Straight From The Hart

My column in today's paper. The Origin of Evil As a child growing up on the cusp of the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, I still have a vivid memory of turning on the big console radio in our “front room” and tuning in to hear a male voice intoning the sinister words: “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?” The answer of course was “The Shadow knows.” It was all we knew about evil in our childish innocence of that time, not having a live streaming of Adolf Hitler’s newest concentration camp during the Holocaust being piped though our television sets every evening. The closest we came to understanding a presence of evil during those days of the Cold War was running out into the yard every time we heard an airplane, trying to read what insignia might be emblazoned on its fuselage, hoping it was not a Russian bomber, because we were having drills at school of ducking underneath our desks just in case we were attacked. Now, thanks to the 24 hour streaming news on all our e

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is in the news again.  Yesterday’s news reports all centered on her possible role in “unmasking” the names of the Trump transition team who got caught up in incidental surveillance, and then leaking the  information to individuals both within and without the government who were not legally entitled to have such information.   These are only allegations of course, but they do tie in with the fact that former President Obama  made it possible on January 12 when  his administration finalized new rules that allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to share information it gleans from its vast international surveillance apparatus with the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. Rice first came up on my news radar following the attack on our Consulate at Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when she was sent out to five news outlets, under the tutelage of Ben Rhodes, to inform the American people that we had nothing t