Beth Arnold

The Diana Effect

By Beth Arnold

Last night, my husband Jim and I twice drove across the Place de l'Alma. This Paris spot is quite lovely but very busy, a hub on the northern side of the pont de l’Alma (bridge). The tunnel underneath this place is where Princess Diana was killed. A golden replica of the flame being held by the Statue of Liberty in New York City has become an unofficial shrine for the late princess above the tunnel’s west entrance. Small groups of people quietly came and went, dropping messages and flowers, stopping to contemplate Diana’s life and death.

This scene took me back a decade to the moment we heard the awful news that the Princess of Wales had been critically injured in a car wreck. She wasn’t dead yet -- as far as we knew.

Spinning the Spin

This column originally was published August 10, 2007 at HuffingtonPost.com. Reader comments not included here.

By Beth Arnold

I was glad to read Gary Hart's Huffington Post blog "Candor in the Age of Spin" in which he wrote about Hillary's challenge of Obama in the recent debate -- for saying he'd reserve the option of attacking al Qaeda and bin Laden on Pakistani territory with or without approval from the Pakistani government. Hillary characterized this public statement as a gaffe that highlighted Obama's inexperience in worldly affairs. But former Senator Hart pointed out that he doubted any Pakistani alive, including President Pervez Musharraf, would question that we'd do whatever it took without permission from anyone if we could just find bin Laden.

This was Hart's advice for American presidents or presidential candidates:

The rule, it seems to me, should be this: State clear principles upon which and conditions under which we will take action to the world; notify friendly or semi-friendly nations of specific intentions where they are concerned; and otherwise behave with the candor and honesty that our founders hoped would characterize America's behavior in the world.

Where's the Outrage?

This column originally was published July 23, 2007 at
HuffingtonPost.com. Reader comments not included here.

By Beth Arnold

I am a child of the 70s. Not old enough to have been on the first line of bra-burners, civil rights activists, or protesters of the Vietnam War, but old enough to have taken up the causes and run with them. I am old enough to have been an intern on Capitol Hill during Watergate and to have been disillusioned with the hypocrisy of our society and government and to have wished Richard Nixon ill for his subterfuge and lies. I am old enough to have believed in the American dream, despite my drenching baptism in cynicism, and to have believed myself to be one of a million Dorothys skipping down a yellow brick road that was paved by our social, sexual, cultural, and civil rights revolutions. I thought I was home free to do whatever I wanted in life without limitation, though I turned out to be mistaken -- but that's a different column.

Grow A Spine

By Beth Arnold

Absurdly, Democrats have taken the coward’s way out -- again -- by passing the latest measure George Bush wanted in his reign of unconstitutional terror, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. Fine, voted the dim Dems. Go ahead with your illegal wiretapping. No warrants required, and by the way, can we do anything else to remove any accountability you might have? You’ve got carte blanche from us. It’s just like voting in the Iraq War: You ask, and we obey.