don't recognize the thing as a parody. By that standard, Ward Sutton's "Kelly" cartoons for The Onion are 24-carat fool's gold. Their wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels layers of lampoon and self-reference make it nearly impossible to tell the dancer from the dance.

March 14, 2007

Opinion Daily

You're welcome

I'm at that stage in life where I have decided to start taking more things personally. There are few setbacks or annoyances—unruly haircuts, bum lottery numbers, the bad behavior of other drivers—that you can't make more piquant by taking private offense and intuiting layers of intentional insult that may or may not be there.

February 28, 2007

Opinion Daily

28 days in the integration nation

For the white male power structure that sabotaged the Susan B. Anthony dollar, kept Chief Jay Strongbow out of the highest echelons of professional wrestling and posited a "White Christmas" as the last word in holiday cheer, it must have seemed like a great coup to shovel Black History Month into the shortest month in the calendar year. But the gods laugh at the schemes of evil men: This year's BHM managed to cram a record amount of history into a mere 28-day cycle.

February 14, 2007

Opinion Daily

Culture War 2.0

Welcome back, Kulturkampf. We just didn't want to live without you.

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