The passing of a patriarch always brings contention and confusion and, for one who leaves behind so many births and deaths, the aftermath is bound to be complex. Now Osama bin Laden’s son Omar issues a family statement asking for (1) “conclusive evidence” that his father is dead and (2) if so, why he was “summarily executed” without a fair trial such as those granted Saddam Hussein and Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic. “We maintain,” his heir contends...

Unspeakable is a word to be used rarely, but it is the only way to describe what Republicans are doing to the American economy. As House members fight to preserve tax cuts for the filthy rich and gut safety nets for the poor, John Boehner warns, “Without significant spending cuts and changes to the way we spend the American people’s money, there will be no debt limit increase. And cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given.” How did such blackmail...

In a 1964 movie, a U.S. President has to overcome a plot by the Joint Chiefs to depose him for being too weak a leader to keep the nation secure. Titled “Seven Days in May,” it was a cautionary tale about maintaining civilian control of America’s might. This May, in real life, Barack Obama and his military-intelligence apparatus worked together seamlessly to track down and kill Osama bin Laden and, in the President’s retelling of these seven days on 60 Minutes, for a triumph...

The day of cards, candy and phone calls restores the debate over the most-analyzed figure in American society–Mom–and recalls my intense relationship with Feminism’s “Mother of Us All”–Betty Friedan. In early 1957, as a free-lance writer, she suggested an idea: At her fifteenth college reunion, she would pass out a questionnaire asking classmates how they felt about their lives. I assigned her to do an article about it. That questionnaire became the Holy Writ of...

An observer still high on sedation (cataract surgery) opens an eye to the sights flashing by on a glowing rectangle in the room: President Obama is at Ground Zero, a hero, not for his efforts to save the most vulnerable Americans from Republican deficit slashers, but for killing one old man, the nation’s symbolic dragon for a decade. In Washington, a beaming Vice-President Biden is with a roomful of people pretending to find common ground on budget cuts, John Boehner with his perpetual scowl...

As details of Operation Osama emerge, a campaign promise by Barack Obama, widely disparaged by opponents then, comes back to recall his confidence about being Commander-in-Chief. In 2007, he said, “It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” Musharraf is long gone, but his Pakistani successors are no...

His body has been consigned to the sea but how will we deal with his legacy? For years now, the corporeal Osama has been like one of those aging celebrities on reality TV and game shows popping up to reprise his latest and greatest hit on 9/11. His irrelevance has been monumental. What needs attention now is the hole he left in the American psyche that has been growing and festering for almost a decade now–gaslighting us into self-destruction, a term to describe intimidation and psychological...

Osama Bin Laden is found in a Pakistan mansion and killed as Americans at home spend an hour sweating out a “national security” announcement while watching “Celebrity Apprentice” or preparing for bed. For the old, anxiety arises with the memory of another Sunday night when President Kennedy interrupted TV schedules to reveal missiles in Cuba and that the U.S. would block all shipments to the Caribbean island. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, a death notice takes on all...

In most elections, politicians pump up small differences into “issues” to distinguish themselves from the other guys. That won’t be a problem next year, as two contrasting visions of America emerge in a contest between President Obama and an unknown Republican who will embody theirs. In 1960, there was a big debate over what to do about two small islands, Matsu and Quemoy, between mainland China and Taiwan. Nixon accused JFK of weakness by being unwilling to use nukes to defend...

On the day of the Royal Wedding, memories of odd doings during the groom’s toddler days with his fabled mother: In the 1980s, a women’s magazine editor was duty-bound to run cover stories about super-celebrity “Di.” I did, including one showing her holding up Prince William, with a line reading “Princess Diana Faces the ‘Terrible Twos’ and Baby No. 2,” based on a suspicion that the royal timetable called for a backup prince sooner than later. The day...

As the President makes Birther jokes to Oprah (“I was there”) and at fundraisers, the next stage of the media cycle begins: payback for Trump. Like the slaughterhouse that uses every part of the pig but the squeal, journalists build up a big name, feast on it and then chop up the leftovers for a stew of deconstruction. Now the Trump pot is heating up with editorial outrage at his antics, reports of falling TV ratings, doubts about his GOP credentials and the whole range of follow-ups...

Those who want to protect America from a Commander-in-Chief of questionable citizenship got ahead of themselves by putting all their energy into proving that Barack Hussein Obama was foreign-born and should not be reelected. In primaries before next November, they will first have to head off Mitt (another odd name) Romney who may not be a secret Muslim but is a professed Mormon, certainly out of the Christian mainstream. And while Romney has a valid Michigan birth certificate, there is also the...

Anderson Cooper, who was pushed around by a Cairo crowd earlier this year, takes a verbal mauling while trying to interrupt Donald Trump’s tirade about the Obama birth certificate with a few facts. This was not what Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he called the Presidency a bully pulpit. Luckily for the CNN anchor, it was a phone interview so the shoving was verbal as the non-candidate kept pelting him with shaky assertions even as Cooper struggled to get a few words in to question the sources...

In this season of renewal, the American spirit is still bleak, but there are small signs of brightness ahead. New polls show a “dour public mood is dragging down ratings for both parties in Congress and for President Obama,” with lawmakers’ approval rating at 17 percent, near an all-time low. In contrast to an Arab Spring, no matter what daffodils and forsythia are saying, an American Winter of pessimism is persisting. The dollar’s value is sliding, and despite the Federal...

Billy Graham’s son and successor says the Donald may be his “candidate of choice” for the Presidency, stirring memories of how the fabled minister got his start as the spiritual advisor to Presidents. In backing Trump, the Grahams would be coming full circle on gambling casinos from a founder of Las Vegas to the honcho of Atlantic City. In 1940s after starting out as a Fuller Brush salesman, the elder Graham went to L. A. and started saving celebrity souls. A young evangelist not...

Somehow we got this thing wrong. When I was studying history, the British controlled one-quarter of the world’s land mass and its people, making them rich and powerful. Less than a century later, the U.S. is fighting in the Middle East with troops all over Europe and Asia in occupations that are draining trillions from our economy. How did we get into such a dyslexic version of empire and how long can we sustain it? And why are we doing it? The questions arise as we take another expensive step...

“History repeats itself,” said the father of Communism, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” He foresaw what’s going on now in a disoriented GOP that still hates his guts. If Donald Trump stops tripping over himself to win the nomination, the party line would hail him as the Second Coming of Reagan, but the parallels are not the ones they would be selling. Both candidates were created by TV, Reagan as a pitchman for General Electric (a global corporation that now pays...

During serial interviews with local TV, the President is caught showing frustration with an aggressive Texas reporter who pushes hard about his unpopularity in the Lone Star state. When it’s over, with the camera still on, the Commander-in-Chief complains: “Let me finish my answers the next time we do an interview, all right?” Life is imitating art again in the media hall of mirrors, as the President’s reaction echoes a 2002 incident in “The West Wing” that may have inspired...

The Standard&Poor’s warning on U. S. debt is being treated as Holy Writ, driving markets down and inspiring Chicken Little clucking in the financial world, but few are questioning the source. We are not talking about the Vatican here but a for-profit company, owned by McGraw-Hill publishers, that has taken a public beating for over-rating the mortgage derivatives that led to an economic meltdown and is currently being investigated by the European Commission for “monopoly abuse”...

The noise level, as always, is high but whispers of sanity can be heard. “What leaders don’t want to replicate,” blogs New York Times‘ Richard Harwood, “is the brinksmanship that left the federal government within an hour of shutting down. On the debt limit, suspense itself could produce the falling confidence and rising interest rates that business and government both want to avoid.” But the barrier to bipartisan agreement is ideological posturing, Republican lust...

Dr. Rand Paul, who months ago was checking out patients’ eyes, is on TV proposing to cut off the Federal budget at the knees. Sarah Palin, who abandoned her own state for big bucks, is on the Wisconsin capitol steps, to praise a no-show Gov. Scott Walker for resisting “violent rent-a-mobs”: “He’s not trying to hurt union members. Hey folks, he’s trying to save your jobs and your pensions.” Donald Trump, with a history of business and personal bankruptcies, is on...

In a fascinating new book, TV journalist Jeff Greenfield imagines alternate history in the past century–a 1960 assassination of President-Elect JFK to put LBJ in the White House for the Cuban Missile Crisis; Robert Kennedy’s survival in 1968 to run against Nixon; and a 1976 victory by Ford over Carter to face the Iran hostage crisis. Such what-ifs, underscoring how personalities and accidents affect history, suggest one for our times: Suppose John F. Kennedy Jr. had survived the plane...

As if Tax Day weren’t painful enough, it brings the premiere of “Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” a film 50 years in the making that, from reviews, seems almost as long to sit through. Nonetheless, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Tea Party members will be on the edge of their seats watching Ayn Rand’s epic of how “men are slave to society and government, and destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society” as a parable for their current struggle to save America. But...

Don’t bother to send in the clowns, they’re here (see the 2012 GOP hopefuls), but it’s those in Congress who are armed and dangerous, threatening to turn the world’s richest nation into a gambling saloon for financial markets. As last week’s shutdown shootout cuts turn out to be illusory, Capitol Hill zealots prepare to repeat it with the vote over raising the debt ceiling and spook world buyers of U.S. bonds into raising rates, as they have in Greece, Portugal, Spain,...

The President proclaims Equal Pay Day “to recognize the full value of women’s skills and…acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination.” Rupert Murdoch isn’t buying it, as the Wall Street Journal insists “There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap” and that the day is “dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances.” That tortured argument has all the logic of the claim that tax cuts for the richest Americans are good for the economy but, as I write this,...