For those who welcomed a thoughtful, analytical, measured President after the pietistic, never-in-doubt George W. Bush, Barack Obama’s latest Big Speech is a reminder that words can cloud as well as clarify. The President now tells us that “when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That’s what happened in Libya over the course of these last six weeks.” But that assertion is not supported by hard facts any more than was Bush’s warnings about...

Patriots who revere the Founding Fathers may now be overshooting their mark by almost a century–back to the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s: If anything went wrong then, the answer was to find the servants of Satan responsible and get rid of them. In Congress and statehouses across the country, newly minted Tea Party officeholders are hounding public employees and their unions as a response to frustration over economic woes–a solution that makes as much sense now as it did in Salem–and...

Not since the days of Iraq’s mushroom clouds and smoking guns has the American air been filled with more obfuscation than now in Libya. The “inchoate coalition” there, we are told, “remains divided over the ultimate goal–and exit strategy” of what now looks like a “military campaign that could last for weeks.” The days of “gunboat diplomacy” are back, when great powers used shows of military strength to impose their will around the world....

Elizabeth Taylor has died at 79 without publishing her memoirs, but that would have been redundant. Everything about her, from the age of ten, is on film and in old magazines. We never met but, in 1958, she saved my best friend’s life. I had sent Bob Levin to interview her and her then-husband Mike Todd for Redbook. He was to see her on a Saturday morning, but the day before she was in bed with bronchitis and Todd suggested that Bob come with him on a flight from L.A. to New York on his private...

As the new law turns one, the occasion recalls a greeting purportedly sent to a company president after surgery, “The Board of Directors wishes you a speedy recovery by a vote of six to five.” A year later, the public is still confused, Republicans swear to kill the law and the White House is sending out explainers to sing its praises. It’s like combining a wake with a birthday party. A new poll shows “Americans don’t think they like the Affordable Care Act, but they don’t...

As usual, the air is filled with sounds but nobody is saying much. In this era of certainty about everything, Libya has exposed the soft underbelly of politics and punditry by reducing expertise to belaboring the obvious. A New York Times editorial, after describing Qaddafi as “a thug and a murderer who has never paid for his many crimes, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103,” hems and haws about the action against him, reviews what’s happened and takes no position beyond...

George W. Bush, who gave up binge drinking for piety and power, knew more about mornings-after than his successor now reeling from the aftermath of his first foreign-policy bender. Everywhere he looks, Barack Obama is surrounded by weird little men with hammers pounding away at his skull. John Boehner, yes. John McCain, of course. Liberal Democrats, why not? Michael Moore and Andrew Sullivan, a not-too-surprising left-right duo. But there are specters from the political dead as well: Ralph Nader? And...

Those who have spent a lifetime (75 years in my case) with the New York Times, from days of smudged fingers on, are moved to realize that “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is passing another milestone. As the Times imposes subscription fees for more-than-casual readers, it’s like the change in a long affair–with time out for 15 years of open digital co-habitation–after decades together under old rules. In those days, it was like waking up every morning with a...

As our planes and missiles bomb Libya, we are back 200 years to the first foreign military action in American history, commemorated in the Marines’ Hymn, intervention in a dispute over the throne between Arab brothers. What we are doing in Tripoli now is, of course, sanctified by the U.N. and in concert with other powers, but it is a clear return to U.S. policy as “policeman of the world” advocated by Dick Cheney and Bush’s Neo-Cons who led us into the Iraq disaster. This...

The Colin Powell warning about Iraq (“You break it, you own it”) is now evolving into a reverse version for Libya. But if we fix that, don’t we own it, too? Hillary Clinton, announcing fatigue and retirement before Obama’s second term, is leading a gung-ho charge against the Libyan strongman. “Qaddafi must go,” she says, calling him “a ruthless dictator who has no conscience and will destroy anyone or anything in his way.” That’s true (as it was about Saddam...

An image arrives, the cover of a new book in French showing American icon Marilyn Monroe 56 years ago in a legendary Irish saloon, a convergence of cultures for St. Patrick’s Day. In that place, where my generation learned about life, Tim Costello was our teacher. One of us, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a budding sociologist and later U.S. Senator, would famously say when JFK was killed, “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” Now, as the world batters...

He keeps reminding us how lucky we were that he lost in 2008. Now John McCain gets into a more-warlike-than-thou exchange with the Afghan War’s current proprietor, David Petraeus. Testifying before the Senate, the General cites “fragile and reversible” gains, guardedly talking about possible drawdowns but raising a likelihood of joint military bases with local forces well after our troops are scheduled to leave in 2014. But that’s not enough for McCain, who during the campaign...

Half a century ago, Americans feared atomic weapons of a nation that long longer exists, the Soviet Union, and its potential to destroy us. Now, as devastation spreads in Japan, anxiety arises about the original Faustian bargain to unleash a power that can’t be fully controlled. If this sounds like the start of a Luddite tract, not so. Nuclear power will be not be disinvented but, as we now know, can not be taken for granted, either. When the horrendous losses in Japan are finally stopped,...

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” goes the old saying. Even while Stewart, Colbert and SNL struggle, politics are making parody impossible. Standup routines at Washington’s Gridiron Dinner are tame as the weekend Oscar goes to a British think tank, which unveils (?) Jihad Cosmo magazine with beauty tips, mujahideen dating advice, complexion care and a guide for suicide-bomber child-rearing. My friend and fellow octogenarian Helen Gurley Brown may have something to say about that,...

What a difference 66 years makes! In 1945, the Japanese homeland was devastated, not by Nature, by my country dropping atomic bombs to save lives of soldiers like me in what surely would have been a bloody invasion. Now, an earthquake and tsunami have set off scrambling in that unwarlike nation to avert another nuclear catastrophe, and reports show the 8.9 magnitude seizure has shifted the Earth off its axis. The difference between now and then is a shattering reminder that nothing in the world stays...

The illusion of human control yields another metaphor as President Obama enters a press conference after learning about the disaster in Japan. “Today’s events remind us of just how fragile life can be,” he tells journalists before taking questions about budget battles and Libya, all framed in the certainty that there must be answers to everything. A day later, a faraway catastrophe is spreading with a nuclear meltdown in Japan and ripples of an earthquake that reach the U.S. to...

The overloaded mind reels to keep up with Scott Walker, Peter King and Muammar Qaddafi, the Three Stooges of this news cycle producing headline headaches that rattle our media teeth. Do we have to keep up with debates about no-fly zones over Wisconsin by disloyal Muslim-Americans? Today’s cacophony recalls days when you could go on an isolated vacation and come back to marvel at how little of importance you had missed by being cut off for weeks. Do we really need to know every twist and turn...

James Dean, Marilyn, Elvis… Fifty years ago, a classic book defined celebrities in the TV age as “well-known for their well-knowness,” and, it often turned out, as disposable as Kleenex when their fame burned out. Historian Daniel Boorstin wrote “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America,” a prophecy now having its umpteenth replay as a survey shows Charlie Sheen getting more Internet and social media attention than Barack Obama. Confusion about reality has gone...

If Justices were paid by the word, Clarence Thomas would be eligible for those government assistance programs he hates, if it weren’t for his family’s right-wing welfare income, which Thomas’ disclosure forms for 13 years “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” In the five years since the Justice spoke in oral arguments carried on by colleagues with lawyers, he and Mrs. Thomas have been loquacious in lucrative self-expression that...

The buzzword has reached its entertainment destination, a Saturday Night Live skit spoofing Charlie Sheen’s obsession, but in American politics, no end is in sight. The Wisconsin standoff goes on along with the budget game of chicken to avoid a Washington shutdown, prompting E.J. Dionne to recall Nixon’s “‘madman theory’…a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid...