Week of March 26, 2007

For much of the twentieth century, about one American in a thousand was confined to a cell. The proportion of Americans behind bars started rising in the mid-Seventies, and by 2003 had done so for twenty-eight consecutive years. Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.

She lied about everything. She just went on lying until people got tired, or old, or died. One of her most telling lies was the one she told about Streicher. She said that she had loathed him. But there is preserved correspondence to prove that she invited his company and treated him as a close friend until quite late in the war. The idea that Streicher would never mention to her what was happening to the Jews is preposterous. He was proud of it, and was eventually hanged for it.

I will never forget the stunning Oct. 7, 1962, Time magazine cover that showed Franklin D. Roosevelt weeping, a shining tear snaking its way down his pale and sunken cheek as he surveyed the destruction wrought by the New Frontier -- tax cuts, a Republican running Treasury. What an indictment of the Democratic Party; what a dirge for the New Deal.

Oh wait, that didn't happen.

Well, I do remember the great Time cover of JFK sobbing as he looked down on a cartoon of dope-smoking hippies holding a banner that said"McGovern." It was the summer of '72, and the little bubble over JFK's head said"Amnesty, Acid, Abortion . . . that's not A-OK!"

Oh wait, that didn't happen either.

Could I be correct that they only front-page weeping Republicans, and only laud conservatives when they're dead?

I refer of course to this past week's Time magazine cover, which had a picture of Ronald Reagan with a tear drawn in, to illustrate a piece on the current Republican Party.