Read the whole thing, and then another

The Boston Globe columnist James Carroll is a treasure. A taste of his latest:

Hurricane Katrina was more than a natural disaster. It was a political epiphany, laying bare difficult truths from which, mainly, the United States has been in flight. Most obviously, the flooding of the cities and towns along the Gulf Coast has pulled a curtain back on a huge population of desperately impoverished people. The ''other" America, as Michael Harrington called it a generation ago, has shown itself as hardly ever before. The wealthiest nation on earth has its hidden legion of have-nots, and all at once the rest of us saw them. The scandal of rank poverty was exposed, and if beholding it was like seeing something indecent, that's because such poverty in this nation is exactly that -- indecent.

Encore! Here's a golden oldie, from 2003:

But there's the problem with President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he reads. Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written by someone else. When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own moral center, what shows itself is a bottomless void.
To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring `em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness.
No human being with a minimal self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no self-knowledge without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George W. Bush to be, in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a compliment. It's a warning.