The day is here again, November 22nd. It’s been 46 years now and, for those well over that age, no less painful with the passage of time. His death was the first of a president in our living rooms–the motorcade, the rifle shots, the disarray in Dallas, the dazed swearing-in of his successor that night, the on-camera murder of the assassin two days later and then the funeral with our eyes and hearts transfixed by the beautiful young widow and two small children. We are so inured now to...

As Harry Reid pressures holiday-homebound Democrats to vote for a start of the Senate health care debate, Republican resisters have found a new weapon to use against the bill–a sudden deep concern about how it might threaten women’s bodies. Seizing on a quasi-government task force’s report this week recommending that annual mammograms start at 50 rather than 40, the GOP has gone into full outrage mode. “This is how rationing begins,” warns Rep. Marsha Blackburn. “This...

Now that she has smooched you-know-who this week, the talented Ms. Winfrey is ready to end the talk show that made her a billionaire and start the next phase of her life as a media mogul with a cable channel aptly named OWN. Like the would-be VP but for much longer and in a far different way, Oprah has been a phenomenon, rising from the depths of poverty to become an American icon with empathy, intelligence and enthusiasm, an Everywoman in constant battles to control her emotional life as well as...

Tomorrow, he turns 92 after passing another milestone as the longest-serving member of Congress in history, almost 57 years. With such longevity, Sen. Robert Byrd embodies almost a century of American history that transformed a nation of backwaters dotted by big cities into a metropolitan sprawl with access to 24/7 knowledge about the whole world. Byrd, a self-made man if there ever was one, started as a gas jockey and butcher in West Virginia during World War II, who discovered a taste and talent...

The more we learn about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the thinner the line stretches between ideology and mental illness, and the more troubling is the question of why, surrounded by psychiatrists, his potential for violence was not sufficiently recognized to remove him from his position as a healer of trauma victims. Yesterday brings a report that “military superiors repeatedly ignored or rebuffed his efforts to open criminal prosecutions of soldiers he claimed had confessed to ‘war crimes’...

Four decades after being tortured in a North Korean prison camp, John McCain is trapped in a slow drip of accusations from Sarah Palin as she embarks on weeks of media ubiquity to promote her aptly titled, “Going Rogue.” A New York Times review notes that “the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential...

A Congressman offers a lesson today about how politics and the media collude to distort rational discussion. In an Op Ed, Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon explains how his bipartisan proposal to have Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life discussions morphed into death panels: “I found it perverse that Medicare would pay for almost any medical procedure, yet not reimburse doctors for having a thoughtful conversation to prepare patients and families for the delicate, complex and emotionally demanding...

The attacks brought Americans together briefly, but the aftermath is still sowing division–as the decision of Attorney General Eric Holder to try five of the 9/11 terrorists in lower Manhattan brings conflict and confusion. On the surface, it’s hard to argue with Holder’s logic: “After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York–to New York–to answer for their alleged...

Barack Obama is doing what George W. Bush failed to do in Iraq–looking for “where the off-ramps are,” according to a White House official. As the President starts a nine-day Asia trip, he leaves behind the message that his Afghanistan decision has been strongly influenced by Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador who was once military commander there, whose doubts about Hamid Karzai are reflected in a White House statement: “The President believes that we need to make clear to...

CNN has struck a blow for journalism on cable TV by forcing Lou Dobbs to take his “advocacy” elsewhere. Somewhere between the right-left divide of Fox News and MSNBC, the network has been comparatively fair-minded with the glaring exception of Dobbs, who occupied a unique spot of blowhard wrong-headedness on the political spectrum. When I started blogging in 2006, my second post was headed “Is Lou Dobbs Running for Something?” and noted: “A long-time Republican, defender...

As Decision Day nears and the President considers four options for Afghanistan, a question hovers over his agonizing: Is it a war or an endless occupation? Will 30, 40 or even 80,000 troops stabilize an unstable country with a corrupt government or, when turmoil persists, stir rage and hatred at Americans for making their people’s lives worse? We went in eight years ago to root out Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists but have succeeded mostly in squeezing them, like toothpaste in a tube, into border...

In his Ft. Hood eulogy yesterday, the President eloquently honored “men and women answering an extraordinary call–the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans… “Tomorrow is Veterans Day. It is a chance to pause, and to pay tribute–for students to learn of the struggles...

In the battle over health care, the Republican Right, after months of saying no to every Obama initiative from stimulus to bailouts, has gone on the offensive to slice and dice Americans into warring factions–young-old, men-women, rich-poor, anywhere fear and hatred can be stirred up. Sarah Palin, bless her feisty heart, started it all with “death panels,” but naysayers are now working the other side of the age divide. After warning the young that ObamaCare will kill their Granny,...

In moments of crisis, Gail Collins writes in the New York Times, “I generally recommend looking to see where Joe Lieberman is going. Then head the other way.” Such wrong-way reliability, which has made Lieberman a lodestar for the anxious and confused, delivered two gems yesterday–on the Ft. Hood massacre and health care reform. As investigators conclude that the shooting spree “was not part of a terrorist plot,” he announces that, as Senate Homeland Security chairman,...

When Arizona Republican John Shadegg used a seven-month-old baby as a prop during yesterday’s debate on health care, his symbolism was more apt than intended. What the House passed last night was a bowel movement of a bill diapered by competitive political posturing to cover a messy pile of mandates, entitlements, wishful savings and iffy tax changes. To call the legislative process that produced this excretion infantile insults the newborn. President Obama labeled last night’s achievement...

As the nation was reeling from the Ft. Hood horror yesterday, a pathetic loner killed one man and wounded five other people in an Orlando office building shootout. Compared to the complexity of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Jason Rodriguez looks like a run-of-the-mill loser with a failed marriage and the inability to hold a job after being fired two years ago from the architectural firm he shot up and later from a Subway eatery in a career of downward mobility. As he was being led away by police, he told...

The TV screen today looks like the vision of a demented performance artist. You can click from images of wildly cheering crowds in a Manhattan canyon celebrating what 25 young man did on a baseball field to talking heads and replays of a massacre of other young people in Texas and then suddenly to an Orlando, Florida office building for the familiar confusion in the first moments after another shooting spree. This is a portrait of 21st century America, light and dark, torn by high emotions in a new...

In the annals of sexual politics and odd couples, none could ever match the possibilities of mating Maureen Dowd and Rush Limbaugh, a power pairing that would have made Mary Matalin and James Carville look like America’s Sweethearts. The image comes to mind from Dowd’s column yesterday, recounting a four-hour dinner at Manhattan’s 21 Club back when she was “a reportette” and El Rushbo’s puss had not yet been carved on the Mt. Rushmore of the Rabid Right. “He...

Sarah Palin has upended politics-as-usual again, this time electing a Democratic Congressman in an upstate New York district that has been Republican for over 100 years. In drumming out of the party Dede Scozzafava, a member of the State Assembly with solid GOP credentials in favor of an inexperienced Conservative with a scared-rabbit persona, Palin has once again demonstrated that her gifts are better suited to show business than elective politics. Even as voters show their unease in Virginia, New...

As CIT goes bankrupt and Treasury Secretary Geithner warns that the “damage caused by this crisis” will “take some time” to repair, a key Wall Street player has managed to weather the storm at the expense of an unwary, drenched public. “All men are equal,” E.M. Forster wrote a century ago, “all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.” An old saying puts it more tartly: “The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, but more on the just...

In northern New York State, they are staging a 21st century version of an American classic, old-time hardball without the Iowa corn. “People will come,” said the prophetic Voice in the 1989 movie. “They’ll turn up not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive as innocent as children, longing for the past. They’ll pass over their money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack.” In a trance of hope, they...

Two days after his 90th birthday, Edward Brooke was at the Capitol yesterday to receive the Congressional Gold Medal from President Obama and scold Mitch McConnell for his failure to be bipartisan. Brooke, the first African-American ever elected to the Senate in 1966 as a Republican from Massachusetts, took the occasion to tell his party’s leader: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. We’ve got to get together…It’s time for politics to be put aside on the back...

Yes, yes, to fight the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. But eight years later, American blood and treasure are still being poured into a country of dirt-poor, illiterate people who support themselves by growing poppy for opium and heroin under one of the most corrupt governments in the world. As Barack Obama makes a midnight visit to honor the incoming dead and console their families, critics may sneer at his theatricality, but the President seems to be trying to clear his head and heart of the...

“I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary,” the President said this week at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. “And if it’s necessary, we will back you up to the hilt.” He was talking to men and women in uniform but answering an American who never wore one, Dick Cheney, who has accused him of “dithering” about sending more troops to Afghanistan during a speech at the Center for Security Policy last week to accept a “Keeper of the...

As Congress stumbles toward a final deal, the process is a reminder of the disheartening political climate in which we live today. No one will really be happy with the final result. How could they be? In a world where human considerations are swamped by partisan posturing, the bottom line, if anyone can figure out what it is, will not be how much better or worse it makes our society but who wins and who loses. At heart, it will be a collection of poor compromises. Here, for example, is Harry Reid,...