So soon after eight years of W circumlocution (“Mistakes were made”), could Americans bear as president another aging frat boy who instinctively mangles language into meaninglessness? Mitt Romney provides a preview of his brand of highwire linguistics by torturing a five-year- old declaration by Obama that he would unilaterally pursue Osama bin Laden into Pakistan: “I thought it was a mistake of him as a candidate for the presidency of the United States to announce he would go in–rather...

Osama bin Laden was so depressed about Al Qaida’s low favorability ratings in the Arab world, we now learn, that he considered a name change for the franchise and a new career. No word as to whether he was mulling a Donald Trump invitation to host “The Apprentice: Boardroom Terrorism” or to be the subject of a Comedy Central Roast, which would have certified him as a has-been. Death, a panel of political experts has voted, was a better career move. Jimmy Carter has officially protested...

Tongue in tanned cheek, John Boehner explains his escalating criticism of Barack Obama: “The president is getting … bad advice. Somebody needed to help him out, so I thought I would.” Actually, Boehner has it backward. For haters of government bailouts, Republicans in general are doing a nifty job of saving the President from his biggest mistakes in office. In 2009, instead of going all out on job creation, Obama overrode advisers and went all in on health care . Worse than that, instead...

From “Mad Men,” we know a media target is a demographic group who wants and needs the same thing or can be conned into thinking they do. Now, a brief hospital stay conjures up a bizarre new target audience of the old, the maimed and the chronically ill that ad men have in their sights.  The future is grim, if you can believe where advertisers are placing their bets on the bed-bound who watch TV screens all day. For these select viewers, the commercials are specially chosen.  For...

After morphing into a Tea Party zealot to win nomination, the GOP choice is in the kind of tricky transition described by JFK while running against Nixon in 1960: “It must be hard getting up every morning trying to decide who you’re going to be that day. Nixon lost then but won eight years later by virtually erasing himself to edge out disorganized Democrats. Covering his campaign, Gloria Steinem wrote: “When Nixon is alone in a room, is anyone there?” This year, running against a well-organized...

“This is not who we are,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says after seeing pictures of U.S. soldiers defiling enemy bodies in Afghanistan. True, but isn’t it what young Americans are in danger of becoming after a dirty, murky, endless war with nothing to show for it when they come home but coarsened sensitivity to human life and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder? As headlines savor a few horny Secret Servicemen in South America, misbehavior by American troops keeps mounting in Afghanistan...

Pulitzer Prize judges should reconsider their decision. By declining to name an award-winning novel this year, they have overlooked the greatest creation of all, a huge work of collective fiction titled “Obama.” In other categories, the Board expanded its vista beyond the printed page to Politico and the Huffington Post. Why not recognize an achievement that brings cave-dweller story-telling into the 21st century? Reading fiction, argues a literary figure, is “a vital means of imagining a life...

Amid a furor about misbehaving morons in Colombia, a citizen who once worked closely with them is moved to share his fondness for those who protect Presidents and their families, including the time they almost shot me in a restaurant that serves drinks with tiny umbrellas on top. In 1966, with her father in the White House, Lynda Bird Johnson came to work for me at McCalls, bringing with her agents who were only too happy to spend their time in an office populated mostly by young women. One night...

Do two make a trend? Richard Cohen of the Washington Post now writes a warm-hearted memoir of a post-White House encounter with President Eisenhower, ending with “He knew precisely who he was. That’s more than can be said for the people who now want to depict him as the eternal innocent.” It echoes my own experience back then and makes me wonder how many others like us later fell in love with a man they had voted against twice. In the summer of 1964, I was one of a half dozen magazine editors...

Five years ago, a family that had captured the American imagination suddenly disappeared from TV screens with no real explanation, just as the current national soap opera, “The Santorums” abruptly ended this week. They sit around a table, nothing untoward happens…and then fade to black. We had been mesmerized on the weekend by their daughter’s hospital stay, we were looking forward to the gang war in Pennsylvania, and suddenly it’s over. Did something happen behind the scenes? Did the...

Time passes and takes with it those who can bear witness, reality becomes history, but in the deep well of national memory, the past holds lessons for the future. On this day 67 years ago, I was in uniform in a sleeping bag on a German farmhouse floor when someone shook me awake to whisper, “Roosevelt is dead.” At 21, I was part of a generation that could remember no other president. FDR had been sworn into office on my ninth birthday. That day will be recalled mostly in nursing homes by people...

In the obituary roll of old clips, Mike Wallace, who has died at 93, is now seen in his familiar role as relentless prosecutor of the powerful. Yet, it was not always so. In the early days of “60 Minutes,” I was with him at small gatherings, when he and other media people, then under relentless attack by the Vice President of the United States as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” were...

In this era of politicized health care, a study by medical specialists finds “many profitable tests and procedures are performed unnecessarily and may harm patients. By some estimates, unnecessary treatment constitutes one-third of medical spending in the United States.” Their list of overused lab work includes X-rays, brain imaging and bone scans that are not needed when they are ordered. Future lists by other specialists are forthcoming, but all this is only the tip of the health care fraud-and-abuse...

A British writer with an Asian wife scandalizes the Web with a “talk” to his children about American race, providing them with outlandish statistical reasons to fear and avoid black people. Such casual racism and paranoia rightly provoke outrage left and right and, in this old white heart, rouse…what? Disgust, sorrow and painful memories. I was born and spent my first years in America’s largest black ghetto, Harlem, in a store where my immigrant Jewish parents lived in back and sold...

Jumping on a weaker-than-expected jobs report, the Etch-a-Sketch candidate is telling crowds, “The reason I’m so animated about defeating Barack Obama is because he’s failed the American people.” Yet, as he promises voters more wealth, Mitt Romney is still going to great lengths to hide his own. In 48 accounts from Bain Capital, on financial disclosure forms the GOP candidate-to-be fails to “identify the underlying assets, including his holdings in a company that moved U.S. jobs to China...

Today marks the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, even as a racial uproar does violence to his memory. The gulf between reactions to his death then, universal public grief, and that of Trayvon Martin tells much about how America has changed in those years. Even when still alive, Dr. King’s preaching of peaceful protest was being challenged by angrier voices of Black Power and Black Panthers. Yet, in his 39 years on earth, he changed the face of America, culminating in a 1964 Civil Rights Act...

“Mad Men” makes news with a passing dig at Mitt Romney’s dad (calling the elder “a clown”) but, for serious fans, the growing question is what’s happening to the show’s core character, the creative but mercurial, lusty but haunted, sexually greedy but sensitive Don Draper? We could be in “Answered Prayers” territory here, Truman Capote’s never-finished novel of that era based on the wisdom of St. Teresa of Ávila: “Answered prayers cause more tears than those that...

A sign held up by a young woman during protests in the contraception kerfuffle last month over Rush Limbaugh’s remarks is reflected now in a swing states poll showing the President roaring ahead of Mitt Romney, almost entirely on a surge of support by women under 50. In February, fewer than half supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s number is down by 14 points, to 30 percent. The president leads 2-1 in this demographic and, in the poll overall, 51 to 42 only a month after...

David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star The Republican Establishment is now embracing the Inevitable—-not with the usual alacrity of hopping on a winner’s bandwagon but a heavy-legged weariness of just wanting to escape the GOP primary swamp. “I think he deserves to be the nominee,” Paul Ryan says in announcing his support as the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall overshadows the primary. “I think he earned it.” The elder George Bush sounds similarly resigned, pointing out Barbara had reminded...

Whatever happened to innocent until proved guilty? Are we deciding murder cases now by taking polls? As Trayvon Martin’s parents call for calm, debate heats up in the media itself, not about the Florida teenager’s shooting death, but about Al Sharpton’s multiple roles in the case as cable news host, racial agitator, judge and jury. A quarter of a century ago, the Reverend Al began his public career as champion of Tawana Brawley, a black teenage girl in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. who, after staying...