Will the last of the primary season mark the end of an electoral temper tantrum or just a step on the way to a bigger one in November? Light bulbs are going on for traditional Republicans who, after feasting on opinion polls and relishing a takeover of both houses of Congress, are beginning to see the steep price of a Tea Party free lunch. On Fox News, conservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer smacks down Sarah Palin’s backing of a Delaware Tea Party Senate candidate, calling it “disruptive...

With anti-Muslim sentiment joining anti-Mexican immigrant bias and undisguised racism against the first black President, the American dream of assimilation seems to be falling apart. Why is all this happening now when an even worse Depression and a wider war in the past century brought the country together, leading to the breakdown of discriminatory barriers in the decades that followed? Blame it on Tea Party rage that elevates Boomer self-entitlement to patriotic fervor. Blame it on Republican...

The “physical rebirth” of the World Trade Center, says a New York Times editorial, “is cause for celebration on this anniversary. It is a far more fitting way to defy the hate-filled extremists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and to honor their victims, than to wallow in the intolerance and fear that have mushroomed across the nation.” When the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that morning, I said to someone, “This is the worst day of my...

Al Qaeda’s Class of 2001 has much to celebrate this weekend on the anniversary of its biggest hits, not least of which is the fear and panic that has not only persisted but grown as a result of its 9/11 attacks. Nine years later, Americans are divided by headline bigotry over building a mosque near Ground Zero while an ecclesiastical moron with a flock of fifty plans to mark the anniversary by burning the Koran despite bipartisan warnings by politicians and Gen. Petraeus that such antics could...

Too little and too late, the President is channeling the Harry Truman of 1948, who won with attacks on Republicans of a “Do Nothing Congress,” inspiring the battle cry of “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” But in personality and style, the urbane Barack Obama is ill-suited for the role of the cranky old man who turned around a sure-to-lose election back then. His Truman tryout yesterday evoked more laughter than cries of outrage: “When it comes to just about everything we’ve...

A new survey shows that 34 percent of Americans take a daily snooze, setting off lively debate about the benefits to body and mind of a brief break from the pace of digital life. Another study suggests that “an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power…it not only refreshes the mind but can make you smarter.” “Almost certainly,” says a research psychologist, making the case against ceaseless stimulation, “downtime lets the brain go over experiences...

A new Vanity Fair takedown disheartens an aged former editor who in his time has seen too many dreary “I didn’t get the story because nobody would talk to me” magazine profiles. “Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder,” the magazine blurbs, “she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author...

The most moving moment in ending America’s combat mission in Iraq comes not from the President’s touch-all-the-bases Oval Office speech but the stifled tears of a man who helped George W. Bush prosecute the war. At an American Legion convention yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates choked up as he said: “Today, at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 4,427 American service members have died in Iraq, 3,502 of them killed in action; 34,265 have been wounded or injured. We must...

Taking full blame for the Bay of Pigs debacle, JFK fell back on an old maxim, “Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.” If the polls are right, Barack Obama has an unblessed event due in November, with no other claimants to paternity amid all the analysis of when wrong in his love affair with the American people that looked so promising two years ago. At this low point, he may want to look back at Kennedy’s experience as a guide to dealing with adversity, admitting...

What would he have made of these separate-but-equal travesties of his historic moment? Martin Luther King told a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial 47 years ago that “many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.” Now, an “overwhelmingly white” sea of faces greets Rupert Murdoch’s...

Approaching 86 next month, Lauren Bacall is making news again, telling all about her life in an updated memoir and doing interviews to promote it. Well, not quite all. In an hour on TCM, there is, of course, the story of her classic coupling with Humphrey Bogart and even a few words about an affair after Bogart’s death with Frank Sinatra. But not a word about Jason Robards, to whom she was married for eight years in the 1960s and with whom she had a child, the actor Sam Robards. In airbrushing...

In the scramble to make sense out of this week’s primaries, a sidebar shows how far and how fast American politics has gone downhill in two years. To keep the Republican nomination for a Senate seat he has held forever in Arizona, John McCain, who won nearly 60 million votes for president in 2008, had to spend $20 million, move far rightward on issues such as immigration and call in the help of Sarah Palin, the running mate he had plucked out of obscurity back then. In Alaska, Palin, now the...

Generations of Americans have to take it on faith that wars can be won. Not since V-J Day in 1945 has there been dancing in our streets and strangers kissing in joy and relief. With the mission in Baghdad far from accomplished, the last U.S. combat troops leave behind 4415 dead, billions of dollars spent (or stolen) and come home to a nation that is much less safe or united after seven years of sacrifice. As the New York Times sums up the departing soldiers’ mood, the war has been “not...

Truth may set you free, but lies are running a close second these days as Rod Blagojevich, Tom DeLay and a politician who falsely claimed to have won the Congressional Medal of Honor are doing well in the court system. The legal principle involved in persuading only 11 of 12 jurors that Blago tried to sell Obama’s Senate seat, according to Scott Turow, author of “Presumed Innocent,” is that it’s not enough to be caught with crumbs on your face next to an empty jar, after telling...

What W. H. Auden poetically called “The Age of Anxiety” at the dawn of the nuclear era is back to haunt us, a climate of constant dread where bad news always crowds out good. Politicians, abetted by headline-hungry 24/7 media, inflate every occurrence into a crisis and, after each is resolved or fades away, go on to the next occasion for Chicken Little howls that the sky is falling. After months of panic-mongering about the Gulf oil spill, the leak is now plugged and Adm. Chad Allen,...

Barack Hussein Obama could have avoided this one, declaring the issue of a mosque near Ground Zero a local decision, as his Press Secretary has done for weeks, but the 44th President has taken his cue from the 35th by coming out in favor of building it. In a “Profiles in Courage” moment, he declares: “Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. “That includes the right...

Momma grizzlies with moola are on the march, as Linda McMahon of Connecticut joins Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman of California in bicoastal bids for a hostile takeover of American government. Since Sarah Palin wowed voters with a wisecrack about hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick and went on to make a mouthy mint in the media from a lost election and an abandoned governorship, a new kind of political woman has emerged in America. Far from the image of a pants-suited Hillary Clinton with the...

Richard Nixon’s spirit lives on. Thirty-six years after the only presidential resignation ever, he is still with us as admirers try to hide evidence of his disgrace in the Nixon Library and Museum just as he himself did in the White House. The Watergate room of the memorial is almost as blank as those missing Oval Office tapes in a to-do described by the New York Times after “the Nixon Foundation–a group of Nixon loyalists who controlled this museum until the National Archives took...

The long-running Clinton soap opera had its finest hour this weekend with a picture-book wedding that, for one octogenarian, evoked admiration for its restrained elegance and stirred half a century of memories. Chelsea and Marc Mezvinsky were married a few miles down the road from a 1728 stone house in Dutchess County where I spent the first two decades of retirement. But if the 2008 election had turned out differently, security considerations would have almost surely prompted the first daughter...

Washington reaction to the Afghan document dump is solidifying into “How dared they release official secrets!” combined with “Nothing new here, we knew all that.” Politicians of all stripes are embracing both harrumphs. Unblessed-by-Wikileaks media people tend to favor the latter. But behind such butt-covering responses are issues that will take time to sort out. One of the leakees, David Leigh of The Guardian, points out that “a game-changing thing has happened. We...

With eerie echoes of 1971, when the leak of secret files confirmed what Americans had long suspected about the disastrous war in Vietnam, the unauthorized release of 92,000 classified documents provides a first-hand picture of its 21st century counterpart in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Back then, the Pentagon Papers marked the beginning of the end in Southeast Asia, amid a swirl of legal battles over government secrecy and the rights of a free press to report what officials were hiding. Now, the documents...

There is no Atticus Finch or Joseph Welch in all this. On the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” we are back in a time when McCarthyism played on fears to spread hatred and destroy lives of people in public life. The President, who won an election by putting the Civil Rights era behind him, will have to revisit that time before his birth and make things right not only with Shirley Sherrod but generations of Americans who have struggled for decency not only in race relations...

With falling approval ratings, Barack Obama is getting advice from all sides on how to “save” his presidency. In the latest round of parsing by pundits, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post concludes: “The bank bailout averted a financial crackup and the stimulus package pulled the economy back from the abyss. Along with reform of the financial industry and health care, these are considerable achievements. Only the voters disagree.” The reason? “No one is accusing Obama...

A century ago, Americans spent only a few minutes a day learning about the world beyond their own senses–”the unseen environment,” as Walter Lippmann put it in his 1922 study, “Public Opinion.” Back then, he despaired of “the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot...

The NAACP is pursuing its own mandate in “condemning racism within the Tea Party movement” while a Congresswoman stirs members by proclaiming, “Those who used to wear sheets are now being able to walk down the aisle and speak as a patriot because you will not speak loudly about the lack of integrity of this movement.” Garbled syntax aside, is raising racism to the top of issues presented by the Tea Party in the best interests of the first African-American president or the...