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Pulitzer Prize-winning Paul Greenberg, one of the most respected and honored commentators in America, is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
An exceptional craftsman, he gives readers an aesthetic as well as political experience and has evoked comparisons to H.L. Mencken and William Allen White. A thoughtful essayist who can also be a devastating critic, Greenberg describes himself as "an ideologically unreliable conservative."
Greenberg won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1978 and 1986. Among his many other honors are the 1988 William Allen White Award, the 1988 Arkansas Associated Press Editorial Writing Award, the 1987 H.L. Mencken Award, the 1983 University of Missouri School of Journalism Medal of Honor, the American Society of Newspaper Editors' 1981 Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary, and the 1964 Grenville Clark Editorial Award. He also won two Walker Stone Awards, in 1985 and 1986.
Greenberg has been on the board of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and served as a Pulitzer jurist in 1984 and 1985. He is the author of the critically acclaimed "Resonant Lives: 50 Figures of Consequence" and "Entirely Personal."
Editorial page editor for the Pine Bluff Commercial in Arkansas from 1962 until 1992 – except for a hiatus as a Chicago Daily News editorial writer in 1966-67 – Greenberg lectures nationwide and regularly provides political analysis on Arkansas network television.
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Paul Greenberg (May 23, 2012)
For lovers of freedom the world over and Americans in particular, there can be no doubt about what was the signal event of the week just past: the safe arrival in this land... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 18, 2012)
Anybody need still another argument for reviving the old Glass-Steagall Act (1933-99), with its salutary separation between commercial and investment banking? If so, JPMorgan... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 15, 2012)
Let us now praise Barack Obama. The president has finally come out and said what everyone -- except maybe himself -- knew he believed all along: He's for allowing homosexual... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 14, 2012)
The headline summed up the result of France's presidential election: "Hollande bests Sarkozy/ To claim helm of France." And the photograph that went with it... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 13, 2012)
When it come to the Republicans' choice for president this year, it's all over but the shoutin' in Tampa.
. .
The great hall, the red-white-and-blue balloons, the... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 12, 2012)
In the fall of 1983 in Moscow, we came in from the cold. Ending our tour of what was then the Soviet Union, a group of editorial writers from across the United States stepped... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 09, 2012)
Every presidential campaign seems more vicious than the last, probably because it's happening right now, and the public has had four years to forget the slings and arrows of... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 05, 2012)
"All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded."
--Attributed to Murray Kempton, among many others.... more
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Paul Greenberg (May 03, 2012)
Charles Colson died the other day at 80, a respected and even revered evangelist in the mold of Billy Graham.
By the time of his death, he may have been the country's... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 27, 2012)
The old man in a rumpled linen suit at the end of the bar stood out like a weed at a garden show. All around him the young couples and swinging singles, so impressionable... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 24, 2012)
LITTLE ROCK -- It's a beautiful sunset, as always, when seen from the Great Hall of the Clinton Library with a glass of wine in your hand and the chamber music about to... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 19, 2012)
It's another sign of the blah times: The sordid details of our public figures' none too private scandals have grown beyond boring. By now, scandals have become as repetitive,... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 17, 2012)
"April is the cruelest month. . . ."--T. S. Eliot, [ital The Waste Land [unital]
Ronald Reagan said it back in 1983: "Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 13, 2012)
It'll be quite a ceremony -- you could even call it a spectacle -- at Fayetteville, Ark., come Sunday. It seems Bill Clinton is due back at the University of Arkansas,... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 11, 2012)
The race for the Republican presidential nomination has been over for some time, and now Rick Santorum has finally admitted it -- and let it be over. At last. He's run a... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 08, 2012)
Call me Mary -- not the one who bore Him, but she who was borne up by him, little did I know it at the time. And you? You say you're some sort of scribe.... more
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Paul Greenberg (Apr 04, 2012)
Something happens to ethics when it becomes a specialty. It becomes professionalized, certified, rarefied. It becomes something besides ethics. It becomes expertise, not... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 30, 2012)
The president of the United States really needs a minder. Or at least an aide who'll always tell him when the microphone that's catching his every embarrassing word is open,... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 29, 2012)
To read this week's press coverage, you'd think not just a landmark Supreme Court case was upon us, but a jurisprudential Armageddon. The moment of truth has arrived, the... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 27, 2012)
That would have been a big story out of Illinois last week if only Mitt Romney had lost as big as he won. It would have meant the Republican front-runner wasn't the... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 27, 2012)
It was inevitable that Little Rock's national airport would be renamed the Clinton National Airport. The sound principle of not naming public facilities for prominent... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 21, 2012)
"I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air." --Margaret Thatcher
It's not just Pyongyang's repeated promises that have proven worthless but Washington's. Each... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 20, 2012)
It happens every few years or whenever John Hinckley makes the news again. You may remember the name, unfortunately. He's the wannabe Lee Harvey Oswald who almost killed a... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 16, 2012)
Another week, another GOP presidential primary to note before moving on to the next inconclusive one. And so it goes on the long trail a-winding to exhaustion or Tampa or... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 15, 2012)
It's the latest chapter in a continuing saga: Still another climateer has been caught monkeying with the evidence. All to prove that man-made Global Warming/Climate Change... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 14, 2012)
Can this be Eric Holder, our Eric Holder, the same attorney general of the United States who used to snub military law, who set out to close the military prison and courts at... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 08, 2012)
After his last comeback of so many (now he's down, now he's up, now he's both) Mitt Romney's campaign proved it was alive by eking out a win in the Michigan... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 07, 2012)
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- First comes the talk. It can't be helped, much like the announcers' chitchat on KLRE, the classical music station here in the middle of Arkansas. It's a... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 02, 2012)
Have you got health insurance? I do. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody did? Just think:
No more worries about losing your health care if you lose your job, or just get a... more
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Paul Greenberg (Mar 02, 2012)
It was a last minute save. Mitt Romney managed to finish a couple of percentage points ahead of the latest non-Romney -- Rick Santorum -- in his native state's Republican... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 29, 2012)
It was big news last fall. Not just nationally or internationally but for the universe.
The eminent scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research,... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 27, 2012)
There are some phrases that come to mean the opposite of what they say. For example, Never Again!
That vow is uttered after every genocidal campaign makes the news. It... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 24, 2012)
The list of those due to be executed is long and ominous. There were 179 names on it just here in Arkansas -- names like Carthage. Casscoe. Columbus, New Hope, Witts... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 22, 2012)
It's really not fair or accurate to say this administration has declared war on religion. Its policy isn't that clear. If it has one. And if it does, that policy keeps... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 20, 2012)
It should be coming soon to a campaign stop near you. Watch for it: Still another high-budget, low-content production by the same masterful hand that gave you shows like... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 18, 2012)
"The more the plans fail, the more the planners plan." -- Ronald Reagan
It's hard to imagine how anyone can take President Obama's latest budget seriously, including... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 15, 2012)
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
No wonder the Titanic became... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 13, 2012)
It was only a matter of time in this Age of the Poll that some mastermind at a political headquarters would decide to ask the almighty American public to pass judgment on God... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 11, 2012)
Congress finally did something right. Or rather it did nothing at all, which was just the right thing to do in these wasteful circumstances. It let the ethanol tax credit... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 08, 2012)
Those who run the Komen foundation, and make a mighty good thing of it, too, sound confused in the worst way: morally confused.
Formally dedicated to finding a cure for... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 06, 2012)
A presidential campaign is the health of economic illiteracy. Every four years, ignorance comes into its quadrennial own. There are voters to mobilize, resentments to stoke,... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 03, 2012)
The results in Florida were even better for Mitt Romney than most of the wildly swinging polls said they would be. With 100 percent of the vote in the Republican primary in,... more
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Paul Greenberg (Feb 01, 2012)
It happens every between-the-wars period. It happened in the 1920s and '30s, then in the post-war 1940s. ... Now it's happening again in the 2010s. War-weariness sets in. A... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 30, 2012)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 26, 2012)
For those fortunate souls who didn't have to sit through the president's State of the Union speech Tuesday night out of a sense of duty, or maybe just masochism, here is a... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 25, 2012)
Sumday morning the word began to filter out. First it was a rumor, then the emails began arriving. Had the media jumped the gun again? But then the family released a... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 23, 2012)
We sit in classrooms listening to another boring lecture. Or we take the kids to school on the way to work. Or climb in the pick-up truck for another day at the construction... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 19, 2012)
Oh, dear. Still another Iranian nuclear scientist has met with a fatal accident. Accidents will happen, especially in the Middle East and to Iran's nuclear... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 18, 2012)
Let's hear it for The Usable Past. That phrase was much in vogue among historians not long ago, and may still be. Historians, too wanted to be part of the practical arts.... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 12, 2012)
There were no surprises in the New Hampshire presidential primary. The voting results followed expectations and the polls. Win, place and show -- Romney, Paul and Huntsman --... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 12, 2012)
It is that time again, mixing mourning and gratitude, to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. And now we can gather at his still new memorial in... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 11, 2012)
Who says Occupy Wall Street hasn't accomplished something specific?
You can put a number on it, or at least The Associated Press did. Talk about redistributing the... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 09, 2012)
After what seemed an eternity of debates, the New Hampshire primary has whirred into life. Like a great creaky old grandfather clock striking the hour -- a reminder not only... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 05, 2012)
It seems former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter has undertaken a second career as a stand-up comic. He's now switching occupations the way he once switched political parties.
At... more
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Paul Greenberg (Jan 03, 2012)
Who is this Richard Kinder, and why is what he says both so funny and so true?
He's the 66-year-old CEO of Kinder Morgan, Inc., who at the moment is trying to create the... more