The Washington Monthly’s founding editor comes out of retirement to reprise his legendary column.
Charles Peters
Charles Peters is the founding editor of the Washington Monthly.
Posted inJanuary/February 2014, Magazine
Tilting at Windmills
No exit Imagine your reaction to being trapped in the backseat of a car having to listen to Ted Cruz quote from one speech of his after another. I suspect my own would be very similar to that of the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson: “I made a quick calculation as to how many vertebrae I […]
Posted inMagazine, November/December 2013
Tilting at Windmills
Fair-weather Democrats You probably read about the two Democratic state senators who lost recall elections in Colorado because they voted to strengthen gun laws in the state. What struck me in the New York Times account that I read is that 21,000 fewer voters turned out than had in 2010. That was the midterm election, […]
Posted inMagazine, September/October 2013
Tilting at Windmills
The Gilded City For many years, Washington was a city of modest lifestyles, largely determined by the civil service salary scale. That began to change in the 1970s with the growth of lobbying into a major local industry and the considerably higher compensation enjoyed by its practitioners. Then came the great increase in defense spending […]
Posted inJuly/August 2013, Magazine
Tilting at Windmills
More scrutiny, not less For the Internal Revenue Service and tax-exempt groups, the real scandal lies not with the few that have been over-investigated, but with the many that continue to function with too little scrutiny. As of 2012, there were 1,616,053 organizations in this country that were tax exempt—supposedly on the basis that, among […]
Posted inMagazine, May/June 2013
Tilting at Windmills
Large and in charge Attorney General Eric Holder recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that some banks have become “so large” that it’s “difficult for us to prosecute them.” Wait a minute—I thought the Obama administration said that the big banks are not a problem. It certainly made no effort to break them up. But […]
Posted inMagazine, March/April 2013
McCruzyism … Too big to jail … Wake up, Democrats
Wake up, Democrats It’s time for Democrats to wake up to the need to get out their voters in nonpresidential election years. This is where Republicans have been winning races for state legislature, governor, attorney general, and the U.S. Congress. The state legislatures, with their governors’ consent, determine how redistricting is done for both their […]
Posted inJanuary/February 2013, Magazine
Tilting at Windmills
Langley’s Bartlebys I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about “the talking points,” but it’s fascinating to discover that the real culprit was not Susan Rice or a sinister White House plot, but, according to Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journal, a daylong debate at the CIA involving “more than two dozen […]
Posted inMagazine, November/December 2012
Woodward’s folly … Romney’s hardship … Finishing what Clinton started
President, dictator, whatever In the long parade of books on the topic of what Obama could or should have done, which began with Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, the silliest of all has to be Bob Woodward ‘s The Price of Politics. The problem with all of these books is that their authors are beholden to […]
Posted inMagazine, Politics, September/October 2012
Tilting at Windmills
Guilty Party “G.O.P. Edge As Dynamics Shift in House Races,” read a frightening headline in the New York Times this summer. How can this be happening after a record of ceaseless obstructionism by congressional Republicans? Much of the explanation, of course, rests on the media’s far too frequent reliance on blaming Congress rather than Republicans […]
