"I know I have said it before but the times bear repeating it, sometimes it feels like we've all become Alice, the character in the Lewis Carroll classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Events these days are so bizarre, it's as if we have fallen into that story's "rabbit hole" and ended up in "Wonderland" where everything is upside down."

"Without a hint of intended irony, the "NewsHour" on PBS concluded its Sept. 9 program with a warm interview of Henry Kissinger and then a segment about a renowned propagandist for the Nazi war machine. Kissinger talked about his latest book. Then a professor of German history talked about Leni Riefenstahl, the path-breaking documentary filmmaker who just died at age 101."

"After September 11, while many thousands of people grieved the sudden loss of their loved ones, a steady downpour of politically driven sentimentality kept blurring the U.S. media's window on the world. Politicians in high office, from President Bush on down, rushed to identify themselves with the dead and their relatives. Cataclysmic individual losses were swiftly expropriated for mass dissemination."

"Out of the trauma that occurred in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there came the recognition of a profound gap that divided America and the Arab World. Despite good faith efforts by some to bridge the divide, two years later it is clear that this gap has widened and misunderstanding and distrust have grown."

"Quagmire" is a word made famous during the Vietnam War. The current conflict in Iraq comes out of a very different history, but there are some chilling parallels. One of them has scarcely been mentioned: These days, the editorial positions of major U.S. newspapers have an echo like a dirge."

"Two headlines, appearing next to each other on the front page of the August 28th edition of the Washington Post prompted me to write this article. In just eleven words they spoke volumes about the contradictions that define the politics of my country and the challenges we are facing as a nation."

"Yesterday as I went about my chores, I realized that my car was filthy from my moving, and I was too darn tired to clean it myself (I usually do, an old habit from Brooklyn) so I stopped off at a "gasless" car wash. They had NO gas, but were still washing cars. We are in the middle of gas "crisis?" here in Phoenix."

The "Bulworth" movie -- with Warren Beatty playing a senator who begins to speak disturbing truths in the form of rap lyrics -- caused quite a stir when it came out five years ago. At the time, I wondered aloud in a column about what might happen if leading journalists followed that fictional example.